Americans are fascinated with wealth. We love TV shows like “Who wants to be a millionaire” or modern day Horatio Alger stories like Will Smith’s portrayal of Chris Garner in “The Pursuit of Happiness”. However, for people who are serious about measuring their wealth, its sometimes difficult to know precisely where you stand.
Since measuring your net worth is a very important part of personal finance, we wanted to let you know about a few links that can help compare your dollar worth to everyone else.
The best thing to do is compare your level of riches to scientifically valid measures of Americans overall population. There are two recent government reports that might be good for you to check out. These are from the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve (here and here). Both of these are based on the most up to date social science techniques and therefore you can have some confidence their numbers are in fact true.
Survey reports aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs, so here are some links that are both useful and fun. CNN money has a handy interactive net worth calculator. Also, the New York Times was running a great series of articles on inequality in America that lets you compare your level of wealth, education and profession against everyone else in the country (here). The issue with these sources is, *I think*, they use data from 2001. – Wealth distributions are constantly in flux, so I’m not sure how helpful values from 2001 are.
NetworthIQ, which is a delightful little website, has some statistics on networth. One thing to keep in mind about NetworthIQ is that the data there is self reported. So, you’ll be measuring your wealth against that of people who like to post their net worth on the internet, not a scientifically representative sample like that in the Census and Federal reserve reports.
Happy comparing!
Best,
James
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