The State of Household Finances
What 58,406 households told us when they graded their own financial lives, and the one subject almost everybody fails.
Free to read and free to cite. By Brian Case, CFP®, Chief Executive Officer, Savology. Source throughout: Savology platform data, August 2026.
Why we published this
Savology grades household finances for a living. People answer a short set of questions and get a report card with letter grades across retirement readiness, emergency savings, insurance, debt, estate planning, and more. We have now done that for more than 100,000 households.
That gives us a view most people never get to see: how ordinary households are doing across every part of their financial lives at the same time, scored the same way every time. This isn't a survey about how people feel about money. These are the numbers underneath.
Why 58,406 and not 100,000
This report covers 58,406 households. The reason is that you can't grade an unfinished report card.
| Stage | Households |
|---|---|
| Created a Savology account | 103,780 |
| Began a report card | 101,835 |
| Completed a report card | 58,443 |
| Included in this report | 58,406 |
A report card needs answers across every subject before it can produce grades. Including partial ones would mean scoring subjects nobody answered.
Roughly 57% of households who start a report card finish it. We would like that number higher, and a shorter version of the survey, about three minutes end to end, is in beta now and will be generally available soon.
What this is, and what it isn't
Everything here describes households who completed a Savology financial report card. That is not a representative sample of American households, and we won't pretend it is.
These are people who went looking for a free financial report card. They select themselves for financial engagement, which probably makes them better prepared than the general population, not worse. Read every number below with that in mind. It makes the weak results more troubling rather than less.
The overall picture looks fine. The average hides everything.
The typical household here earns an overall B−, and only one in ten scores below a C overall. Break that grade into its subjects and the impression falls apart.
Nine of the ten subjects land between a C and a B+. One does not. Estate planning averages a D+, the only subject where the typical household fails to reach a C.
More than half of households have no estate documents at all
The estate planning grade counts documents: a will, a guardianship nomination, a living trust, another trust, a durable power of attorney, an advance healthcare directive, and final disposition instructions. An F means zero of the seven, and the model only assigns it to a household that owns a home, is married, or has children.
31,153 of 58,406 households, or 53.3%, have not one of the seven basic estate documents, despite owning a home, being married, or having children.
Estate planning grades cluster at two ends with nothing in between, and there are no D grades at all. That isn't a data error, it's the scoring model: a single document moves a household from zero to one, so there is no natural middle.
Which documents households actually have
A will reaches about a quarter of households. The two documents that work while you are still alive, a durable power of attorney and an advance healthcare directive, are each held by roughly one household in eight, even though they are usually the simplest and cheapest to complete.
The number we found hardest to look at
28,500 households in this data have children. Among them:
88.1% have not named a guardian.
73.3% have no will.
41.9% have no term life insurance.
A guardianship nomination costs almost nothing and doesn't depend on what you own. Across all households in this data, 7% have one.
It gets worse in your thirties, not better with age
Preparation collapses in the thirties, the decade when households are most likely to have young children and a first mortgage. It improves after that without ever recovering: among households aged 60 and over, one in three still has no estate documents at all.
The least-prepared households are not the poorest ones
Estate planning peaks in the middle. The households least likely to hold any estate documents earn between $100,000 and $150,000, where 60.0% have none. One quirk belongs here: the model grades an unmarried, childless renter with no documents as a C rather than an F, and that group skews lower-income, so the under-$50k figure looks better than it otherwise would. The pattern above $50,000 is unaffected.
Retirement readiness is U-shaped. Households earning $250,000 or more score below a C 51.3% of the time, statistically indistinguishable from the 51.7% of households earning under $50,000. Readiness is measured against the income a household would need to replace, and earning more raises that bar about as fast as it raises the savings.
Insurance is the subject households handle best
| Policy | Households holding it |
|---|---|
| Health insurance | 84.8% |
| Homeowners or renters insurance | 71.9% |
| Term life insurance | 46.5% |
| Disability insurance | 29.3% |
| Umbrella insurance | 12.0% |
| Long-term care insurance | 2.1% |
An employer enrolls you in health coverage. A lender requires homeowners insurance before it will close. Those two sit at the top, and neither was really a decision. Below them the numbers drop off fast, and disability insurance protects the ability to earn that funds everything else.
What happens when households come back
Because we keep the edit history behind each set of answers, the scoring engine can be run backward: reconstruct a household's answers as of any past year and score them the same way. Among the 872 households whose recorded finances changed across those annual re-scorings, 69.2% improved their overall grade and 28.2% declined. Improvers gained 2.58 rating points on average.
| Subject | Average change |
|---|---|
| Estate planning | +2.22 |
| Emergency fund | +2.21 |
| Net worth | +1.79 |
| Credit | +1.09 |
| Retirement readiness | +1.02 |
| Savings rate | +0.06 |
What we can't tell you is whether seeing a report card caused any of this. These 872 households are roughly 1.5% of the population studied and self-selected by definition. Edit history is retained from November 2020. We are showing the direction, not a causal claim.
The pattern underneath all of it
The strongest subjects all send you a statement. Debt, income, credit, and housing arrive monthly with a number attached and a due date. Someone else is already keeping score, so households keep score too.
The weakest subjects are the invisible ones. No institution mails you a monthly update on whether your will still matches your family, whether your net worth moved the right direction, or whether your retirement is on pace.
Households are good at the parts of their financial life that other people measure for them, and weak at the parts nobody measures at all.
Methodology
Population. 58,406 households that completed a Savology financial report card, each represented by its most recent card as of August 1, 2026. Every card used is a live scored result; no modeled or reconstructed values are included in the cross-sectional figures.
Composition. 89.5% came to Savology directly without any organization, 6.6% through a financial advisor, 2.6% through an employer or plan sponsor, and 1.4% through one of Savology's own funnel organizations.
Scoring. Savology's production model on a 60 to 99 scale: A ≥ 99, A− ≥ 90, B+ ≥ 87, B ≥ 84, B− ≥ 81, C+ ≥ 78, C ≥ 75, C− ≥ 72, D+ ≥ 69, D ≥ 66, D− ≥ 63, F below 63.
Limitations. Financial details are self-reported. The population selects itself and is not representative of American households generally. The estate planning result for the lowest income band is affected by the scoring exception described above.
What we deliberately did not conclude. Households that came to us through an advisor score better on every measure here. We are not presenting that as evidence that advice causes better outcomes, because those households are also wealthier and self-selected and this data cannot separate the two effects.
Citing this report
Please do. Savology, The State of Household Finances, August 2026. Media and research enquiries: bcase@savology.com.
Savology provides financial planning tools, education, and advisor introductions. It is not a financial advisor and does not provide investment advice or sell investment products.