Tool · Money
Type in what you own and what you owe, box by box, and the calculator subtracts one from the other — then puts the result beside what the Federal Reserve's household survey found for people your age.
Where does each number come from?
- Every box is a balance on a statement, and the statement is named under each one.
- Checking and savings
- Today’s balances, from the bank’s app.
- Retirement accounts
- The latest 401(k), 403(b) or IRA statement, or the plan’s app. The full balance, before any tax you’d owe on the way out.
- Your home and other real estate
- What it would sell for today, which is a guess. A recent sale of a similar home nearby, a real-estate site’s estimate or the county assessor’s figure are the three places people get one, and they don’t agree with each other; running the calculator with the lowest and the highest shows how much of your net worth is that guess.
- Cars
- What they’d sell for, from a used-car pricing guide. Not what you paid.
- Everything else you own
- Brokerage accounts, a business, anything you could sell for real money. Furniture and electronics usually don’t count for much and the survey doesn’t count them.
- Mortgage
- The principal balance on your latest statement.
- Credit cards, student loans, car loans, personal loans
- Each one’s current balance from its statement — the balance, not the monthly payment.
- Everything else you owe
- Medical bills, a loan from family, a home equity line, back taxes.
What moves the answer?
Let’s say you own a $200,000 home, have $40,000 in a retirement account and a $10,000 car, and you owe $170,000 on the mortgage and $10,000 on the car. You own $250,000 and owe $180,000, so your net worth is $70,000. Most of it is the $30,000 of the house you’ve paid for.
Beside that, the survey: for households headed by someone under 35, the middle household had about $39,000 in 2022 and the average was about $184,000. The middle and the average are that far apart because a small number of very wealthy households pull the average up, which is why the middle figure is the one that describes a typical household and the average describes the total spread across everyone. For the 35-to-44 group, the middle was about $136,000 and the average about $550,000.
What does the calculator take as given?
- The survey figures
- Come from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances for 2022, published 18 October 2023, in 2022 dollars. Median and mean net worth by the age of the household’s reference person: under 35, $39,000 and $183,500; 35 to 44, $135,600 and $549,600; 45 to 54, $247,200 and $975,800; 55 to 64, $364,500 and $1,566,900; 65 to 74, $409,900 and $1,794,600; 75 and over, $335,600 and $1,624,100. The Fed runs the survey every three years and hasn’t announced when the 2025 results publish.
- The dollars are 2022 dollars
- Prices have risen since, so a 2026 household with the same real position as the 2022 median would show a somewhat higher number. The calculator doesn’t adjust for that and says so.
- What the survey counts
- The Fed’s definition is “the difference between families’ assets and liabilities”, and it includes homes, vehicles, retirement accounts and businesses. It doesn’t count a pension you haven’t started drawing or future Social Security, so a teacher with a pension and a contractor with a 401(k) look different in the survey even when they’d retire on the same income.
- What's left out
- Taxes owed on retirement money when it’s withdrawn. The cost of selling a house. What anything would fetch in a hurry rather than at leisure.
The two-hundred-thousand-dollar house and the seventy-thousand result are one made-up household; every box on the page is a balance on a statement you already get, and the house is the only one that takes a guess.
Sources
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances”, Federal Reserve Bulletin, 18 October 2023 — Table 2, family median and mean net worth by age of reference person, thousands of 2022 dollars.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Consumer Finances index — “The 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is the most recent survey conducted.”