u/Dreamsneverlies

Kept seeing average net worth figures that felt impossible, so I went and pulled the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 numbers.

Age	Average	Median
Under 35	$183,380	$39,040
35 to 44	$548,070	$135,300
45 to 54	$971,270	$246,700
55 to 64	$1,564,070	$364,270

Under 35 the average is 4.7 times the median. The smallest gap at any age is 3.9 times, at 45 to 54.

The reason is that net worth has no ceiling. One household worth $50 million sits in the same bucket as a thousand households worth $40,000, and it drags the mean while doing nothing at all to the median. So the average is really a fact about the top of the distribution, not about anyone in the middle.

The practical version. If you are 30 with $39,000 you are not behind the average person. You are the median person. The average person your age does not exist.

Disclosure, I build a free budgeting app so I have an interest here. The four rows above are the whole point though and you do not need anything from me to use them.

I build a budgeting app, so I went looking for why people abandon them. Around 150 threads across r/personalfinance, r/budget, r/ynab and r/povertyfinance. Most were someone asking for a recommendation. The rest were people explaining why they stopped using whatever they had.

I kept notes rather than a spreadsheet, so treat the ordering below as solid and the exact weights as my read.

What they ask for, most common first.

1. Bank sync, by a distance
2. Some version of "I just want to know what I actually have"
3. Not wanting to pay for it
4. Currently leaving YNAB
5. Explicitly not wanting to hand over bank credentials
6. Wants it simple, please stop adding features
7. Irregular or freelance income
8. Proper reports and export
9. Shared with a partner
10. Straight up distrust of finance apps

The contradiction sitting inside that list.

The most requested feature is bank sync. Fifth on the list is not connecting a bank at all.

Those are the same people asking for the same outcome. Read the sentence right after someone asks for sync and it is nearly always "so I do not have to type everything in." Sync is the means. Not typing is the end. The group that refuses to hand over credentials wants the identical result and keeps proposing the same workaround, which is importing a statement file.

The category has split itself over a mechanism while both halves are asking for one thing.

What they want, in their own words.

"What's left is what you can actually spend. Not what you think you have. Not what your bank balance says."

"How much can I genuinely spend today and still make it until payday. A normal budget just isn't built to answer that."

That is not a request for a budgeting app. It is a request for one number.

Why they actually leave, which is on nobody's list.

Among the threads from people who had already quit, the most common reason by a wide margin was not price and not a missing feature. It was effort.

"I always quit after two weeks because manually opening an app, choosing a category, and typing $5.50 for coffee felt like a second job."

"Is coffee a drink or a grocery? It's paralyzing."

This is the whole thing. Effort is the number one reason people leave and it appears nowhere on the list of what they ask for. Nobody requests "please require less of me" because it does not occur to them until they have already failed at it twice.

So apps in this category get built against the ask list, ship the ask list, and then lose the user in week two to the item that was never on it.

On price.

"Why do budget apps charge money when people start budgeting because they don't have money?"

Some version of that came up constantly, and I have not seen anyone in the category answer it properly.

The best line in the whole thing was about a gym.

"Still paying, not using, just like the gym."

Someone describing a subscription they had forgotten to cancel. It also describes how most people end up relating to their budgeting app.

So the takeaway. This category is not really competing on features. It is competing on how little work it takes to keep using.

Picture two apps. One has twenty features and makes you categorise every purchase by hand. The other has five and imports a statement once a month. By day fourteen the first user has done sixty small chores and quits. The second user has done one thing. Fewer features, still wins, because the question was never what can this do. It was what does this cost me every week to keep using it.

The reason most teams miss this is that roadmaps get built from feature requests, and nobody ever files a request saying please require less of me. So the thing that actually causes the churn never enters the backlog.

Curious whether other people see the same gap in their own category, where the thing that actually causes churn is never the thing users ask you to build.

The "you need a million to retire" number is an American number, and I wanted to know how much of it is actually about retirement versus just about US prices. So I pulled World Bank data for all 195 countries and worked out what the same purchasing power costs elsewhere.

