On your financial journey, it is helpful to know how you compare to the rest of the population. By understanding how your net worth compared to others, you will know exactly where you stand, since otherwise, it’s impossible to see if you are doing well or poorly in society. Now, I would urge you to use this information in a positive light as inspiration and for goal setting rather than a negative comparison about yourself versus others. In a negative context, comparison can be the thief of joy, however, comparison can motivate you to reach a certain threshold by certain age or reassure you that you are doing better than most. The following chart shows the median US household net worth by percentile in 2023 (DQYDJ, 2023b). The chart uses a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis since it is otherwise difficult to view the chart due to the disparity between the top and lower percentiles. This means that each increment on the vertical axis increases by a multiple of ten. In this chart, we can see that 50% of US households have less than $192,084 and that the top 30% of households have more than $493,068. To be in the top ten percent of households in America, you must have more than $1.9 Million!

While knowing the household net worths by percentile is useful, it is more applicable to understand how this changes by age group. The chart shows the 25^th, 50^th, 75^th, and 90^th net worth percentile for each age cohort from 18 to over 80 (DQYDJ, 2023a). Because the net worths above the 90^th percentile are so high – literally off the chart – I have left them out of the dataset. A noteworthy characteristic of the chart is that net worth increases with age in all categories but peaks in the retirement years followed by a decline until death. This signifies the transition from saving for retirement in our younger years to spending retirement savings later in life.

Now that you have reviewed the charts, and calculated your net worth – how do you stack up?

References:

DQYDJ, P. (2023a). Average Net Worth by Age plus Median, Top 1%, and All Percentiles. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles-by-age/

DQYDJ, P. (2023b). United States Net Worth Brackets, Percentiles, and Top One Percent—DQYDJ. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/