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The Federal Reserve's SCF only includes cash value of insurance policies. I consider their data to be the gold standard. All the wealth percentile calculators and articles I have seen just recycle this data.

I agree that these discussions are useless as you won't answer my questions.

The cash value of life insurance is counted, term life isn't, for example here is Bankrate stating this: https://www.bankrate.com/smart-spending/personal-net-worth-calculator/

You didn't answer my question (you didn't answer my previous one either). But I will answer yours. They have the same effective weath. After he's dead, Joe has nothing. His heirs may or may not have anything. If he had a $2M term life policy then they get that, but Net Wealth doesn't...

Of course not, but fact that you could afford spend more means that you are wealthier than someone who couldn't,

So imagine there are two retirees, X and Y, both are using a 4% SWR. X has $1M of investable assets and so can spend $40K a year, Y has $500k of investable assets and so can spend $20K a year but also has an income of $60K a year from pensions and SS. So Y can spend $80K a year. While X has...

Let's agree that the definition of Net Wealth does not include pensions as an asset. The question is, is someone with a pension effectively wealthier than the same person without one?

Is a pension an asset?

I deliberately did not to use the term Net Wealth, I was asking whether they would be wealthier or not, ie that they would have a higher standard of living.

If a person with whatever investments or future liabilities was given a free $100K a year COLAed pension are they effectively wealthier or not?

I don't think Net Wealth is a useful concept for retirees with pensions and SS as it does't indicate how much effective wealth someone has. Some can have more Net Wealth but only be able to support a much lower lifestyle because they don't have a pension. So I think pensions should be part of...

I don't believe that Net Worth is equivalent to "your estate after you pass away" as it doesn't include life insurance. Net Wealth may be ok for young people, but it is not a useful measure of wealth for older retirees who often have pensions and SS.

Thank you for providing this information. Please can you clarify what you mean by "instructing Fidelity". I understand you do this twice, once to determine the withholding percentage and then again in January to code as a rollover. Is this something you do online or do you have to call...

Costco seeing minimal inflation overall, and deflation on some items https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/costco-seeing-minimal-inflation-overall-and-deflation-on-some-items-3257751

$5.7B in a $27T economy is 0.02%. You really think that this moved the needle on US GDP?

This was in one region, not the US as a whole. She had no measurable impact on US GDP

While any event has a local impact, there is no way Swift had any significant impact on the overall US economy to suggest otherwise is total nonsense.

This can only be known in retrospect. If someone retired in Jan 2000 with $1M invested 100% US Stock Index and withdrew 4.6%, they would have run out of money in Dec 2022. TMDV. (Those that followed the Ramsey 7% would have gone bust in 2011) Even 4% would have been very hard to stick with for...

I include a pension in my wealth because having a pension makes me wealthier. When someone claims a pension is not an asset, but then uses it to reduce the investments needed to fund their expenses, they are valuing the pension at exactly the amount they have reduced their needed investments by.

The definition of assets used by the FRB is broader than usually used to calculate net wealth: "we expand the wealth concept to include household claims on defined benefit (DB) pension assets. Wealth as measured here, then, includes all assets over which a family has legal claim that can be...

I don’t know what to make of inflation. Unfortunately, there is conflicting data that can be used to support the full range of Fed actions from cut to hold to raise. Looking at CPI the picture looks good. Annual inflation peaked in June 2022 at 9.1% and has since fallen to 4.9%. In fact, as...

Jurrien Timmer on the MacroHive podcast March 2, 2022: https://macrohive.com/hive-podcasts/ep-102-jurrien-timmer-on-sp-to-8000-ukraine-fall-out-and-bitcoin-allocations/ Listen from 20:40 for the next minute. He makes the case for the S&P500 reaching 8000 in 2027 (18% CAGR). Now, before I get...

The actual one month seasonally adjusted percent change in inflation in March was 0.05304%, not 0.1% as reported (Source FRED CPI data). Looking at the FRED CPI (seasonally adjusted) data (see chart) there was a dramatic fall in inflation that occurred in July 2022. In the 9 months since...

What do you mean when you say it "seems to track well with actual inflation"? I went to the FRED site and downloaded the CPI (monthly data, seasonally adjusted, annual rate) and Michigan Inflation Expectations data to Excel. As the Michigan data is supposed to be an estimate of inflation in...

I have been investing for 40 years and I have heard these same types of predictions again and again. These oracles of prediction have a remarkable ability to craft a plausible sounding scenario that is only exceeded by their ability to be spectacularly wrong. I know some people won’t believe me...