I am not “wasting” (as TML implies) my financial literacy, I merely lack the income necessary to build wealth.

Or does TML expect that hamburger flippers and people living at poverty level can build net worth through applied financial literacy?

The answer to this question is very dependent on how much money you had in the market. It doesn’t even matter which percentage of your assets were in the market or which percentage you lost, just an amount and whether this amount is small enough that you could have saved enough to compensate. Because if the amount you lost exceeded your yearly gross, there is no way you can save enough to see your net worth increase. Someone with a million dollar net worth who had 50% of money in the market could have easily lost more money than he or she can save during the year. At the same time, someone with only 10K worth of savings all of it in the market – pretty stupid, right? – would’ve only lost 5K and could have easily see net worth growth. Someone with a negative net worth could have seen it grow by simply paying off 5% of debt. Of course there were some smart people who got out of the market on time, but other than that, the higher your net worth was in the beginning of 2008 the more likely you were to lose more money than you could save.

As to being afraid to look – again, there could be two reasons: you don’t have much or you lost too much.