December 3, 2023 – When I wrote my post on the “Die With Zero” philosophy in October, I dug through the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). I used the detailed wealth distribution data to study the extent of asset overaccumulation late in retirement. The Federal Reserve releases the SCF only every three years, and just a few weeks ago, we got another survey covering 2022 and providing a wealth of information – pun intended. Quite amazingly, in 2022, for the first time in history, the average household net worth crossed one million dollars, now standing at about $1,060,000. Of course, wealth is unequally distributed, so while we may all be millionaires on average, the number of millionaire households is much smaller.

Then, what’s the percentage of millionaires? Is it a tiny elite, like the wealthiest 0.1% or 1%? I remember reading years ago that the share of millionaires was in the high single digits. So, I was surprised that more than 18%(!) of households were millionaires in 2022. That’s across all households and all age groups, and it is significantly higher for older folks. Also, the overwhelming majority of millionaires are homeowners. Homeownership can’t be such a terrible investment after all.

Since I did all that work, writing a Python program to dig through all those datasets, I thought I might as well write a blog post and share the results with you. Let’s take a look…

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