We're Rich! er' than Ever...

American's a really great at making money. We are the most efficient nation on the planet in turning an hour into productivity that leads to income. In that respect time is money, and therefore money is time. When we work for money we can spend it (on goods or services), we can use it to repay debt (money we borrowed for goods or services) or we can save it (to spend on good or services) in the future. Ultimately assets are stored time.

We have a lot of money (time) stored. Below we can view the composite consumer balance sheet in 'relative scale' - Total Asset as compared to the Total Liabilities.

There is $167.9 Trillion in assets on our balance sheet - that's about double what we had the peak of the 2007 period. We have about $18.6 Trillion in total liabilities on our balance sheet. In that regard we are pretty healthy as a composite, but we also know wealth is not distributed very evenly in our country.

Homes (the house) is 26% of the total wealth of the US consumer. It's the largest single asset class, as 'all other financial assets' combined make up 41%.

Liabilities are 'only' 11% of the total assets. You can see that easily on this scale. The only real meaningful liability is the mortgage, which makes up 66% of all liabilities.

Your personal consumer balance sheet is likely to have the house as your largest asset and the mortgage as your largest liability. The net wealth you have is the amount of stored 'time' you have accumulated if you wanted to stop working (which is one way we convert our time into money).

Tip: Divide your monthly expenses for necessary goods and services into your total savings. If your monthly expenses are $5,000 and your savings is $500,000: $500,000 / $5,000 = 100 (months). You have stored 100 months of time in the form of money before you'd need to start converting your time back into money.