We've learned in a previous article that the financial situation in America is dire. With the median retirement savings of only $5,000, many Americans will be working for longer or living a more spartan retirement life. Now what's the personal finance readers racial makeup?
Let's look at the Urban Institute's calculation for average family liquid retirement savings by race. As you can see in the chart below, there's a massive difference among White, African American, and Hispanic retirement savings.
For those wondering, the Urban Institute refuses to include research on the Asian American minority for some reason. I've asked why, and they've said in the past they don't have enough data, which is BS. When I dug further, they said Asian American income and retirement savings is equal or greater than Whites, so they don't want to talk about it.
Now let's take a look at the racial makeup of America based on 2010 census data.
Now let's look at the income by race data by the census bureau. As you can see, Asian median household income leads the way at roughly 30% higher than White median household income. It's no surprise that African American and Hispanic income are at the bottom based on the retirement savings by race chart above.
If we believe financial education leads to more income and wealth, then we can hypothesize that there will be an overrepresentation of Asian American personal finance readers and an underrepresentation of African American and Hispanic readers compared to the overall national average. The percentage of White personal finance readers should be a lower representation since the total must equal 100%.
Racial Makeup Of Personal Finance Enthusiasts
What's the personal finance readers racial makeup? Based on my survey of over 3,000 votes, there is roughly a 30% overrepresentation of Asian readers, a 5.3% underrepresentation of African American readers, and a whopping 7.5% of Hispanic readers on Financial Samurai.
I use FinancialSamurai.com as a representation of personal finance readers because it's been around since 2009, has over one million organic pageviews a month, and is therefore one of the top personal finance sites on the web.
As you can see from the chart, the personal financial readers racial makeup is roughly 48% White, 35% Asian, 7% Black, 5% Hispanic, 3% Bi-racial, 2% Multi-Racial, and less than 1% are Native American.
The Solution To Improving The Financial Health Of Americans
Would you have guessed that the personal finance readers racial makeup would have such a high percentage of Asian readers? It could certainly be the case that because I'm Asian and have an Asian personal finance site name that Financial Samurai naturally attracts more Asian readers.
However, if you read my content, look at my titles, and research the traffic statistics based on keyword searches, Financial Samurai is not garnering traffic from Asian search terms.
People come to my site because they type in words like, “401k by age,” “how do I retire early,” “how much should my net worth be,” “real estate investing,” and so forth. Financial Samurai does not rank for racial keywords.
We must either hypothesize that those who are already financially savvy care about financial information or those who read personal finance websites tend to get richer than the average person over time. I believe there's a mixture of both.
Anybody who started reading Financial Samurai since 2009 has probably crushed the average American in terms of wealth creation because we've been talking about investing in the stock market, bond market, real estate, and private investments since then.
The solution to improving the financial health of Americans is to simply encourage more Americans to read personal finance websites. Self-serving, I know, but so true. And the solution to help more African Americans and Hispanics improve their finances is to have more African American and Hispanic personal finance writers write topics that are geared more towards their respective communities.
It cannot be a coincidence that Asians lead America in both income and wealth and are also 7X overrepresented in terms of the personal finance readership demographic, despite representing only 5% of the population. Further, giving reading personal finance articles is free, there is no downside to subscribing to your favorite personal finance sites.
It's up to the government and the school community to popularize personal finance sites to as many people as possible. The more people can get their finances together, the better it is for the economy, for our country, for our children, and for our health and happiness.
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About the Author: Sam began investing his own money ever since he opened an online brokerage account in 1995. Sam loved investing so much that he decided to make a career out of investing by spending the next 13 years after college working at two of the leading financial service firms in the world. During this time, Sam received his MBA from UC Berkeley with a focus on finance and real estate. He also became Series 7 and Series 63 registered. In 2012, Sam was able to retire at the age of 34 largely due to his investments that now generate roughly $200,000 a year in passive income. He spends time playing tennis, hanging out with family, consulting for leading fintech companies and writing online to help others achieve financial freedom.