$170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month net if you are living in GA - with fairly low state taxes. I calculated this on paycheckcity.com. That’s without taking into account health insurance cost.

So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.

As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?

And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)

Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).

Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.