They'll be better off than a retiree with $0 and social security.

But those numbers don't hold water, unless this hypothetical person is somehow only making $8k, and managing to live off $6800 per year.

Minimum wage in my state is about $10 an hour, so for round numbers let's use that. Ramsey advocates putting 15% of your gross income into retirement savings when you are on Baby Step 4 (after all your debts are paid off, and after you've built a decent emergency fund).

$10 an hour x 40 hours a week x 52 weeks a year = ~$21,000. Meaning you'd put ~$3200 a year into retirement.

The historical returns for the S&P500 (and the market as a whole) have been 11.53%, which is where Ramsey gets his 12% figure (rounding). But even if you only take the last nine years into consideration, it's averaged 7.6%. There's no point hypothesizing about returns lower than this, since you're actively choosing mutual funds that have a historical track record (10-15+ years) of beating the market.

In this scenario, after investing for 30 years and never getting a raise, minimum wage never going up (which in my state is already happening in the state legislature and individual cities), you never making more than minimum wage....

At retirement, you'd have between $360,000 and $786,000.

Only living on the proceeds from that, you'd have between $28,000 a year and $62,000 a year to live on.

Now, we can debate on whether you can take all the returns out without eventually depleting the principle, or what about someone who doesn't have 30 years, or whatever cockamamee scenario you dream up.

But the truth is, $28,000 is more than this hypothetical person ever made in their life. That, plus social security, plus a paid for house (we are doing the Ramsey plan after all), means their retirement will be their most affluent years.

The whole point is to get people to invest. If you don't invest, you will have $0 at retirement. The rest are details.