Net Worth by Age Charts Are Wrong

You pull up the Federal Reserve chart on a Sunday evening. Your number is above median. Below the top quintile. The chart doesn't know what you actually have.

The Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances comes out every three years. It's the most rigorous household wealth dataset in the United States. When someone posts a net worth by age chart on r/personalfinance — the kind that gets 800 upvotes and 400 comments — it's usually sourced from this data. Adjusted for CPI. Broken down by age bracket and percentile. It looks authoritative.

You pull it up on a Sunday evening. You find your age bracket. You find your number. And for a moment, you feel okay. Above median. Decent trajectory. Then you look at what's in your net worth number and what's in theirs, and the comparison starts to fall apart.

The EPF account in India you stopped contributing to when you moved to the US. Around $38,000 at current exchange rates. It's technically yours. But you can't access it without filing withdrawal paperwork through the EPFO portal, which requires an Indian mobile number you may no longer have active, linked to an Aadhaar you may not have updated since 2019. Liquid? Not exactly.

The ESOP from your last startup. 12,000 shares at a $0.80 strike price, in a company that raised a Series B and then went quiet. Worth something. Maybe $60K at the last 409A. Maybe $0 if the liquidation preference stack is deep enough. Not countable as real wealth. But it's in your net worth number because the brokerage portal shows a value.

The apartment in Hyderabad. Your parents moved in when your father retired. You're co-owner on the deed with your brother. Market value around $180,000 at current rates. No plan for extraction. Not for sale while your parents are alive. But it counts, technically, as an asset.

The Federal Reserve chart doesn't know about any of this. The chart measures American households. It counts liquid assets, retirement accounts, home equity in the US, investment accounts. It was not built for someone with assets across three asset classes, two countries, and one family obligation that functions like a mortgage without the bank.

The chart isn't wrong. It's just not measuring you.

What the Federal Reserve SCF Actually Measures

The Survey of Consumer Finances is conducted by the Federal Reserve every three years. The 2022 edition surveyed around 4,600 households. It's weighted to represent the full US population and oversamples high-wealth households to capture the tail of the distribution accurately.

What it measures: financial assets (bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, retirement accounts), non-financial assets (primary residence, vehicles, business equity, investment real estate in the US), and liabilities (mortgages, student loans, credit card debt, other loans).

What it does not measure: foreign assets of any kind. Foreign real estate. Foreign pension and provident fund balances. Unvested equity. Foreign FDs and savings accounts. Assets held in trust or jointly owned with family members abroad. The fair value of business equity in India-registered entities.

For the median American household, this isn't a gap. Most American households don't have foreign assets. The omission doesn't distort the benchmark for its primary audience.

For an NRI with 8 years in the US and financial ties to India, the omission is significant. The assets the SCF ignores aren't minor line items. For many cross-border HENRYs, they're 20-40% of actual net worth — and a far higher percentage of the complexity.

The Six Assets Missing From Every Mainstream Benchmark

1. EPF (Employee Provident Fund)

The EPF is a mandatory contribution scheme for salaried employees in India. Employer and employee each contribute 12% of basic salary. If you worked in India for 5-10 years before moving to the US, your EPF balance is real money — often $20K-$80K for people at senior IC levels. Withdrawal is possible after 2 months of unemployment, or upon leaving India permanently, but the process is operationally complex. It's not the same as liquid savings, but it's not zero either.

2. Foreign real estate (including co-owned property)

Indian real estate valuations have run hard in major metros. An apartment in Bangalore's Whitefield or Hyderabad's Kondapur that was worth $60K in 2015 is worth $150-200K today. But "worth" and "liquid" are two different things. Property that your parents live in, or that's held jointly with siblings, or that requires a lengthy NRI repatriation process to extract capital from, is not the same as a Vanguard account. It counts in net worth. It doesn't count in liquidity.

3. Unvested equity

Unvested RSUs, options, and pre-IPO equity grants are not assets until they vest. But people routinely include them in informal net worth calculations — and they show up in net worth trackers that pull brokerage data. The SCF explicitly excludes unvested equity. Most people's mental model of their wealth doesn't.

