I have a hard time believing someone who entered
practice in 2000 and got paid on an eat what you kill basis and invested 50% of their take home consistently in the s&p is not in the 8 figure portfolio range, likely a lot more. The IMRT reimbursement of the 00s combined with the bull market run of the 10s, must have been nice. If you’re not very wealthy under that scenario you really did something wrong (spending all of your take home, multiple divorces, investing with madoff, etc)
Edit: I ran a simple backtest on this. Investing 10k per month into SPY starting in 2000 and reinvesting dividends, adjusting future contributions for inflation to be worth 10k in 2000 dollars results in a current portfolio value of 16M. Putting away 20k per month leaves you with 32M. Investing in the nasdaq instead of the s&p leaves you with 57M. Depressed yet? You got another 10 years to go, repeating the past 10 year performance would leave you with 321M in 2034. Add leveraged funds and things really get wacky. All from an early start just saving most of your money every month in an index fund. I have no reason to expect current grads where have anywhere near this level of wealth building opportunity due to cost of living, interest rates, tapped out economic growth, and income not keeping up with inflation.