The chart below is simply horrifying. Not only are these median net worth figures scary, realize that 50% of the households in the country have less than these figures. Having a a net worth of less than $200,000 as you approach or enter retirement is a recipe for disaster. When 70% to 80% of that net worth is tied up in your house, you are nothing but a dead retiree walking. You should acquire a taste for cat food and learn how to panhandle for money.
The $25,000 to $45,000 of non-home related net worth would also include vehicles, furniture, electronics, and appliances. The amount of this net worth in usable cash or investments is microscopic. How can people expect survive for decades on virtually no savings? This chart reveals that a huge percentage of American households will face miserable retirement years and/or having to work until the day they die. They will have to sell their homes to live off the proceeds. Who will they sell to? You can see the younger generations don’t have a pot to piss in. This does not bode well for home prices over the next couple decades, despite the artificial boom engineered by the Fed and Wall Street since 2012.
The unequivocal facts in that chart are the result of globalizing good jobs to foreign lands, the utter failure of our educational system, the success of Wall Street/Mega-Corporation propaganda in convincing a vast swath of America to live for today using easy money credit, politicians squandering the national wealth on the welfare/warfare state, and a Federal Reserve that has debased our currency by 96% in just over 100 years.
This chart will look even worse when the stock/bond/housing bubble implodes for the third time in the last sixteen years. We are sitting down to a banquet of consequences.
