Do Americans have an earnings problem or a savings problem? Unfortunately, I think we’ve got both. Take a look at the median income by age and sex from the latest Census Bureau data.
The median income for 20-24-year-olds is $25,116 for women and $27,040 for men.
The median income for 25-34-year-olds is $35,620 for women and $40,560 for men.
By middle age, the median income for 35-44-year-olds is $40,768 for women and $49,972 for men.
The median income for 45-54-year-olds is $40,248 for women and $52,624 for men. In other words, the median income doesn’t increase significantly after age 44.
In fact, the median income plateaus for both women and men ages 55-64 at $41,080 for women and $53,508 for men.
Analyzing The Income By Age And Sex Data
The obvious points are 1) people make more the older they get and 2) men make more than women at every single age group. Making more as you age is nothing insightful. What is insightful is how the difference between men and women’s salaries really start to grow in their 30s. A 25% pay gap is huge!
So what’s going on here? The answer must be biological (life). For example, I have a female friend who was the most gung-ho worker ever. She was an Electrical Engineer in college (one of the hardest majors) and told me that she planned to work “forever” after Harvard Business School.
Two years after HBS, she was pregnant, and when I asked her whether she still planned to go back to work she said, “No way! Raising my children is the most important thing in the world to me.”
It’s been five years since she’s been out of the work force. If she decides to return at age 37, it’s logical to assume that she will have to start at a lower pay and title than colleagues who kept working while she was away.
Regarding finding a solution to the gender wage gap for equal pay for equal work, the fix I’ve come up with is to have equal paternity leave rights for men and women. With equal paternity leave rights, employers are more blind to discriminate.
What’s interesting is that women have more money in their 401k on average up to the $150,000 income mark, according to a 2017 report by Fidelity Investments with 13 million tracked accounts. Women earning between $20,000 and $40,000, for example, have saved an average of $17,300 in their 401(k) compared to $15,200 for men in the same income range.
Median Income By Age And Sex In America Continued
I live in San Francisco where the median single family home costs $1-1.1 million dollars and the median income is roughly $76,000. But when I go to look at median priced homes, I see nothing I want.
Even the fixer I bought costs more than the median home price, and I’m probably going to end up spending at least another $130,000 to restore the home to good condition.
When I look at the median income levels by age in the chart above, I get a little depressed because it’s hard to get ahead with that income figure unless both men and women work. But can both men and women who make median incomes work if they have a family? Hard to say given the cost of childcare is atrociously high.
We know that the median household net worth has gone nowhere in the past 40 years. Furthermore, the median household income has been going down since 2000, but finally showed a rise to $68,000 based on the latest data available by the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, housing prices, healthcare costs, and college tuition during the same time period have far outpaced income growth. Is there any wonder why Americans are having a tougher time getting ahead?
Strategies For Increasing Income And Net Worth
I hope every single reader on Financial Samurai increases their incomes and their net worths above the median levels over time. The median income by age and sex would income. I’d like to reiterate some moves one can do to make these two things happen.
1) Move to a more economically robust area of the country.
It took our settlers 3-6 months to cross the entire continent. Now we can make the same trip in four days by bus. Take some risks and go to where the action is. Yes, I understand it’s frightening, but we live in America where rules and laws are pretty uniform.
I suggest geoarbitraging first in your city, then move to a different state, and then consider moving internationally to a place like Thailand or Malaysia. You don’t have to go straight to a foreign country to save on costs.
In fact, it is largely due to geoarbitrage within the United States that I’m bullish on the Heartland of America. I’m taking advantage of this logical migration shift away from expensive coastal cities by aggressively buying midwest and southern real estate through real estate crowdfunding.
I put my money where my mouth is by selling a San Francisco rental home for 30X annual gross rent and reinvesting $550,000 of the proceeds into 18 different real estate projects around the country in 2018.
2) Work longer hours.
A 40 hour workweek is arbitrary given there are 168 hours in a week. If you want to make more money, the easiest thing you can do is work more hours. Hard work requires no skill.
Work 50 hours, and watch your income grow by 25% more than the 40 hour worker. Work 60 hours a week and watch your income grow by 50% or more due to over time.
There’s no reason why you can’t find another hourly wage job. It’s absurd to complain why you don’t feel like you’re getting ahead if you are working less than 40 hours a week!