4. NPS and other Indian retirement accounts

The National Pension System in India is a defined-contribution retirement account. Access before age 60 is restricted. NRI contributions are technically possible but operationally complicated. Balances held in NPS are real wealth but illiquid and often forgotten in cross-border net worth calculations.

5. Fixed deposits in Indian banks

NRE (Non-Resident External) and NRO (Non-Resident Ordinary) fixed deposits in Indian banks are a real asset class for many NRIs. NRE FDs are fully repatriable and tax-free in India. NRO FDs have repatriation limits. Both earn rates significantly higher than US savings accounts — 7-8% as of 2026 vs. 4-5% in the US. These are real, liquid-ish assets that most US benchmarks ignore entirely.

6. Remittance obligations and family financial exposure

This one doesn't show up as an asset — it shows up as a liability that most benchmarks don't capture. If you send $2,000-$4,000 per month to India for parents, family obligations, or property maintenance, that's a recurring outflow that changes your net worth trajectory in ways that don't appear in any standard benchmark. It's not debt in the formal sense. But it's a real constraint on wealth accumulation.

The Liquidity Problem

Net worth charts mix liquid and illiquid assets as if they're the same thing. They're not.

Liquid assets are things you can convert to cash within a few days without meaningful loss: bank accounts, index funds, money market funds, short-term treasuries. Semi-liquid assets include real estate (weeks to months to sell), retirement accounts (accessible with penalties before 59.5), and FDs (accessible with early withdrawal penalties). Illiquid assets include unvested equity (not yours yet), locked foreign accounts (process-constrained), and co-owned family property (relationship-constrained).

The complexity tax on cross-border net worth isn't just about confusion. It's about the real cost of managing assets across multiple systems, currencies, and legal frameworks — and the opportunity cost of attention spent on that management instead of wealth-building.

The HENRY Benchmark Gap

HENRYs at $300K-$500K TC in high-cost cities occupy a strange middle ground in the SCF data.

The high income means they're above median for their age in most asset categories. But the HCOL cost structure — $4,500/month for a 2BR in the Bay Area, $3,000/month for two kids in decent daycare, $2,000/month in remittances — means their savings rate is lower than their income would suggest.

The result is a peculiar clustering: HENRYs at $400K TC often show up in the 60th-70th net worth percentile for their age, not the 90th. They look like they're underperforming their income. They're not. They're paying a cost structure that the benchmark doesn't account for.

When you compare yourself to the SCF chart at that income level, you feel behind. But the benchmark wasn't built for your cost structure. It was built for a median household earning $70K that happens to have saved well.

What a Correct Benchmark Would Look Like

A correct benchmark for a cross-border HENRY at $400K TC in a HCOL city would filter for:

• Income range: $300K-$600K household income
• Metro: HCOL city (SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston)
• Family structure: children and/or remittance obligations
• Asset complexity: cross-border holdings, unvested equity, foreign retirement accounts
• Years in the US: 5-15 years (enough to have accumulated US assets, but with active India ties)

That filter produces a peer group that probably numbers in the low thousands nationally. The SCF samples 4,600 households to represent 130 million. The subsample that matches this profile is tiny — maybe 50-100 households in the entire SCF dataset.

The HENRY wealth gap is partly a measurement problem. If you're measuring yourself against the wrong benchmark, you're getting the wrong answer. The anxiety isn't irrational. The benchmark is just wrong for you.

What NettWorth's Approach Looks Like

NettWorth builds peer benchmarks from people who actually match your financial situation. Not synthetic data. Not the SCF extrapolated to your income level. Real portfolios from real people — cross-border HENRYs with unvested equity, EPF balances, Indian real estate, NRE FDs, and remittance obligations.

When you look at "where am I in my net worth trajectory," the answer changes when you compare against people who have your actual asset mix. The EPF in India counts differently in a peer benchmark than in the SCF data, because the people in your peer group also have EPF. The illiquidity discount is priced in. The comparison is real.

The income-to-wealth conversion problem is real for HENRYs. But part of the problem is measuring that conversion against the wrong baseline. Fix the baseline first. The Sunday evening anxiety doesn't disappear entirely — but it stops being about a chart that wasn't built for you.