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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

Note this includes retirement accounts (like 401(k), IRA). Not really directly reflective of "net worth" given it's more or less locked up until retirement.

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No need to make up your own definitions. Net worth = assets - liabilities. 401(k) and IRAs count as assets, and you can draw from them with various amount of flexibility depending on how dire your financial situation is.

Just substitute your preferred terminology if you weren't a fan of mine. I was just trying to get a point across, not debate semantics.

What was the point you were trying to get across?

That these include retirement accounts?

And therefore directly reflective of net worth.

A billionaire does not have a room of dollar bills either.

I can't read the paywalled story but did pensions count towards net worth? If not then the inclusion of retirement assets into net worth is clearly misleading when looking at historical numbers.

Yeah but tax penalties and other fees for withdrawing early.

Not really, as outlined here[0]. Even with penalties, becoming homeless and becoming homeless with a million in a 401(k) are vastly different despite some folks here thinking both are equally broke somehow.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24550715

Yeah seen that, not too well up on all this. Sounds like they are talking about converting their account. I guess maybe a lot of people aren't up on this sort of stuff or aware of all their options unless maybe they went to college to be an accountant maybe.

Neither of those accounts are "locked up", there are ways to access your money before the government sponsored year of retirement. See rule 72(t) or periodic distributions for withdrawing without penalty. Finally you can always withdraw the money with a penalty.

You can withdraw your contributions to ROTH IRA's at any time, penalty free and ROTH 401(k)s are easily rollover-able to a ROTH IRA.

They are completely a part of net worth, it's in the very definition.

I thought it was obvious... I wrote "more or less locked up" precisely because I knew if I just summarized it as "locked up" without qualifiers somebody would eagerly jump in to trash my comment here. Somehow I forget people are keen to do that regardless. My bad, I thought I was trying to help people interpret that statistic but now I regret it.

I'm not sure I understood your point though.

Retirement accounts hold YOUR money, that is money that YOU saved for YOUr own use later.

Whether I put it in a savings account or taxable investing account it is still part of my net worth as it's money I will be using some time in the future.

Perhaps I'm too dense but I'm not understanding why you are not including retirement accounts as part of net worth calculations.

The sentence was "55% of Americans are estimated to own stocks", and I pointed out this includes retirement accounts, feeling (evidently quite wrongly) that that would be important to many readers to be pointed out.

If you don't see any value in that, then I'm sorry, the next time I won't mention it. My apologies. I repent.

why would that not be included in your net worth?

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