ASF members and visitors: A financial overview

We have 175 responses - still trickling in at the rate of one or two per day, but here's what we have:

First, looking at all responses.

A couple of mea culpas

- Q3 was poorly expressed, as the "Other" category was surprisingly popular and I wonder if many respondents considered super to be under "other", whereas super is a tax structure, not an asset allocation. I should have been clearer about that, and perhaps added another question about tax structures.

- Q7 was poorly expressed, as I wasn't clear about realised versus unrealised capital gains, versus non-capital income

That aside, a few preliminary observations:


- As a group, our average age is 42, ranging from 18 to 70. (Due to some surveymonkey quirk, or maybe the way I constructed the question, we don't get a chart for this. If anyone is interested, I'll export the data and get a chart from Excel)

- Of the people with more than 100% gearing on their investments, average portfolio is 50k, most have a mortgage, and interestingly they carry little credit card debt. Perplexingly, they say investment income contributes between 10 and 50% of their income.

- Those with between 50 and 100% gearing are pretty much representative of the whole (nothing distinctive about them)

- Those with no investment debt are also pretty much representative of the whole, except that they have a strong preponderance to carry zero credit card debt, and the group is very much inclusive of our high net worth respondents

(more coming)

Of those who said their investment income was responsible for 75% ore more of their total income (again, I should have been clearer about unrealised capital gains), the following held:



Average age of this group was 50, but there were a handful in the 18-15 range. They would probably explain the very low numbers in the net assets.

Also, I should probably have been clearer about how to consider pension income, as I suspect some people counted it as income and some did not.

Living situation

We had no respondents living in managed accommodation (in hindsight this is probably because anyone living in managed accommodation isn't responding to surveys), but we do have 13% living with parents. Their average age is 26 with plenty below that number, a few in their 30's, and one outlier in his 60's. Half of them work full time and a further 13% work part time. They mostly carry no debt and their portfolio is less than $250k

The multi-millionaires

Those with an investment portfolio valued between $2m and $10m had the following characteristics

VHNWI

We have a couple of outliers in the VHNWI range ($20-50m), and they had the following characteristics

Age of Respondants