What 58,406 Report Cards Say About the Clients You're Not Meeting
Savology graded the finances of 58,406 households, every one scored the same way across retirement readiness, emergency savings, insurance, debt, net worth, credit, and estate planning. We published the full results in The State of Household Finances. This is the advisor’s cut: what the data says about the households who are not in your book yet.
One framing note before the numbers. These households selected themselves — they went looking for a free financial report card, which probably makes them more engaged than the average American household, not less. Read everything below as a best case.
The average is a B−, and the average is a lie
The typical household in this data earns an overall B−, and only one in ten scores below a C overall. If you stopped there, you would conclude the mass market is doing fine without you.
Break the grade into subjects and the picture inverts. Nine of the ten subjects land between a C and a B+. The tenth is estate planning, which averages a D+ — the only subject where the typical household fails to reach a C. More than half of these households — 53.3%, or 31,153 of them — hold none of the seven basic estate documents, despite owning a home, being married, or having children.
That shape is the whole opportunity. Households look fine in aggregate and are failing in specific, fixable places — places a statement never shows them, and places an advisor can address in one working session.
The subjects nobody mails a statement about
The pattern under the grades is almost embarrassingly clean. The strongest subjects — debt (B+), income (B+), credit (B+) — are the ones where an institution already keeps score and mails the household a number every month. The weakest — estate planning, net worth, retirement readiness — are the ones nobody measures for them.
Households are good at the parts of their financial life that other people track, and weak at the parts nobody tracks. Advice, at its core, is the business of tracking what nobody else tracks. The data says demand for that is structural.
Higher income does not mean prepared
Two findings worth keeping for the next prospect who says they make too much to need help:
- The households least likely to hold any estate documents earn between $100,000 and $150,000 — 60.0% have none at all.
- 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 being replaced, and earning more raises the bar as fast as it raises the savings.
Income qualifies a household for your minimums. It does not disqualify them from needing you.
What this means for a practice
Every finding above is visible in an individual household’s report card in about three minutes, before your first meeting. That is the practical point of this research: the gaps are common, specific, and diagnosable in advance — which means first meetings can start at the diagnosis instead of the interview.
The full report, with the age curves, the document-by-document breakdown, and the methodology, is free to read and free to cite.
Source for all figures: Savology, The State of Household Finances 2026 — 58,406 households, platform data as of August 2026.