POLL: What is your net worth?

In My Humble Opinion
1
  • $0 or less
  • $1-$1,000
  • $1,000-$5,000
  • $10,000-$25,000
  • $25,000-$50,000
  • $50,000-$250,000
  • $250,000-$500,000
  • $500,000-$1,000,000
  • $1,000,000-$2,000,000
  • $2,000,000-$3,500,000
  • $3,500,000-$5,000,000
  • $5,000,000-$7,500,000
  • $7,500,000-$10,000,000
  • more than $10,000,000
  • more than $50,000,000

0 voters

You can include house equity without subtracting the mortgage amount - “I put down 120k on my home and it’s worth $80k more now == +$200k”. If you have student or car/boat/whatevs loans, subtract those if substantial.

2

Also looking for suggestions on granularity of the poll options. You get 20 options in a poll, I was unclear of the best distribution. I suspect the I weighted pretty hard toward the top end, but there’s older people on this board which strikes me as folk with equity and assets.

3

I don’t think the granularity is off. While it’s true that it’s top-ended, IMO that’s because some of the top end responses could simply be merged without needing to make room for another compensating option in the sub-million range, because below the million dollar range the choices seem to be informative and useful, to the extent that any poll like this is, of course.

4

I do wish I’d selected a pie chart. I find board’s feature that sorts responses in a bar graph annoying and IMHO it undermines readability of the results.

5

Whoever answered more than $50 million, I was wondering if you need a professional house sitter. I’m asking for a friend.

6

Too bad it stops at “0 or less”, lol. Where’s the option for “negative $200,000”?

7

If including my 401k, around $40,000.

If not, then around zero. I have almost no savings and still have some credit-card debt to pay off.

8

A fair point. Maybe the instructions in the OP should have listed liabilities like “subtract student loan debt” or something?

9

Much like George Bailey, I’m worth more dead than alive.

10

Holy cow! With 56 votes, the option in the lead is $2-3.5M. I guess it shows how much the board skews older and richer.

I think having a poll and taking out home equity would be more interesting. Home values around the country can really make these answers vary.

11

Or maybe have a follow up poll: “What percentage of your net worth is your home equity?” Followed by a range of percentages, 0-100%

For me it’s less than 10%.

12

We recently paid off our mortgage on our expensive home. So cash went down, and equity went up. I’d guess 50% of my net worth is my house.

13

Most ranges are about 2x of the lower end to high, yet 50,000 - 250,000 if 5x. Why? Seems wrong.

14

If you had options that weren’t naturally ranked, like, what is your favorite color", the sorting would make sense. It’s disconcerting in this case, though, since there IS a natural ranking to the answers.

15

I do admit that made my calculation easier. “Hmm, I wonder if I need to check exactly how well my retirement accounts are doing - whups, never mind, they’re probably not doing that well.”

16

For anything financial like this, distribution generally follows a power-law, so you should have each bucket cover a multiple of a previous bucket.

17

Generally, yes. Older, whiter and a bit more comfortable on average.

But it probably is also skewed a bit by regional variation, with I’m guessing a larger proportion of folks on this board from the urban coasts. I’m in the Bay Area and a high cost of living pushes things like wages, home equity and 401k/pension plans towards higher absolute numbers. More objective wealth, but maybe a little bit less subjective wealth in the moment than it seems.

Of course Californians can transform a boatload of unexpected CA equity that doesn’t translate into a more comfortable life in state into a relatively more luxurious retirement in some place like Maine and some do. Hence the less-than-stellar regards some recently transplanted Californians receive in less affluent communities as they start driving up the housing market by paying cash.

18

But then you end up with a survey like below. I’d like it better if it were more “money” number, like 7500-1500 instead of 8000-1600, but I guess it could work.

1000
2000
4000
8000
16000
32000
64000
128000
256000
512000
1024000
2048000
4096000
8192000
16384000

19

That list should have started with 1024 and proceeded accordingly.

20

Well I’d be pretty happy to have $0xFFFFFF in assets.