You can drive through a comfortable neighborhood and have no idea which families own their lives and which ones are financially stretched. The house looks the same either way. So do the cars in the driveway and the beach photos from spring break.
But while one family might own all of it outright, the next could be borrowing against next year to keep pace.
A family’s financial situation is one of the few things you can’t read from the street, though plenty of us keep trying. That gap, between what money looks like and what money is, came to mind when I saw a popular Empower Survey had started making the rounds again.
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In the 2024 study, Gen Z said it takes about $587,800 a year to feel financially successful. Boomers put the figure just under $100,000. Gen X and millennials landed in between, somewhere in the $180,000 to $212,000 range. The average across every adult surveyed came to roughly $270,000.
Here’s the head-scratcher: The same survey put the net worth Gen Z believes it needs at about $9.5 million.
The number is easy to laugh at and easy to scold. A 25-year-old naming a figure that high can sound out of touch. The conversation worth having sits underneath the headline, and it’s about what a healthy relationship with money looks like and how one generation hands that down to the next.
The ground has moved, so where do you start?
Some of what Gen Z is reacting to is legitimate. I acknowledge that housing and education cost dramatically more than they did a generation ago, and comparing raw dollar figures across age groups without accounting for that isn’t a fair fight.
A boomer answering this survey came up in a different economy than a Gen Zer entering the workforce today. Before we write the number off, it’s worth noting that the ground under young people has moved and expectations may also have shifted.
Financial success has never required the premium version of everything, though. You can have almost anything you want.
However, you probably can’t have the best house, the best car, the best vacation and the best of everything else at the same time. The freedom is in choosing. Pick the few things that matter most to you and be content being ordinary about the rest.
We also make personal finance more complicated than it needs to be. What I aim for is simple and low friction. Aim to save 20% of your net income and automatically allocate into the right places, like a Roth or taxable investment account.
The specific mix depends on the situation, but the automating is the part that does the quiet heavy lifting. It’s hard to miss what you don’t see.
Once that habit is running, the rest of your income covers what you need and want without second-guessing every dollar. This setup allows you to spend without crunching numbers and without regret.
When a target turns into a trap
Let’s put some numbers on it. A household taking home $200,000 after taxes and saving a fifth of it sets aside $40,000 a year, about $3,333 a month, before that cash is ever in reach to spend.
Setting up automatic payments on your accounts so they coincide with your pay date is a quick hack.
Over a decade, that’s $400,000 in contributions alone, with whatever it earns stacked on top. That’s why a target like $587,800 is such a trap. It turns a private thing into a public scoreboard and invites you to measure your life against a driveway.
As income rises, a bigger paycheck mostly buys a bigger version of the same choice, and the trap tightens as the numbers grow. The bigger house, bigger car, bigger vacation… This is lifestyle creep.
Treat a figure like $587,800 as the bar, and you can spend a whole career earning well and spending to match, only to push the freedom you were after further down the road.
The families I see with the most freedom are the ones who decided early what enough looked like and let the rest keep working in the background.
Money is doing its job when it buys time, presence and choice. I want to take the trip with my school-age daughters while they’re still young, and to sit through a game or a dinner without half my mind on work.
Building the accounts that pay for those moments is my job, and I take it seriously. The moment itself is what I am building toward.