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U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances, 1989 - 2022


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How are your neighbors doing? The US Federal Reserve offers interactive charts of income, net worth, debt, vehicles, real estate, etc from surveys the last 33 years. I about fell off my chair at the numbers, altho not so much the change over time. Best to leave it showing median rather than mean or else the crazy outliers will dominate. You can slice it many ways, like to see if folks were house-rich but cash-poor at a certain year and age group.

I will show examples by age breakdown, but keep in mind that it's not the same people over time but the same age group at each year. One distortion is that a pension really means the custodian has to have a hidden million or so to fund it, while someone who retires only on their own savings looks deceptively well off especially when they will have to pay cap gains taxes on liquidation. Play with the charts as you like:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before_Tax_Income;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:median

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Assets;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:median

Edited by caesar novus
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Leave it to The Feds...How does one stay in the, say, 45-54 y/o category for 32 yrs (Jack Benny excluded, of course)?..Kind of a meaningless presentation of data.

If statisticians torture the numbers long enough, they can get them to confess to anything.

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Granted, much of the age categories are uninteresting but that is just one of 10 ways to break it down, like whether self employed. Even aside of timeframes and breakdowns, I am amazed at some of the overall wealth levels in spite of housing or wuflu cycles. How representative are these survey responders?

The main thing is the 25 or so types of financial issues, and secondarily to map across time. The tertiary age details do let'you examine for instance how are the recently retired faring or the middle aged. The 75+ group seems to be doing surprising well as in not running out of money. The young are struggling in various ways sensitive to interest rates, which the fed is setting. Other gov't may use these numbers to adjust social security.

More example chart variations:

Debt by current work status of reference person

Net worth by current work status of reference person

Debt by age of reference person

Edited by caesar novus
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