"The average American has $334,000 saved for retirement."
You've seen that number. It's real, it comes from the Federal Reserve, and it is one of the most misleading statistics in personal finance.
Here's why: that figure is the average balance among families who actually have a retirement account. And in the Fed's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, only 54.3% of U.S. families did.
So nearly half of America is simply not in the calculation.
The median for the families who are in it? $86,900.
Same dataset. Same year. A $247,000 gap. Let's figure out which number is actually about you. 👇