...what happened to the house and car they already had in that mess? Why did they lose them on retirement?
This is why I don't let my daughter run the household budget. Grown up stuff is for grown ups.
He's trying to argue that if you have $1M net worth, a lot of that is tied up in non-liquid assets, so you 'have' to liquidate everything to cash before saying that you can live off that $1M without working a fucking day in your life -
which a lot of people would qualify as rich - and even doing that his maths still work out that yeah, you still can never work another day of your life, it's just you're 'only' living the same life as upper-bottom / lowwer-middle quartile people do in one of the richest countries on earth

When real talk, if you have $1M net worth using his exact example you could rent your fully paid for house out, and live
very well off just that income somewhere like the caribbean