Recently released data presented in a report from the Congressional Budget Office indicate that U.S. family wealth totaled sixty seven trillion dollars in twenty thirteen. The report also indicates what we all know – that that wealth is shared rather unequally.
The report indicates that the top ten percent of families, those who had at least nine hundred and forty two thousand dollars in wealth, held seventy six percent of all wealth. The average amount of wealth in this group was four million dollars. As reported by CNNMoney, everyone else in the top fifty percent of the nation accounted for twenty three percent of total wealth, with an average of a bit more than three hundred thousand dollars per family.
That means that the entire bottom half of the nation’s population controls just one percent of the wealth. The average held by families in the twenty sixth to fiftieth percentiles was thirty six thousand dollars. Those in the bottom twenty five percent effectively had zero wealth. In fact, they were thirteen thousand dollars in debt on average.
Families run by adults with college degrees had a median wealth of two hundred thousand dollars, or nearly four times that of families headed by someone who ended their formal education with a high school diploma.
