Retail and cars are the only half decent investment vehicles that the average person can partake.

Those are both consumption, not investment. Cars are almost invariably a wasting asset. I've owned 15 cars in my life. I made a profit on only one, and that's not counting the labor I put into it. Just about anything you can buy retail also depreciates. Index funds and tax-free bonds at least earn you some money on your money.

You can now sell, downsize, pay off most of your debts… You can put yourself in a great position for the limited incomes of a 60-70yo.

I'm doing that now, though I have some savings and other investments as well. I have two houses and an apartment. We're selling the apartment, and the debt/equity ratio of the two houses now sits at 12%. We'll have the house we're living in paid off in a few months, before I retire, then I'm attacking the second mortgage on the other house (which is currently a high-end rental). After that, the first mortgage. The rental is running a positive cashflow already. There are tax reasons that it makes much better sense to hang onto the rental rather than selling it off.

If it works out according to plan, my disposable income post-retirement will be appreciably higher than it is now while I'm working full-time. So more free time, and more money. It'll go to my travel budget, I don't see increasing discretionary spending on anything else, I don't value material possessions, experiences matter more to me.

Bit of a long story, but the main point is that, with a bit of planning and a small amount of self-discipline, it can be done. I wasn't born into money, I grew up in a poor family. I don't have an absurdly large salary, but I'm good at planning, don't overspend and have never used credit except to buy houses. I married a woman who knows how to handle money. It may sound too easy, but there's not all that much to it. Stick to the priorities and have some contingency plans.

Now the only people who can afford boomer McMansions are boomers who all don't want to buy those but downsize instead.

Downsized housing is in the same type of homes first time home buyers also want, which is almost universally NIMBYed into oblivion, so now these downsized homes are a lot more expensive for what you get and there aren't nearly enough of them.

How boomers figured that them being the largest cohort, all owning giant homes, and all planning on selling them to smaller and smaller generations of people who've been largely locked out of home ownership would work for them is beyond me. Well they made that bed so I guess they get to sleep in it now.

You know it's bad when the Etsy home page has "sell home fast find buyers spell $15" as like the third promoted product from a witch in Minnesota.