DQYDJ

https://dqydj.com It's all over the place, but a few of the categories might resonate.

https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/ See "Median Net Worth by Year". It's inflation adjusted to 2022 though, not 2025 (hopefully at least that's still in ballpark though). There was a slight spike upwards for median wealth during the pandemic fwiw. This seems to have entirely corrected though.

I think your historic trend data is out of date. The inflation-adjusted median wealth crossed the 2007 bar sometime between 2019 and 2022. See the "CPI-Adjusted to 2022" column https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/

Replying to myself since it's too late to edit, but according to these numbers[1], it looks like this tax would hit about 52% of American households, so my "even the poorest of Americans" is a bit overwrought. And if we take the US median home price (~410k as of this year[2]) and exclude 75% of that (~307k), then this tax would hit ~30% of American households (~$481k net worth). Even at that, it's still quite a hurdle to clear to convince the top 1/3 of households support a 1% tax on their accumulated wealth. [1]: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/ [2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

That source is from 2008. Now (https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/) its at 11%. And its not a binary. Anyone making six figures (nearly half of households) should be able to easily afford the best care. I'm sure there are people with spending problems who are exceptions to this.

Net worth calculators[^1] would put this woman at the 88th percentile of wealth in the US. Yes, I think that counts as wealthy. I obviously think it's mostly absurd if you think a woman who bought 50 years ago in SF has a house worth only 50K. The vast majority of houses in SF that would have cost 50K, 50 years ago. The average home in 1976 was $65K,[^2] and the median home price last year in SF was $1.4M, at effectively the 90th percentile of American net worth. If you don't think top 10% of wealth in America counts as wealthy, then I don't know what to tell you. [^1]: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/ [^2]: https://imgur.com/1976-article-on-housing-prices-sf-bay-area-7NCYct6

Just for reference, if you include home equity, to be in the top 10%, you have to have wealth of $2.25 million. Without home equity it’s about 1.5 million. Source: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/

It looks like[1] combining the bottom 10% gets you a substantially negative number, such that even the bottom 1% have more wealth than the bottom 10% combined. [1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/ under "Household Net Worth Percentiles for the United States in 2020"

Basically any S&P 500 index fund [1] averages over 8% return over the trailing 15 years, even inflation adjusted [2]. Using [3] October 2009 to present gives an annualized return of 13.763% and going back 20 years to include the great recession returns 12.06%. Post-tax current-day value scenarios: Starting in 2004 (20Y): $500.00/mo: $418,349.29 $2,500.00/mo: $2,091,746.42 Starting in 2009 (15Y): $500.00/mo: $252,413.58 $2,500.00/mo: $1,262,067.88 [1]: https://www.financecharts.com/etfs/SPY/performance/total-return-cagr [2]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ [3]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-periodic-reinvestment-calculator-dividends/

Wealth is unevenly distributed. > Average net worth is higher than median (at $1,059,470 vs. $192,084, respectively) ... (2023) Reference: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/

It's only if you qualify as a 'covered expatriate' though. I'm not a lawyer or an accountant but a plain reading of the standard suggests the vast majority of Americans would not be covered. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8854#en_US_2023_publink100046230 I think the key would be how they arrive at the net worth numbers. If it's just a calculation of all your assets as if they were sold at FMV, ~90% of the US is below the net worth threshold. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/ The average tax liability standard looks like it would take 5 years at $600K+ of adjusted gross income, too. Plenty of people would meet this standard. Most people would not.

We (mostly) don't create money out of thin air. We borrow it. This obligation acts as a limit on money supply inflation. Also, slight, but mostly consistent inflation is far better for everyone than what the US went through in it's first 150 years as a country. The average American household is worth more than $1MM and the median is close to $200k. All time highs, even adjusting for all the inflation. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/

And then you look at your balance when you go to sell and realize it is not worth much. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/market-cap -28% annual return since going public. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ A relatively riskless investment in sp500 would have earned 11%+ per year since 2019. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

A quarter of households have net worths greater than $600,000. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/

The article is about annual income, not wealth. As of 2020, 99th percentile net worth in the US is about 11M. https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

The minimum salary really should be increased these days. Given the current income percentiles in the US (https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percentiles/). The current H1B min-salary is $60k, which is below the median household wage in the US. The min-salary should instead be pegged to the p90, which is currently at $130k. That way foreign workers (which includes myself and many friends) should absolutely be held to the highest standard and be the best and the brightest and pushing the bar higher for 90% of US citizens.

