JUNE 2026

AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

The asset-building field exists because of a shared recognition that income and wealth are not the same thing. Helping a family through day-to-day expenses is not the same as positioning it to absorb a shock, take a risk, and build something that lasts. Income matters — no serious philanthropic strategy ignores it — but wealth is what makes progress towards financial security durable. What we have lacked is not that recognition, but rather a definition: a shared way to answer how much wealth is enough, and enough for what.

On June 11, the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program (Aspen FSP) walked AFN members through its new essential wealth metric, developed over the past year in partnership with funders, researchers, and wealth-building leaders. The session was a members-only convening, but the questions it raised are relevant to the whole field, and we want to share what stood out and why it matters now.

Why Wealth, and Why Now?

Over the past 25 years, the value of assets that build wealth has appreciated faster than the paychecks used to fund them. Aspen FSP’s analysis finds that, after inflation, U.S. home prices have risen roughly 60% and stock values approximately 200%, while real median household income has grown only about 15%. Wealth compounds while wages do not, so income gains alone cannot close that gap, meaning that families without appreciating assets continue to fall further behind, while those who already own homes and retirement accounts pull ahead.

None of this makes wealth the end goal, as people rarely want wealth for its own sake. When asked what a good life means, Americans chiefly cite freedom of choice in how they live, a stable family, a home, and a secure retirement; only about one in ten say becoming wealthy is essential. What people want is what wealth makes possible. Wealth is best understood not as an end but as a mechanism, one capable of providing seed capital, a buffer against setbacks, and the means to invest in a home or education.

The most consistent way that mechanism gets built is through ownership: employee ownership, homeownership, community-owned real estate, and access to capital markets. And that ownership is not only financial; it is about having a stake, a voice, and the power to shape one’s own economic life. When ownership is widespread, the economy can empower more people. The question then becomes not whether to enable more ownership and wealth building for more people, but how much wealth each household needs to be financially secure and thrive.

A Metric for “Enough”

Aspen FSP’s new essential wealth metric is designed to provide an answer to that fundamental question. As Aspen FSP’s Genevieve Melford put it, “We don’t have a clear shared definition and a metric and way to measure what enough wealth looks like.” The wealth-building field has developed strong measures of income sufficiency, such as the supplemental poverty measure and living-wage standards, but no equivalents for measuring wealth.

Melford offered the income poverty rate as an analogy for the essential wealth metric. Imperfect as it is, the income poverty rate makes a deficit visible, names what success looks like, and creates shared accountability that becomes embedded in how programs, budgets, and policy are evaluated. The essential wealth metric is built to do the same for wealth: Melford calls it “a standard that really makes the wealth deficit visible, names what sufficiency is, names a target, and lets us hold ourselves accountable for progress.”

Rather than asking whether households are merely staying above water financially, the essential wealth metric measures whether they have enough wealth to serve three functions at once:

  • Resilience. Can a family weather a shock such as a medical bill or job loss without being knocked off track?
  • Prosperity. Can they afford the major assets and investments that build durable, long-term security?
  • Well-being. Do they have genuine peace of mind and the freedom to make choices about how to live, such as moving to a new city for a new job?

Several design choices make the metric practical for funders: It is age-adjusted, since the wealth a person needs at 25 differs from what they need at 55. It is geographically flexible and calibrated to local costs, a feature shaped by prototyping the metric in Colorado with the team at Gary Community Ventures. It builds on existing tools such as asset poverty and liquid-savings benchmarks rather than replacing them. And it is not pass/fail: it marks milestones along the path to true wealth building, from asset poverty to emergent wealth (a foundation for resilience plus one appreciating asset) to essential wealth (the wealth needed to thrive).

The two higher milestones capture the difference between getting by and getting ahead. A household at an emergent wealth level has a foundation for resilience — roughly $2,000 in liquid savings (about the cost of one typical financial shock) — along with the means to purchase or hold a single appreciating asset (either a home or a robust retirement savings nest egg, but not both).

A household at an essential wealth level has more of a cushion — on the order of six weeks of take-home pay — and enough of a net worth to hold multiple appreciating assets (though the metric is pegged to the cost of those assets rather than the actual ownership of them). For comparison, a young household at an emergent wealth level could manage about a 3.5% down payment on a median-priced home, while one at essential wealth could manage roughly 10%.

The Picture It Reveals

Because the essential wealth metric attempts to measure the true level of wealth needed to experience its benefits rather than the current distribution of wealth in the United States, it shows how by how much most households fall short of having even essential wealth:

  • About 26% have essential wealth.
  • About 17% have emergent wealth.
  • The largest segment, 43%, sit above the asset-poverty line but below the level of emergent wealth (note: this is likely a population many funders serve directly).
  • And 14%, more than 18 million households, are in asset poverty.

Roughly three-quarters of American households have not reached the level of essential wealth, an issue that persists across every age group. Young adults have the highest rate of asset poverty, with about one in three living at that level. While the situation improves somewhat for many with age, older generations also struggle to reach the essential wealth threshold. As Melford noted, the consistency of that gap across generations points to “structural barriers, not individual behaviors.” That is why she described the challenge as a systems problem rather than a last-mile one, and why the potential to improve the situation is significant. By Aspen FSP’s analysis, moving just half of Black households to the emergent threshold would close the racial wealth gap by more than half. By utilizing this new shared metric, such a goal becomes one that the wealth-building field can set and track.

Where Philanthropy Can Lead

The essential wealth metric may not lead any single organization to redesign its strategy — at least not initially — but it offers a framework that can be used to create shared targets and speak a common language. Here are three ways funders can be early adopters and put the metric to work:

  1. Make the case. Families need both income and wealth to be economically secure. Population-level evidence makes America’s wealth deficit visible, allows for the creation of goals, and can be adjusted for the geographies a funder cares about.
  2. Scope and design solutions. The essential wealth metric’s milestone structure shows where a target population sits on a defined scale, allowing funders to set concrete targets, such as moving 30% of a portfolio from working with those in asset poverty to those at the emergent wealth level, and to test interventions against them.
  3. Track impact. Applied to national datasets, program data, or new local surveys, the essential wealth metric allows the wealth-building field to hold itself accountable over time.

Crucially, the essential wealth metric provides data and insights beyond individual programs. Closing America’s growing wealth gap requires systems-level design that shifts wealth building from an opt-in to a default, creating population-level opportunity rather than one-household-at-a-time progress. As Aspen FSP noted, solutions can take many forms, and progress will require pulling several levers at once: boosting cash flow, reducing debt, removing penalties such as asset limits, and creating onramps to ownership. The opportunity exists to treat wealth for individuals and families not as something extra or something to be obtained far down the road, but as the input that has been missing from the economic-mobility equation all along.

To learn how your organization can become an early adopter of the new essential wealth metric, please reach out to AFN and Aspen FSP. We also invite you to register for the 2026 AFN National Conference in Philadelphia, October 6-8, and to sign up for the Wealth and Ownership breakfast, where this work will take center stage.