Top of the "class"

While reading through the archives of the "It's Your Money:Money Musings" blog, I came across this post about class, which relates to an online "class calculator" tool available here from the New York Times. Although it's obviously US-based, the results should be applicable for Australian readers also - although, of course, we Aussies don't have any such thing as a "class system" ;)

Money Musings found his "class" came out as:

  Occupation: 49th Percentile
  Education: 79th Percentile
  Income: 78th Percentile
  Wealth: 55th Percentile
  AVERAGE: 64th Percentile

When I tried it I got:

  Occupation: 81st Percentile
  Education: 97th Percentile
  Income: 91st Percentile
  Wealth: 93rd Percentile
  AVERAGE: 90th Percentile

Which seems pretty much spot on - one of my short term goals is to have a personal net worth that exceeds the 90th percentile household net worth for my age group (using data from the most recent HILDA survey), and, eventually, to exceed 1% of the cut-off the the annual BRW Rich 200 list.

One thing I noticed is that you can influence the outcome by picking the best description of your occupation - as a Chartered Chemist I can hit the 81st Occupation percentile using the "chemists and material scientists" grouping, but if I put in my current occupation (Process Improvement Manager="other business operations specialists") I only rate the 49th percentile!

Another thing to note is that there is no adjustment made for age. As Money Musings says, it is"Difficult to compare the net worth of a 50something with that of a 30something..."