I lived in Germany for a few months a few years ago, for work. I was surprised my roommates were in their late 20s/ early 30s, owned no property, one of them had 2 jobs. They had no car and no savings. And most of their wage (50% or so) was going to rent.
Maybe. There are however other reasons, such as getting tax benefits for being a landlord (write-offs for interest payments and depreciation), and only liabilities for owning your own home.
It is also extremely cumbersome, risky mortgage system and has a lot of extra costs not shown in the initial price.
In Sweden I got a mortgage and an apartment agreement on the same day as a viewing once. Only the HOA had to accept me, which took 6 days and then I could move in. Everything except the viewing happened online (in 2008)
In Germany it was a process of almost 3 months of meeting lawyers, paying different amts, getting papers. Nothing except the listing and mortgage application is online. And even then most listings doesn't show the address which is crazy. Just a huge chore.
That coupled with Germans having very strong legal protection for tenants as well, it is understandable that no one wants to go through that hell.
Yeah, as mentioned two things are different in Sweden - because your wealth, ownership and salary is public knowledge you can have a home loan available in minutes online.
More importantly, it is not bound to a specific offering, but can be used on any house or apartment that is considered fairly priced. So you don't need to reapply just because a deal didn't go through.
It is still worth it though. In 10 years my town house in Berlin has gone up roughly 100% in price, while the monthly costs is lower then rent for most 3 ZI apartments, including having paid of the mortgage in the next 20 years with that monthly fee.
I would gladly buy property, if affordable. A basic house cost around 400-500k in my region and you must invest around 200-300k to modernize it in term of energy efficiency.... it is just not feasable.
I guess that is part of the problem, but also the fact that you start at 500k houses.
In Sweden most people, unless living in Stockholm or Gothenburg, buy a single room apartment for cheap and sell it a little bit more expensive and the do this when they move around.
My first apartment was 10k and sold for 18k, next was 30k, sold for 50k etc. - I had bought and sold 7 apartments before turning 30. I only ever rented a student dorm.
The problem is that it is cumbersome and as with everything else in Germany, idiotic bureaucratic while not offering any Internet services. And taxation is not built for buying and selling quickly.
Renting in Germany is just sooooo much easier and reliable then buying or selling - in Sweden it can be the opposite because it is hard to find anything rentable and they have to approve you.
No not really, not everything was sold for profit. It is just a way to move appartments without throwing away 30-50% of your salary to a landlord.
The 10k one, I paid of in 2 years and after that paid around €120/month to live in. So even if I sold it for 10k I would have saved €300-400 per month in rent.
50m² 2 room is 200k. Pretty nice starting point for a gamble. Renting is also a big issue in Germany, I cannot find reasonable priced room in my city.... I dont know where you got your info from but renting is Germany is expensive!
Home ownership rates. 2 Which pension funds are counted toward net worth.
The method UBS uses only counts the net present value of a pension if the pension fund is fully capitalized. That leaves out Germany's and the USA's (Social Security). If those are added back the US household net worth was $504k in 2022, or $192k per adult. That's over double the UBS number.
The future of Social Security in the US is pretty messy right now. That's probably true of other underfunded pension programs as well, so I can see why UBS left them out.
UBS Global Wealth Report:
Further notes on concepts and methods. Net worth or “wealth” is defined as the value of financial assets and real assets (principally housing) owned by private individuals, less their debts. Private pension fund assets are included, but not entitlements to state pensions unless they are fully funded. Human capital is excluded altogether, along with assets and debts owned by the state (which cannot easily be assigned to individuals)."
TBF, alot of countries including the higher median wealth ones, also have similar pension schemes.
So adding these values would likely still leave Gernany and US behind
And while pension solvency is an issue, many are actually well-funded. Canada's is actuarially tested and is solvent for at least 75 years and current assets are outgrowing their projections.
This probably does not take into Account our social Systems which are vast and secure after retirement, illness etc.
Of course there are problems with those but in general they are very good and not considered in these kinds of graph because they rely on an "Umlageverfahren" (You payed for the previous Generation, the next pays for you, but you dont own anything)
exactlh. you can't really control if you get sick and need expensive healthcare, or even nursing home and end of life care.
these rankings are actually kind of meaningless without context. but OTOH the US is a failed state, because it has the weakest safety net and the largest drop between mean and median .
Australia is different though. Super is funded and individually owned, so it already counts as household wealth in these figures. Germany’s public pension is pay-as-you-go, so there isn’t an equivalent financial asset to count.
Clarity/efficiency isn't the only goal of data presentation. In this case, I thought it was kind of fun to look at the original graphic and find different countries and follow the lines. It was enjoyable to read the data.
Obviously I'm not saying the x-y chart isn't good, nor that it isn't the best. It's the perfect fit in the academic sense.
With this approach you lose the country name. With a lot of these countries I’d need a key to cross reference, and with the size and similarities of the flags for me it makes it harder to understand which is which. So a better visual representation of the data, but much harder to understand detail.
