Annual Income and Net Worth

The single most popular post that I've ever written for PFStock is my Net Worth Update post. This post has several tables listing median networth versus age and annual income. I found that most people are searching for hard data that compares how they are doing compared to others, especially those who are the same age with a similar income.

For a while now, I've had an annual income poll in the sidebar of PFStock that asks readers to respond to the question: "How much do you make?" So far there have been 93 responses. In constructing this poll, I deliberately set the income ranges to correspond with the income ranges for the CNN Money website. This table tells you the median net worth for people that fall into each income category. Here are the latest data from the sidebar poll:

CNN Money: Net worth by income and percentage of PFStock readers within each income range.

Annual Income	Median Net Worth	% of PFStock Readers
less than $25k	$1,250	4%
$25k-$49k	$34,375	13%
$50k-$74k	$168,500	9%
$75k-$124k	$301,475	34%
$125k-$149k	$644,100	3%
$150k and higher	$1,122,900	34%

Note that the percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding. From these statistics, I found it interesting that a large percentage of my readers fall into the higher income categories. Approximately 70% of PFStock readers have an income greater than $75,000 per year. Does anybody want to share their insights on this statement?

Given that I have the median net worth for each income category and the percentage of readers that fall within each category, it would be tempting for me to calculate the "average median net worth for PFStock readers" based on the CNN data. But, what value could such a data point possibly provide? Nevertheless I will throw caution to the wind and and let you know that using an Excel spreadsheet of these data I have calculated that the average median networth for PFStock readers is $532,050.27.

This result corresponds well with the other poll that I have on PFStock: What is your net worth? Again, I was surprised that a large percentage of readers fall within the higher net worth categories, with more than one-half of all readers reporting a networth of more than $500,000. If you haven't already, please participate in the polls in the PFStock sidebar, and I will update the information periodically.

Here are some interesting related posts:

Annual Income Survey (2/10)
How much do you make? (4/09)
Net Worth Update (8/09)
Net Worth Comparison (6/08)
Are You Wealthy? (3/08)
Calculating Net Worth (9/06)

DC