What’s the Average and Median Retirement Account Balance by Age and How Do You Compare | Retirement Accounts Through Age 65

We have brand new data that tells us what’s the average and the median retirement account balance by age in this country.

Hi, I’m Troy Sharpe, CEO of Oak Harvest Financial Group, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professional (CFP®) and host of the Retirement Income Show.
Before we get into the data, if you could just take one second to hit that thumbs up button, that’ll tell YouTube that this video should be shown to other people so they can see where they stack up and how they stand when it comes to their retirement account balances. And if you don’t like the video, [then] hit the thumbs down — that’s fine, too.
Before we get into the average balance and the median, I want to make sure we understand what these numbers actually mean. So when we talk about the median, we’re talking about the middle. So, if we look at this data series, I have 10 numbers. All of them are zeros. With a 99 at the backside (end). The median is zero.

So, if this was your retirement account balance of 10 people, one person had 99, [and] everyone else had zero, the median is zero.
But the average of this data set is 9.9. That’s when you just simply add them all up and divide by the number of points. In this case, 10. (And) 99 divided by 10 is 9.9.
So, we’re going to go through the median account balances first, and then we’re going to look at the averages. Now the averages are higher, and this is where you want to be, but the median does tell a good story as well. And we’re also going to look at the percentage of people in this country who actually have retirement accounts.

One very sad statistic that I’ve seen recently was about half of baby boomers, we’re talking tens of millions of people, have less than $100,000 saved for retirement. So, that makes it difficult, obviously, to generate income when you have less than $100-grand saved at 60 years old or so.

So, the median Again, the median doesn’t get skewed by big numbers — people who have $12 million, $13 million, something like that — in their retirement accounts. But less than 35 [years old], the median [is] $13,000 in this country.
In between the ages of 35 and 44, the median retirement account balance is $60,000. From 45 to 54, $100,000.

Now remember, the averages are going to be higher than this, so when we get to there in a second, we’re going to see what you should be shooting for, and we can talk about some strategies to plan in addition to the retirement account assets.
From 55 to 64, the median retirement account balance is $134,000; and 75 and up, $83,000 is the median account balance.

So, again, the median is lower than the average because the average can have high numbers that skew it. (And) the median is the middle.
So, how many people in this country actually even have a retirement account?
So, if you’re less than 35 years old, about 45% of the people in this country have retirement accounts. In between the ages of 45 to 64, it’s right around about 56. It’s 55, 58, 56, depending on your age, but this is the average. So, 56 — or a little bit more than half of the people in this country — have retirement accounts. And 75 plus is 38%, and this makes sense because retirement accounts weren’t invented — defined contribution plans like 401Ks and IRAs — until the late 70s. So, it makes sense that people above this age range don’t have retirement accounts.

Okay, so what is the average? So, these are the numbers that I want to be shooting for. If you’re looking to see how do you compare, this is the numbers that we want to go by. Less than 35 (years old): 30,000 is the average retirement account balance. Now compared to the median, the median for that demographic was $13,000. So we can see the average is higher. From 35 to 44, the average is $131,950. From 45 to 54, now we’re getting up to $254,000, or a quarter of a million saved for retirement.
Now, keep in mind all this data comes from the Federal Reserve. This is brand new data and our team is researching and compiling and we’re going to be providing a series of videos to help you understand what this data means in other financial categories so you can see where you stack up.
If you’d like to receive that data when we publish it, hit that subscribe button and also that little bell icon which will notify you when we do publish this data. We’re putting these videos out once a week.

From 55 to 64, the average retirement account balance is $408,420. Now this is important. When we start to get to this age range, we want to start to diversify the tax characteristic of our accounts. What does that mean? That means we don’t want to have all of our money inside retirement accounts because when we start to take it out, we have to pay income taxes. So, if income taxes are higher in the future when we need more income, [then] we have no choice except to pay those taxes. And as we take more and more out, we go progressively up the tax brackets.

So, as we When we help clients prepare in this stage, we’re trying to make sure that we have money saved inside the Roth IRA — what we call nonqualified dollars, which are nonretirement dollars. So having high retirement account balances is good, but we also want to have money outside of retirement accounts.

Age 65 to 74, the average retirement account balance is $426,070. And then 75 and up is $357,920. So this is the most recent data from the Federal Reserve.

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