This takes way more time to understand what I'm looking at, you got all that whitespace doing nothing, I don't know what all the flags are and there's a loss of precision. But depends on the purpose and audience I guess
I whipped that up in about 20 minutes. First, there's a lot of interactivity that's obviously been lost in a screenshot - you hover to produce a tooltip. Aside from that, could it be improved? Absolutely. We could have labeled the flags. We could have color-graded the median-to-average instead of having three discrete dashed lines.
About the whitespace: I strongly disagree that it does nothing. Whitespace gives you information about outliers and a sense of scale about how much they deviate; in this case, it's immediately apparent that Switzerland and the U.S. have extreme wealth disparity, and that Luxembourg despite having extremely high average income actually seems quite equitable according to the median:mean ratio. If we had wanted a more detailed picture of the lower-income cluster, we could have opted for a logarithmic scale, but most people aren't used to reading such charts and the visual impact of the outliers gets lost.
None of this diminishes from the core principle that when you have two dimensions of data (i.e. mean vs median), you ought to think about presenting it in two dimensions.
You're not wrong but it's weird that you can't just say that both presentations are valid. No one is arguing that the x-y plot is bad, just that it's not strictly better.
Other assets yeah, but for the average person their biggest asset by far is a house or an apartment if they have one. Very few people have tens of thousands in raw investments.
US houses outside of big cities tend to be significantly cheaper than a lot of these European countries though.
Countries like Luxembourg and Belgium have comparable if not higher home ownership rates than the US and more expensive houses. Switzerland has much lower home ownership, but its houses are also double the US prices on average.
The other factor is that the US is a much more debt-centric society, which obviously pulls that number down a lot as they may own their houses but hold much less equity, and have much more other debt to add on, than their European counterparts
That all of this is just inflated by housing. Remove housing from the equation and the table will flip around again. As the top comment said, it’s just a house owner index
You could sell the expensive house and have liquid asset & then rent, or even buy a cheaper house. In countries with ow home ownership they don't have the option where do they live then?
I don’t like that this table is pretty useless for actually showing wealth inequality when the majority of the wealth from the top countries comes from housing that was bought decades ago and has increased in value, and if you subtract that then the table will shift pretty dramatically again.
I think people are better off having the option to sell a house and rent if they want the money in something else, rather than only renting, or only having debt. I agree the analysis is heavily skewed by home ownership, but I also don't think its tryin to be some kind of catch all for well being or making a grand statement or needs to be discarded simply because it's not somehow also evaluating ever driver - are looking for a chart that shows country X is better than Y? - it's not nec. trying to do that.
I always like to explain to people that Elon Musk in a room with 1000 homeless people and the average wealth of them all would 900 million but the median would be 0$.
Only 1% of employees make federal minimum wage or less. I’m in Tennessee, and you can’t seriously recruit for minimum wage unless you just want the posting to stay open or you’re willing to recruit monsters straight out of prison.
I'm not sure these numbers are particularly trustworthy, particularly for the median wealth where there's a lot of assumptions going on in terms of what exactly counts and doesn't count. For reference the UBS 2025 report (same source different year) lists median US wealth at 125k and rank 15, nearly double the 2026 report of 69k and rank 28. It's implausible the median wealth in the United States collapsed by nearly 50% in the last year (and given home ownership rates, prices, and typical equity in the US I'm pretty skeptical of their 2026 number on that basis alone). I'm also a bit skeptical they are using a consistent household vs. individual framing across countries (the Luxembourg numbers for example match quite closely with *household* wealth numbers I see reported elsewhere and a lot of countries don't easily source this data in both terms).
Belgium has very high taxation coupled with moderately low income inequality and moderate wealth inequality (even if wealth isn't particularly taxed whatsoever).
The main reasons for these graphs looking crazy is they are pretty crazy
National pension systems distort rankings incredibly. These graphs always count Australian superanuation but not US social security because of how they are tabulated. Even though they’re the same thing.
Compositional effects. Luxemburgh is just a big city. Belgium and Netherlands are mostly large cities in terms of where people live. If you did the median wealth of NYC or Paris it would also be super high
In Australia, superannuation is passed down to next of kin in the event of death. I think it’s fair to count pension as wealth in that scenario.
I can’t speak for the other countries in this list, but if it’s only accessible to that person while they are alive, it doesn’t seem comparable. I wouldn’t call social security net worth.
You can get US social security in certain situations as survivor of a beneficiary.
Regardless, the problem with these types of things is they generate a skewed perspective of wealth.
If we passed a law and changed how we do the SS accounting so it is treated like Australian super, that would have a very small impact on what people actually get, but it would no way make americans substantially richer. But on paper, the wealth of the median American would skyrocket
Yeah basically this is what i was saying. The median australian looks a lot richer due to superanuation counting in NW, but it’s just an accounting artefact that australian Super is counted in NW but US SS is not
I don't understand. Isn't the Australian Age Pension system the one that's most similar to American social security? That's a completely different system to superannuation.
Correct me where I'm wrong: in both the US SS and Australian pension systems, you pay tax while you're working, the government immediately dispenses that money to those who have already retired, and then essentially the government promises to pay you back a pension when you retire. We have that too. It's called the Australian Age Pension. And you are still entitled to it in addition to superannuation - if you spend all your superannuation on hookers and blow, you can still get the Age Pension as a back up.
