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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The median US household has a net worth of $200,000. Even a 50th percentile US household is very wealthy by global standards.

Credit card statistics are heavily manipulated because it's easy to make them sound terrible. I don't know which factoid specifically you're referring to, but the studies about "X percent of Americans couldn't handle an emergency expense without putting it on a credit card" often use tricks like including anyone who would pay by credit card if they could. I remember reading some of these studies and realizing that I would have been included in the statistic because I prefer to use a credit card where I can, even though I pay it off before interest accrues.

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Net worth or net income? Being 40yo with only 200k of worth between two when you’re halfway through your working life and have had 10y of appreciation of assets isn’t very much to go forward with.

> The median US household has a net worth of $200,000.

Which is primarily the market value of the home they live in. They can’t pay a bill with it.

The median American household has $8000 of liquid cash in all of their cash accounts combined.

> The median American household has $8000 of liquid cash in all of their cash accounts combined.

That’s a lot of liquid cash. It reinforces the idea that the median American household has an unparalleled amount of money to burn on whatever.

That includes savings. The median checking account is $2800. People can burn from that $8000 but it’ll be at the expense of being able to handle an unexpected emergency expense, or a goal they’re saving up for.

And this is the median, which means that half of US households have less than this. Which is quite a lot of people who still use phones.

I’d assume that net worth is mostly housing and/or retirement accounts, and thus not really available to pay off credit cards.

>Even a 50th percentile US household is very wealthy by global standards.

Not by purchasing power. We're also in a weird position compared to our "peers" in that most of them have relatively easy access to much less wealthy neighbors via over-land transit or a cheap plane ride, whereas we have to travel quite a distance or pay for extremely expensive plane tickets. Which means that we're stuck here with what a USD buys in the US, instead of being able to hop over to someplace else where a dollar goes further. We also work more than our peers, so our per-hour earnings take a hit compared to theirs.

I could go on. The trick is trying to gaslight Americans into second-guessing the economic pain they've increasingly felt over the past few decades. The 50th percentile American household lives worse than the 50th percentile household of quite a few less-wealthy countries.

averages strike again.

Median wealth in the U.S just around $100k - see Wikipedia & other databases.

how many people own houses ? & for those people that own houses - average equity in those houses is less than 45%.

ain't no factoid - but lived reality of most people. maybe on the coasts where techies and finance bros live - but the rest of america is facing a bleak financial reality.

actually per UBS [0]: Median Wealth in the US is $68K. Almost neck in neck with median income.

[0]: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2026...

> averages strike again.

My comment said "median" explicitly

The number was for household wealth. I think you're looking at individual wealth, which would naturally be lower because it's spread across more people.

Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...

The average (mean) is closer to $1 million per family, but that's not a useful number.

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