How rich are you?

Thanks to the silly, I got to read this ABS report on wealth.

As usual, the silly just glossed over it and presented a single whoopee-do figure telling us that we are worth $500,000 on average.

The poor old ABS must feel a bit dark about that. They've gone to the trouble of doing a stack of research and producing an 80 page report with lots of tables and breakdowns of statistics, and the silly condenses the whole thing to a headline that says, "Yeeha, we're rich".

I dug into the report and found a few interesting things. There are just under 8 million households in Australia, and around 1% of them are worth more than $1 million.

Ponder that for a moment. We're told we are in the middle of an enormous property boom, and the "life style" shows are full of stories about expensive properties and the like, yet very, very few people are worth over $1 million. Why is that? How can it be that we have all these people in million dollar houses, yet so few are worth that much?

Hell, we're renting a house that must be worth close to a million - if not more. It's not that flash. There's a house a few doors down that is on the market for $1.6 million. You cannot buy a house in this suburb for under $700,000 (that being defined as a liveable place with three or more bedrooms). In fact if you want to live around here, you need to get used to the idea of paying $800k - $900k for a house. If you pay less than that, you're unlikely to want to invite your friends around for a drink. Slums are not a good look.

The kicker though is that the ABS pulls a nasty trick by subtracting debt, which means we are looking at net worth figures. Once you do that, it appears that most people aren't worth a whole lot.

The numbers on superannuating, shares and unit trust ownership are not that special either. We are always reading that we are a nation of shareholders, but the top quintile (that's 20% to those of you that failed maths) has an average shareholding of $97,000. The top 20% has average superannuation of $264,000. The other 80% makes depressing reading.

The average household value of the top 20% is $644,000 - like I said, that won't buy you a house around here. The average value of household goods (furniture, clothing, TV etc) in the top 20% is only $84,000.

I'm not going to run around telling you how much we are worth, but these numbers did provide some comfort. We are well ahead of most of the Joneses, so I can sleep comfortably tonight knowing that I am not the poverty stricken wretch that I thought I was.

I'll just have to avoid visiting my friends on the North Shore in the multi-million dollar mansions.

Bastards.

What really surprised me about the way the silly covered this report is that they didn't get some dick from ACOSS on the phone and get them to have a long whinge about how the poor are getting poorer and the rich should be taxed until their eyeballs bleed. If anyone from ACOSS ever turns up on my doorstep, I am going to set their nostril hairs on fire.