typical US family's net worth: $93,100

Quote from traderdragon:

I want to know what country has 73% home ownership and an average $385K net family worth.

This country must be at the top of the "richest in the world" and the USA must be about 30 places below it. (sarcasm).
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Belgium.

The figures were published by the National Bank of Belgium.
 
It would be helpful if you could find out the median net worth as it can be a significantly different value than average due to the way how wealth is often stacked to a very small rich minority.

For example, if there are 9 people with net worth 1000 and 1 with 1 billion, their average net worth is approx. 100 million but their median net worth is 1000. Average is highly misleading, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median
 
With 100 Million or so samples in the US, seems that average and median are close to the same. However as I was wrong once before, I could be again.
 
Quote from rimshaker:

Personally, I like to look at liquidity as a measure of wealth. It's one thing to say you have a million dollars in assets (houses, cars, paper profits, etc), and another thing to say you have a million dollars liquid (cash, gold/silver).

Both situations say you have a million dollars, but the underlying idea of real wealth puts them at opposite ends of the wealth spectrum.
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But where do you draw the line in terms of liquidity? E.g., If I have $4M in long-term GICs (or as you americans call them, CDs) I can't touch the capital. It's guaranteed interest though but it's totally illiquid.

But yea, I can't understand including houses (other than to pad the figure and swell the ego :D ) because great, your house is worth $800K. Sell it and have 800K........but you have nowhere to live now, lol.
 
Quote from spike500:

Belgium.

The figures were published by the National Bank of Belgium.
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I'm having a huge amount of trouble finding these... could you send me a link? I found the GDP per capita that was updated in 2005 that said that the average GDP per capita was $31900

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2004.html

and I'm trying to imagine a situation where either a) Everyone owns their own homes b) people just can't think of anything to do with their money but save it, c) Families are HUGE or d) the rules for passing on prior generations wealth are not restrictive at all... or any of these in combination with another. A median family net worth of 385000, with 2 people earning wages within the home, would take over 6 years of spending NO money and getting charged NO taxes to build if you ignore interest... obviously this makes things rediculous, but it approximately conveys what a daunting task it would be. This might just strike me as odd because of a difference in cultural perspective, but I'd be really interested in seeing those statistics that you mentioned.

Edited. I messed up the calculation and corrected it... still seems crazy to me.
 
Quote from invaliduser:

I did not realize people were so well off.
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93k? That's pathetic! Does that include retirement savings? I hope not. I am not bragging, nor am I near 1 mil yet, but 93k ain't much IMO. Heck a major medical claim could wipe that out in the blink of an eye.

That's a sad commentary on the consumer driven US society.
 
Quote from gnome:

With 100 Million or so samples in the US, seems that average and median are close to the same. However as I was wrong once before, I could be again.
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The sample size doesn't cause the difference between mean and median, the skewness of the distribution does. And net worth is extremely skewed. The US has several people with a net worth of positive 1 billion, but no one with a net worth even approaching a negative 1 billion. :)
 
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