Net Worth Growth Calculator

The Federal Reserve surveys American household balance sheets every three years. Here is where households landed in the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the most recent published wave, by the age of the head of household:

Read the median column, not the average. The gap between them is enormous — $247,000 versus $971,000 for households aged 45–54 — because a handful of very wealthy households drag the mean upward. Roughly speaking, the median is the household in the middle; the average is a household that barely exists.

Two things stand out in the medians. Net worth more than triples from the under-35 group to the 35–44 group, and nearly doubles again by 45–54. That isn't because people suddenly save three times as much in their late thirties — it's the shape of the curve in the calculator above, where growth on an existing balance starts to outrun new contributions. And it peaks at 65–74, then falls, as retirees begin spending the portfolio they spent forty years building.

Use these as a thermometer, not a target. The median household in its fifties has $364,000, which is nowhere near enough to fund a comfortable retirement under the 25× rule. Beating the median is a low bar. Your target comes from your own spending.

Net worth grows from two sources: money you add, and money your money earns. Early on the first dominates completely and progress feels like pushing a boulder. Later the second takes over and the boulder starts rolling on its own. Watch how long each successive $100,000 takes, starting from zero at $1,000 a month and a 7% return:

The first $100,000 takes 6.6 years. The tenth takes 1.3. Same dollar amount, one fifth the time — because by then your portfolio earns more in a year than you contribute. This is the whole reason the first milestone feels so much harder than the last, and why abandoning the plan at year five is abandoning it right before it starts working.

Four levers actually move the curve:

• Raise the savings rate, not the income. A raise you spend entirely does nothing. Money you invest before you see it does everything. Automating the transfer on payday is the single most reliable mechanism there is.
• Take the employer match first. A 50% match on the first 6% of salary is an instant 50% return on those dollars, before the market does anything. No other lever pays that on day one.
• Kill high-interest debt before investing. Paying off a 22% credit card is a guaranteed 22% return. A 3% mortgage is not the same problem, and paying it down early costs you the spread against a portfolio expected to earn more.
• Start earlier rather than saving harder. The table above is why. Ten years at the front of the curve beat thirty at the back — see investing at 25 vs. 35 for the arithmetic.

Notice what isn't on the list: picking better investments. The gap between a decent index fund and a great one is measured in fractions of a percent. The gap between saving 5% of your income and 20% of it is measured in decades. If you have a specific target and a deadline, the savings goal calculator will tell you the monthly number that gets you there.

These get conflated constantly, and the difference decides whether you can actually stop working. Net worth is an accounting identity:

Your retirement numberis a different thing entirely: the portfolio large enough that withdrawing from it covers your living expenses. It counts only assets you can sell and spend — 401(k), IRA, brokerage. At the classic 4% withdrawal rate, it's 25 times your annual spending.

The difference is mostly your house. Consider someone with $700,000 in net worth: a $400,000 home paid off, $50,000 in cash, and $250,000 invested. Their net worth clears the median for nearly every age group. But their retirement number, if they spend $60,000 a year, is $1,500,000 — and only the $250,000 counts toward it. They are 17% of the way there, not 47%.

Home equity doesn't fund retirement because you have to live somewhere. Selling the house means buying or renting another one. What a paid-off mortgage does do — and it's worth a great deal — is lower your annual spending, which lowers the retirement number itself. That's the mechanism, not the equity.

So track both, and know which question you're asking. Net worth tells you how you're doing. The FIRE calculator tells you whether you can quit. And the Coast FIRE calculator finds the earlier milestone — the balance that reaches your retirement number on compounding alone, with no further contributions at all.