Summary
Simplifi does a great job of showing me what my net worth is and how it has changed. What it doesn't show me is what that number actually means. A net worth of $340,000 could be excellent progress or a real shortfall depending entirely on my age, income, household size, and where I live.
I'd like to see a Net Worth Percentile Comparison feature: a view that shows where my net worth falls relative to comparable households, stated plainly as a percentile — "Your net worth is higher than 82% of households like yours" — along with a visualization showing where I sit in the distribution. I'd want to be able to define who I'm being compared to, and to see whether my standing is improving over time.
What I'm Asking For
A percentile figure. One clear headline number telling me what share of comparable households I'm ahead of or behind
Filters to define my comparison group. I'd want to narrow the comparison by:
- Age Bucket
- State
- City or metropolitan area
- ZIP code, where there's enough data to make it meaningful
- Income range
- Household size
- Marital status
Bonus Percentile tracked over time. A simple trend line showing whether I've moved up or down relative to my peers over the past year or several years.
Why This Would Be Valuable
Location changes everything
National averages are close to useless for this purpose. Cost of living, salaries, taxes, and housing markets vary so much across the country that a household in Toledo and a household in San Jose with identical net worth are in completely different financial positions.
More to the point, people don't compare themselves to the nation — they compare themselves to their neighborhood. The neighbors, coworkers, and friends who form my actual mental reference group are almost entirely local. A comparison that ignores geography isn't answering the question I'm really asking. Metro-level and ZIP-level comparisons are what would make this feature genuinely useful rather than just mildly interesting.
Most of us are comparing against incomplete information
A lot of financial anxiety comes from comparison made with almost no real data. I see the renovated kitchen, the new SUV, the vacation photos — and I infer wealth from spending. What I can't see is the balance sheet underneath: the HELOC that paid for the renovation, the 84-month auto loan, the credit card balance.
The result is a widespread and often mistaken sense of falling behind. People make worse financial decisions, or just live with constant low-grade unease, based on a comparison that was never grounded in anything real.
Simplifi is in an unusually good position to fix this, because it already has the accurate version of my side of the equation. Giving me a credible peer distribution to set it against would replace guesswork with something real — and for a lot of users, that's going to mean genuine reassurance that they're doing better than they thought.
It would make progress measurable in a way absolute numbers can't
Net worth growth on its own is easy to misread. If my portfolio rose 8% in a year when comparable households rose 12%, I lost ground — and I'd have no way to know that today. Seeing my percentile move answers the question the current dashboard can't: am I actually gaining relative to people in my situation?
That also makes progress visible during flat or down markets, when absolute net worth is discouraging but relative performance may be fine.
Expected Benefits
- Replaces vague financial anxiety with objective, situation-appropriate context
- Corrects the distortion that comes from comparing balance sheets to lifestyles
- Offers a fairer benchmark than national averages or generic "you should have X times your salary by age Y" rules
- Makes financial progress legible, especially when absolute net worth is flat
- Helps with realistic goal-setting by showing the actual range for comparable households
- Gives users a strong reason to keep every account connected and up to date, since accuracy directly affects the result
Bonus: The Same Comparison for Spending and Income
Net worth is the most useful single number to benchmark, but it's a lagging one. If the same percentile treatment were extended to spending and income, the picture would be considerably more actionable.
Income. Knowing where my household income sits among comparable households — same metro, same age, same household size — is useful in its own right, and it's information most people only ever get through awkward conversation or guesswork. It's also directly actionable in a way net worth isn't: a low income percentile alongside a healthy net worth percentile tells a very different story than the reverse, and points toward a different response.
Spending. This is where I think the biggest insight lives, because it's the piece that explains the gap between what people appear to have and what they actually have. Being able to see that my household spends more on dining out than 90% of comparable households, or less on housing than 70% of them, would turn the abstract question of "am I overspending?" into something concrete. Breaking it down by category — housing, transportation, groceries, dining, travel, subscriptions — would be far more useful than a single total.
Put together, the three comparisons answer a question none of them can answer alone: if my income is around the median for my area but my net worth is well below it, where is the money going? That's the question most people are actually trying to answer, and the spending breakdown is what would let them answer it.
I'd see this as a natural follow-on rather than a requirement for the first version — net worth alone would already be worth having.
