The following content is sponsored by Personal Capital

Visualizing Americans’ Financial Assets by Age

What do your account balances look like? Chances are you’ll answer that question differently if you’re a new graduate versus if you’re a retiree.

As we progress through life stages and our earning power changes, our finances will naturally evolve. In this graphic from Personal Capital, we look at a breakdown of financial assets by age. It’s the second in a three-part series that explores the spending and saving of Americans.

What Are Financial Assets?

Before we take a look at the data, it’s key to understand what financial assets are. Financial assets are non-physical assets that are typically liquid. This means they can be easily exchanged for cash. They derive their value from their contractual claim on an underlying entity, such as an ownership share in a company.

Some common examples are:

• Cash
• Certificates of deposit
• Bonds
• Mutual funds
• Stocks

They do not include physical assets such as real estate, vehicles, or commodities, which have an inherent value due to their physical attributes.

A Breakdown by Decade

We calculated the breakdown of financial assets from the anonymized data of Personal Capital users, who tend to have a higher-than-average net worth. Here are the median balances for each account type by age.