What Makes Up PFBloggers’ Net Worth? (Part 1)

Since reading Million Dollar Journey’s post comparing the net worth of PFBloggers, I have continued to be curious about what we can see and learn from PFBloggers’ net worth. There are a lot of limitations to net worth. But it’s still interesting to look at. And these are all folks who are blogging about personal finance—with many of them blogging specifically about what they are doing to increase their net worths.

So I gathered a bunch of data, mostly from NetWorthIQ. It wasn’t scientific. I skimmed through all the public net worth profiles. I picked out the ones whose names or handles I happened to recognize as being PFBloggers. And I looked at anyone whose name or handle was fanciful or sounded like it might be the name of a blog. If the profile listed a blog URL, I picked that one out too.

In total, I gathered data from 23 profiles. To that, I added the data from a pretty notable PFBlogger who doesn’t use NetWorthIQ—but who discloses a lot of net-worth data on his blog. And I added in my wife’s and my data. That totals 25 PFBloggers.

To orient you, here is the type of data that is disclosed on NetWorthIQ and what I gathered:

Assets	Debts
Cash Stocks Bonds Annuities Retirement Home Other Real Estate Cars Personal Property Other	Home Mortgage(s) Other Mortgage(s) Student Loans Credit Card Car Loans Other

I believe the data is all self-reported, and it seems likely that some people may have interpreted categories differently or been more or less precise in how they reported information. Also, much of the data was pretty current—February 2008; but several profiles were more from the Fall 2007 timeframe; and a few were older still.

Here were the spreads in this data set:

	Low	High
Age Range	25-29	50-54
Income Range	40-49K	250K+
Net Worth	$23,343	$1,617,988

Now here is the distribution of net worths:

Net Worth	Incl. home	Excl. home
$1,000,000+	4	3
$750,000-999,999	3	1
$500,000-749,999	6	7
$250,000-499,999	6	4
$100,000-249,999	5	8
<$100,000	1	2

So the column “Incl. home” is the PFBlogger’s net worth, as stated in NetWorthIQ or elsewhere. The column “Excl. home” subtracts out the PFBlogger’s equity in his or her primary residence—calculated by taking the value listed for Home (asset) and subtracting out the value listed for Home Mortgage(s) (debt). As you can see, for many folks, home equity was a significant portion of their net worth. Seven profiles had $200,000 or more in home equity; and another five had $100,000-199,999 in home equity.

Overall, 20 of the 25 PFBloggers here owned their home. But only two owned their home outright.

More review of the data will come in the continuation of this post! Hopefully, that will come soon, depending on how my time goes this weekend.

For Part 2 of this post, please click below:
Where’s Their Money—What Makes Up PFBloggers’ Net Worth? (Part 2)

Related Posts
Lessons from the Millionaires — What Makes Up PFBloggers’ Net Worth? (Part 3)

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