The method is a price level ratio. How many dollars it takes to buy a dollar's worth of goods somewhere compared with the US. Portugal comes out at 0.6037, so the same basket runs you 60 cents there. Multiply your target by that ratio and you get the portfolio that throws off the same local purchasing power. The withdrawal rate cancels out of the comparison, so it holds at 4 percent or 3 or whatever you actually use. Drop to 3 percent and every number just scales up by a third, and the ranking is identical.

What came out of it.

The median country is $457,100 and 108 of the 195 sit under $500,000.

Only 8 come out above the US. Bermuda, Cayman, Iceland, Switzerland, Barbados, Nauru and Israel. Sudan shows up too but that's an exchange rate artifact and I'd ignore it.

I expected a cliff between the rich world and everywhere else and there isn't one, it's a smooth slope the whole way down. The rich world is the tight part, twelve countries sit between $765,700 and $1,178,500, so the entire developed world fits inside a 1.5x band.

Portugal $603,700. Spain $645,200. Japan $648,700, far cheaper than its reputation, though that's mostly the yen having fallen rather than Japan getting cheap. Thailand $306,900, Malaysia $316,300, Philippines $331,600.

Where it breaks down, and this sub will spot it faster than most. Price levels average a whole national basket and most of that gets bought by locals on local wages. Import familiar food, run a car, carry international health cover or put kids in an international school and you're buying a different basket at something much closer to Western prices. Rents in the areas foreigners actually land in run well above the national average too. So it's the ceiling on your discount rather than the discount itself.

It also says nothing about the two things that decide this in practice, which are visas and tax. No treaty analysis, no FEIE or foreign tax credit, no wealth or exit taxes, no view on where your withdrawals get taxed and at what rate. It ignores currency risk as well, and this ratio moves ten or twenty percent in a couple of years without any real prices changing.

And national averages hide a lot. Lisbon is not rural Portugal.

Chart with all 32 countries and the sourcing is in the comments.

Took the World Bank price level data and worked out what portfolio you'd need in each country to buy the same standard of living that $1,000,000 buys in the US.

Posting it here rather than in a finance sub because I'm fairly sure these numbers flatter the cheap end, and the people who actually know are the ones who've done it.

Mexico $536,900

Costa Rica $590,600

Portugal $603,700

Spain $645,200

Panama $450,800

Colombia $378,200

Malaysia $316,300

Thailand $306,900

Vietnam $289,300

Other direction:

Iceland $1,178,500

Switzerland $1,119,600

Australia $901,400

Canada $834,500

Germany $802,300

Japan $648,700

Median country across all 195 in the set is $457,100.

Where I think it breaks down. This is a national price level, so it's weighted to what locals buy on local wages. If you import familiar food, run a car, carry international health cover or put kids in an international school, you're buying a completely different basket at something much closer to Western prices. Rents in the neighbourhoods foreigners actually end up in sit well above the national average too. So I'd read these as the ceiling on your discount rather than the discount itself.

It also ignores visas entirely, which from reading this sub stops far more people than money ever does.

What I'd genuinely like to know is how far off it lands in practice. If you moved from the US to somewhere on that list, did your real cost of living come anywhere near the ratio, or did the expat premium eat most of it?

Chart with all 32 countries and the sourcing is in the comments.

Pulled the World Bank price level data and worked out what portfolio you'd need in each country to buy the same standard of living that $1,000,000 buys in the US. Same life, different price tag.

Ones people here ask about most:

Mexico $536,900

Costa Rica $590,600

Portugal $603,700

Spain $645,200

Panama $450,800

Colombia $378,200

Thailand $306,900

Vietnam $289,300

And the other direction, if you're thinking of moving up rather than out:

Iceland $1,178,500

Switzerland $1,119,600

Australia $901,400

Canada $834,500

Median country across the whole World Bank set is $457,100. Half the world sits under $500,000.

Two things surprised me. Only 8 countries out of 195 are more expensive than the US, so if you're American you're already near the top of the world price table and nobody mentions that when they quote you a retirement number. And there's no cliff between the rich countries and the cheap ones, it's a smooth slope the whole way down, which I only realised after plotting more than a dozen of them.

Big caveat before anyone says it. This is a national price level, meaning what locals actually buy. If you import your food and carry international health cover you won't see anything like the full discount. And visas stop most people long before money does. Use it to narrow a list, not to make a plan.

Chart with all 32 countries and the full sourcing is in the comments.