The All-Canadian Wealth Test 2009

According to the Wealth Comparison Calculator, my household, at age 29, should be worth almost $800,000. And here I thought I was doing OK...

What a terrible calculator.

According to these various tables, my household (wife and I) are in the top 20% of canadians... pretty much all thanks to Vancouver real estate appreciation, and our being die-hard LBYM'ers and DINKS...

Encouraging, I guess....

According to this I my income is in the lowest 20% of Canadians but have assets that make me middle class and I am about to become upper middle. I am pretty happy about this. When I make more I will put more away.

Ben said:

According to the Wealth Comparison Calculator, my household, at age 29, should be worth almost $800,000. And here I thought I was doing OK...

What a terrible calculator.

Click to expand...

I think the calculator is buggy. For our household, we'd be doing okay if our net worth was $1.14 million. And I was thinking we are not doing too bad either...

CanadianCapitalist said:

I think the calculator is buggy.

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I think this type of calculator never works well for those in the upper middle, lower upper class, since all your assets, income etc. are being compared to the rich outliers. Age is also a huge consideration since the majority of wealth is earned in the last few working years. There are simply too many biases rolled in.

How could you expect someone with an average upper class Alberta income ($233.8k) in their mid-thirties to have a similar net worth as a pair of 60 oil-exec's ?

The tables of mean and median income, net worth included in this post are probably much more informative. They must have the data, but I really wish Stats Can would present data as more informative box plots.

Yeah, something seems to be off with the wealth calculator. But it doesn't help that I am at the very lowest part of the range for one of the questions, and the very highest for another. It really skews the results.

It might be better if the questions weren't arranged into categories and simply allowed you to put in real age, real salary, etc., and then did the math working on a sliding scale.

Another problem with this kind of comparison calculator is when they compare the net worth of people making a similar salary.

In my case, I am relatively young, but making a very good salary. When comparing net worth of people "like me" who make that kind of salary, I always come up short, because most people earning that much are older and have had many more years than I have to build their net worth.

I have a feeling this factor may be skewing results for quite a few of us. There seems to be quite a few high income earners who are relatively young on this discussion board.

It seems to me that the calculator seems to produce reasonable results until you get to the last question on renting, owning a home without a mortgage and owning a home with a mortgage.

For a male, 35 to 44 years of age, university degree, couple under 65 with kids at home, household income of $50K to $75K and two earners, the median networth is shown as $522K.

Own with mortgage = $591 million
Own without mortgage = $1.109 million
Renting = $384K

The final choice seems to throw off results quite a bit.

CanadianCapitalist said:

It seems to me that the calculator seems to produce reasonable results until you get to the last question on renting, owning a home without a mortgage and owning a home with a mortgage.

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The final choice seems to throw off results quite a bit.

Click to expand...

I agree. The discrepancy is huge with the last choice.