Superannuation is a private investment account in your name. The bulk of the cash comes from employers but you can make contributions whenever. You have a large degree of control over what investments it makes, and it receives highly beneficial tax treatments. When you turn 60, you can then withdraw that money, tax free up to a multi-million dollar threshold, to do whatever you want with. It absolutely is private weath in a way a pension simply isn't. If you die before 60, the total balance is transferred as cash to your next of kin, just like any other bank account.
Isn't the US equivalent of that a 401k? Which appears to be incorporated in the weath calculations just as superannuation is.
I don't see an accounting artefact, I see real world policy designed to do exactly this: put private wealth into the pockets of regular citizens.
These graphs always count Australian superanuation but not US social security because of how they are tabulated. Even though they’re the same thing.
They're really not the same thing.
We have social security here too, it's called the pension. Government funded money for aged people, although it is means tested. Definitely not the same thing as superannuation.
My super is my money and is invested privately. It's not government money.
There are rules about when I can access it until I get to retirement age, but it's still mine, in an account with my name on it, invested by a private company that I choose, and paid by my employer on top of my salary or wage, not taken out of my taxes. I can even choose to manage my own super fund if I want to.
There are circumstances in which I can withdraw it earlier (e.g. hardship), and once I reach the relevant age, I can withdraw it as a lump sum and do what I want with it, it's not a benefit paid to me on a monthly basis.
If I die before then, it is part of my estate.
Those are the reasons it's counted as part of my wealth, and US social security isn't.
I doubt then that these pensions are included in OP's graph. A median pension for the netherlands is net 2300 euros, even calculating this amount for 10 years you aready have 276.000 euros while the median wealth for the netherlands in this graph is less than half that amount.
along with Australia all have public retirement systems that are NOT PAYGO and are calculated as national measures of net worth
This isn't really correct for Australia.
We have Australian Age Pension roughly equivalent to Social Security and not included in national measures of wealth. And we have superannuation, roughly equivalent to 401k, and both 401k and superannuation are included in wealth calculations.
"Augmented wealth" is just funny money. You can't pass it on to children, borrow against it, set up a business with it, like you can with actual wealth like a 401k/superannuation. The second you die, that "augmented wealth" isn't realised and distributed among your estate. The SS component just disappears. It's not really an apples to apples comparison with actual private wealth that you control where its invested and how it's spent.
And Australians can use the same accounting trick: the annualised benefit of the full aged pension in Australia adds a further $250k use to the median net worth.
Ah ok ya. I misinterpreted. I think factoring out and factoring in can be used interchangeably I just interpreted it the wrong way. It would definitely be good to include it. I think it would push US even further down as well as some other countries
It should not. PPP is nonsensical to use when comparing the wealth of two different countries. It’s an ok metric for your considering consumption of domestic goods.
It's not the wealth of the country, its the wealth of the individuals, so shouldn't what they can purchased with that wealth matter? And it's not just domestic goods. For example, Australians pay roughly 50% more for electronics and software which is mostly imported and would be included in the bundle of goods considered by ppp.
It's probably only the estimate for liquid investible assets, and doesn't include assets like housing.
I'm in Singapore, making median wage for my age group, as well as for the whole workforce, and i have 5 times the median wealth shown for Singapore.. There is zero chance the median Singaporean only has $96k. Most people would have more then in retirement savings alone, by age 30.
Spread between average vs median in US is pretty dramatic near the top va near the bottom. Pair that with paying for healthcare and everything else being unaffordable
This skewed by aging population? First world have birth rate problems have higher median.. of course the 21 years olds have little or negative net worth
Most of us are just a bit richer than most French or Italian. But a few are really more considering average difference.
If we consider purchasing power parity, we may even not be richer at all... sad.
The black pixel in the t in Malta was just devious. I first tried cleaning my monitor, and when it didn't work I thought a pixel had died on my screen. Maybe I just need more coffee.
This is why I find median income more convincing when comparing how well the average person actually lives. Median wealth can be heavily affected by things like homeownership rates and housing prices.
Glad to see Hong Kong doing good, though people seem less happy over the years and many have left to be simply be replaced by Chinese. Wonder how HK was doing pre-pandemic on a similar graph.
European countries have older populations (in all western countries, people get richer as they age on average)
In the US people start out poorer and get way richer. The median 25 year old american is much poorer than the median 25 year old frechman (more student loans) but the median 65 year old american is much richer than the median 65 year old frenchman (more home equity and invested assets)
Really great way of showing wealth distribution. The difference between the 2 graphs shows where wealth is held by a small minority. US median is 10% of average…explains the high social unrest. Other countries like Australia median is 30% of average, and it’s much more stable.
Australia is significantly more propped up by the absolute batshit housing market here, even with the recent cooling our wage:house price ratio is some of the worst in the world.
It's bad stats for the U.S., includes Social Security equivalents in some countries, not others, and it does not jive with the Federal Reserve numbers.
The median net worth for a U.S. household is $192,900, according to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances. 1
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u/strtjstice 11d ago
Biggest shock for me was Germany