Home and stock prices have increased substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a $91,000 median increase in net worth between 2019 and 2022 for households headed by someone aged 65 or more years.
That’s according to Bloomberg, which cited research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that used data from the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
“Slightly more than half of seniors’ gains in net worth came from nonfinancial assets like home values, while retirement accounts and other financial assets contributed the remaining 48%,” Bloomberg reported.
By comparison, households headed by someone aged 40 to 64 years saw median gains of $57,800, and households headed by someone aged 18 to 39 saw median gains of $31,000.
Although the dollar amount is significantly lower for younger households, the percentage of increase is much higher, “since they were starting from a lower base,” Bloomberg noted.
Ana Hernández Kent, senior researcher with the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Lowell Ricketts, a data scientist at the St. Louis Fed’s Institute for Economic Equity, noted that the gains are distributed unequally among groups in the United States.
“Wealth grew markedly for all groups, but some families — grouped by race and ethnicity, age and education — saw steeper growth,” Kent and Ricketts said.