Go to France, Greece, Spain, or Portugal if you want to kick back. This is America, where getting your ass kicked every week is a rite of passage!
3) Leverage the internet.
I was talking to my Lyft driver the other day and he says he quit his job at Oracle to be more free, play in a band, and teach guitar one on one. He makes about $38 an hour teaching and asked if I had any other suggestions to how he could make more.
I told him to create guitar lessons online and sell the lessons for a competitive price. Invest the time upfront and leverage a massive demand curve online. The internet never occurred to him, and I wonder if the internet never occurs to many people. It’s cheaper and easier than ever to start a business online.
You can set up a WordPress site like mine through my step by step guide for under $5 bucks a month. You never know what might happen if you just try.
4) Develop your X Factor.
Do your normal job and then do something you love to do even more. Be careful following the advice of “doing what you love” when you’ve got no money, no experience, and no skills. You’ve got to pay your dues first. Before you go to work or after you come home, work on your X Factor for at least a couple hours a day.
Test things out, fail with a safety net, and scale up once you’ve found a viable solution. Leveraging the internet is ideal, but you can always go the old school route to try and make extra income first.
5) Believe that you deserve to be rich.
IBM’s CEO got a $100,000 base pay raise to $1.6 million in 2015 along with a $3.6 million bonus in 2014, and a $13.3 million stock incentive reward payable in 2018. Meanwhile, IBM’s stock went down ~25% over the past two years while the S&P 500 went up 35%, a 60% underperformance! You or I could do just as good of a job as the IBM CEO, for 1/10th the compensation.
Even a train janitor makes $271,000 a year here in the SF Bay Area. Abolish welfare mentality! There’s more money out there for everyone.
6) Building passive income streams.
Instead of relying on just one income source, as most Americans do, it’s important to build as many side engines of income as possible. If one engine goes down, another engine keeps your ship afloat. Goodness forbid you lose your job.
The wealthiest people in this country have at least five different passive income sources. Here are the best passive income investments to consider by rank.
Save As Much Money As Possible
During good times, never extrapolate your income out into the future. You will screw up your financials and end up buying things you have no business buying. The median income by age and sex in America are guides for you to dominate.
I was feeling so wealthy in 2007 that I bought a Lake Tahoe vacation property. Then the world ended, and the value collapsed by 30%. Holy crap! It was a bad decision. I’m up at my Tahoe place now writing you this post after a magical two foot powder dump, but working to live is besides the point.
I’d love for every single one of you to break above the median income and net worth amounts. Our unfair competitive advantage is that we have people who’ve created great wealth and are willing to share their stories, help each other out through the comments section, and contribute insightful posts.
We are not pontificators. We are doers!
Active Income Is Key
If you’re happy with your current financial situation, then by all means, carry on. But if you’re not, it’s time to get motivated and make a change.
The median income by age and sex should continue to go up. The wage different should continue to narrow as well. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to find the best job that suits you the best and pays you the most.
Your day job income and saving rate are the keys to great wealth in the first half of your career. Your investments will be your biggest wealth-driver during the second half of your career.
Active income is key to getting richer. But if you can build enough passive income to cover your living expenses, that is when you are financially free!
Boost Your Passive Income Through Real Estate
If you want to boost your income, then you need to invest in income-generating assets. There is no better income-generating asset that also tends to appreciate in value like real estate.
Thanks to real estate, my wife and I had the confidence to retire early. Today, real estate generates more than $150,000 a year in passive income so we can be stay at home parents.
Favorite Real Estate Investment Platforms
Fundrise: A way for accredited and non-accredited investors to diversify into real estate through private eFunds. Fundrise has been around since 2012 and has consistently generated steady returns, no matter what the stock market is doing. For most people, investing in a diversified eREIT is the way to go.
CrowdStreet: A way for accredited investors to invest in individual real estate opportunities mostly in 18-hour cities. 18-hour cities are secondary cities with lower valuations, higher rental yields, and potentially higher growth due to job growth and demographic trends. If you have a lot more capital, you can build you own diversified real estate portfolio.
Best Tool To Track Your Wealth
Get a handle on your finances by signing up with Personal Capital. They are a free online platform which aggregates all your financial accounts in one place so you can see where you can optimize your money. Even at a high income, money escapes like water from a leaky bucket if you don’t carefully track where it all goes.