That’s income. Regarding wealth (“net worth”) [1] Median: $121,411 p90: $1,219,126 p95: $2,584,130 p99: $11,099,166 p99.5: $17,557,208 p99.9: $43,207,732 [1] 2020 federal reserve data https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

>Never sell real estate. If he would have invested that $10,000 in the S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, it would have been worth more than $2 million by the 90s. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

> I am not super wealthy, my net worth is ~$3 million It's worth noting that this is the 96th percentile for net worth in the United States. Maybe by "super wealthy" we only mean the 97th, 98th, and 99th percentiles? Source: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

I would strengthen your statement to say that almost everyone can't afford it. Median household income is around $67K in the US, and the median household assets (minus the house) at age 65-69 is $75K. So even if a third of your income is being replaced by social security, a typical household has not even two years of income saved. A 25th percentile household has less than 5 months! Most people save basically nothing, on net. Even 75th percentile households only have 4 years of income. Assuming reasonable investment returns, that's only saving 2.5% on average. Pensions aren't expensive, retirement is expensive! People, even ones who can easily afford it, often won't save. https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles-by-age/

As an aside, averages don't work that way. The average (mean) can vary greatly from the median, which is the central value, due to outliers. For example, "Median individual income in the United States was $44,225. Average individual income in 2021 in the United States was $63,214.03." (https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/)[1… [1] Not sure that I buy the actual numbers; the median has been around $30K for a number of years, up to 2019 at least. A $10K jump in 2 years?

>I agree, which is why everyone who lives off an income rather than assets (which is ~99.5% of us) I think you're greatly underestimating how many people can "live off [...] assets". This page shows household net worth by percentile[1]. Based off that, you can probably live off investments starting at around the 90th percentile ($61k annual income with 5% withdraw rate), if you live modestly in a low CoL state. Once you get around the 95th percentile you can probably live comfortably in a high CoL state ($129k/year, translates to 87th percentile in california), and by the time you get to the 99th percentile, you can probably live as well as dual earner households with high paying careers ($555k). [1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ [2] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-state-calculator/

Your source references https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/ https://www.epi.org/data/#?subject=wagegroup etc. Those values are for the top 1% in the US - The "richest" nation on the planet. I have no idea why the author is presenting these as global numbers, but they quite clearly are. 0.23% of the worlds population have over $1mil in net worth. https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/

For most retirees, inflation doesn't hit nearly as hard. No transportation to work every day, no kids to feed or clothe, home often paid off, generally lower expenses all around. Earning 5-7% off of a savings account, or maybe municipal bonds, was once a huge, reliable supplement to Social Security. As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

> As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ Those "retirees" also do not have enough money to retire. To retire and live off the interest of a theoretical 5% interest savings account for 30 years requires you to already be wealthy. If you're a working-class baby boomer, you may have gotten that from your house when you sold it and moved into a bad neighborhood or an apartment. But that's just about the only way other than Social Security and old pensions that you're going to keep eating.

> $20M is retirement money. $1.2M isn't. I live in a HCOL area, so I get this sentiment. But it doesn't match at all with actual reality in the US. The median 65-69 year old has a net worth of $272k, with the average being $1.25M [0]. A lot of places are pretty cheap - especially since even modest earners could get thousands of $ in SS each month. [0] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles-by-age/

Humans have a natural desire for fairness, so it is reasonable to want a tax system where the rich (who benefit most from society) pay a similar amount in taxes to the average person, as a proportion of their wealth. The median family's net worth[0] in the US is about $120k, and the median household federal tax burden[1] is about $10k per year, which equates to an 8.3% annual wealth tax. Unfortunately I don't think anyone is proposing such a tax for billionaires in the US, which just shows how one-sided the Overton window is there. [0] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never…

Even if we're talking about wealth and not income, the amount necessary to be in the top 10% wealth is...not that much. It's about $800,000 in net worth: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ This is largely attainable for the majority of Americans when you factor in the value of one's home, retirement accounts, and general lifetime savings. Keep in mind we're not talking about how much net worth the majority of Americans have at any snapshot-in-time, we're talking about the maximum net worth attainable in one's lifetime, and what that looks like for the majority of Americans. There's absolutely no evidence that the top 10% wealth holders has been a static group of people over the last 60 years.

From that same site, 90% net worth is ~1.25m. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ If you contribute 2k a month at 7% interest that would take you 23 years. A long time yes, but certainly achievable on a 100k salary. Of course I know the interest rate might not be that going forward, but the point still stands.

The 90%ile of Household Net Worth in US is $1.2 million. Is that poor? https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/