Before Personal Capital, I had to log into eight different systems to track 30+ difference accounts (brokerage, multiple banks, 401K, etc) to manage my finances on an Excel spreadsheet. Now, I can just log in to see how all my accounts are doing, including my net worth. I can also see how much I’m spending and saving every month through their cash flow tool.
The best feature is their Portfolio Fee Analyzer, which runs your investment portfolio(s) through its software in a click of a button to see what you are paying. I found out I was paying $1,700 a year in portfolio fees I had no idea I was hemorrhaging!
They also have an incredible Retirement Planning Calculator. It uses your linked accounts to run a Monte Carlo simulation to figure out your financial future. You can input various income and expense variables to see the outcomes.
The median income by age and sex has continued to go up as the economy recovers post pandemic.
I mean this proves to me the Christina Hoff Sommers’ PragerU video. The graphs prove that they’re relatively no differences in pay when you first start out. Thanks Equal Pay Act of 1963. As time goes on women have children and due to gender roles, they’re suppose to take care of the baby. I am all in favor of equal maternity and paternity leave because then you would see a decrease of the income gap. As gender roles continue to be broken down, you will see a closer resemblance of a 1:1 ratio between income of men and women.
gender gap reports give a totally false sense to people. It gives the illusion that a man and a woman have the same job and are working side by side and this is not the case there are so many factors involved such as the types of jobs men are willing to accept over woman, things like danger and outdoor jobs that men are more inclined to be drawn towards that most woman are just not.
It is my personal belief that the moment you are satisfied with how you are doing, is the moment you stop trying to improve. You should always look for something bigger and better to work towards. Even Jordan Belfort wasn’t satisfied with making $49 million in one year, because it was just $3 million shy of $1 million a week. Most people may know him as “The Wolf of Wallstreet”. He has reportedly made over an estimated $100 million in the year of 2014 alone since becoming a motivational speaker. Goes to show you can always reach higher.
I know that for some Americans things are hard but I wanted to share my story. I am a medically retired Army NCO of more than 11 yrs. I spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan. My wife is still active duty and we did what most would not. While we were in Iraq and Afghanistan we put so much money toward our house and we stached money away. While we were in Iraq we bought a rental property for just under $60k(a condo) that we rented out for just under $600 a month. After we came back from Afghanistan we had orders to Germany were we spent the next 3 years living in on base housing and rented our our 3 bedroom house for $850 and later $950. Today the condo rents for $695. I receive more than $3200 a month plus what my wife makes. We do pretty well despite how others around us with the same career paths struggle. I guess I am saying that its not what you make its what you do with it. For a lot of families in America $3200 alone would be amazing, but it is what you do with what you have that will make the difference tomorrow. When my wife and I got married our combined full time pay was less than $4200 back in 2005. Remember we were always gone, always away from each other and doing a dangerous job with extremely long hours that kept us away from our extended family. In our first 3 years of marriage we spent about 100-130 days under the same roof/same bed. Most of those days were on leave/vacation. My wife is now gone for 9 weeks and as soon as she get backs we move. After that she will be gone for another 6 weeks sometime between Hollowed and Christmas. Then she will start a rotation of 9 weeks on 2 weeks off, and when I say 2 weeks off she will be back home but will still have to work. Life is full of sacrifices and there are rewards for those that are willing to make them. I know that my family is well taken care of even if all these “retirement calculators” are not accurate to peoples situations.
I agree and wish I would have realized that along time ago. Everyone has a different situation. Hope for the best, plan for the worst…. early!
I really appreciate websites that promoting saving rather then earnings, I’m no one special, but worked really hard after a life of 5 days a week of partying at Uconn. . . I started in the financial planning field in 2005 and started my own office in 2009, and now have 20 advisors and 8 staff as part of our operation. . . . I promise you my bad traits are really bad. . .. But the reason I share this is because my good traits, hard work, perseverance, goal driven, leadership ability, and an iron clad process has been the backbone of my success along with an exceptional office staff. . . .WIth these features and a savings driven priority anything is possible. . . (33, 900k annual income, net worth of 4.5 million)
Yes!!! Come to Greece to kick back, work 12-15 hours a day, don’t get paid your overtime hours, get a monthly salary of 700 euros while having a bachelor and a master degree 2 languages and many others.. YOU MORON!!!