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Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: this page lists the headline facts Clear Money Guide has computed or verified, each with a stable anchor, its primary source and its data vintage, written so a single sentence can be lifted and still stand up. 11 facts, and 3 things we deliberately do not claim, which are listed too.
The facts
| Fact | Where / vintage | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Between 88.0% and 93.7% of US households hold less than $750,000 — the median account minimum among advice firms that publish one. | anchor 2022 (SCF); minimums retrieved 2026 | CMG computation Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 Summary Extract microdata; Clear Money Guide advisor-minimums benchmark (176 firms, 28 stating a firm-wide minimum) |
| Among financial advice firms that publish a firm-wide account minimum, the median is $750,000; 28 of 176 firms with adjudicated account requirements publish one. ⚠ The population is firms that publish a firm-wide minimum — not ‘RIAs’. 148 of the 176 publish none, and what they do for small households is not established. | anchor 2026 | CMG computation Form ADV Part 2A disclosures |
| Medicare does not pay for long-term care. It covers up to 100 days of skilled nursing per benefit period after a 3-day qualifying inpatient hospital stay — $0 a day for days 1–20 after the $1,736 deductible, $217 a day for days 21–100, and all costs thereafter. Provenance File verdict: FALSE | anchor 2026 figures, read 2026-08-07 | quoted source medicare.gov — Long-term care; medicare.gov — Skilled nursing facility (SNF) care |
| Households headed by someone 65–74 spend 76.9% of what 55–64 households spend, but only 53.8% of what they earn. The ‘80% of pre-retirement income’ rule is approximately right against pre-retirement SPENDING and overshoots by more than 26 points against pre-retirement INCOME. Provenance File verdict: MUTATED ⚠ Cross-sectional age groups in one year, not the same households followed over time; CES Table 1300 publishes means. | anchor 2024 | quoted source BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 1300, 2024 |
| The gap in life expectancy at birth is 5.3 years (75.8 for men, 81.1 for women). Among those who reach 65 the gap in remaining years is 2.5 (18.2 versus 20.7), narrowing to 1.7 at 75 and 0.9 at 85. Provenance File verdict: MUTATED ⚠ Period life tables are a snapshot of current mortality, not a cohort forecast — NCHS states this itself. | anchor 2023 | quoted source NCHS, United States Life Tables, 2023 (NVSR 74-6) |
| CDC’s 2023 marriage rate and divorce rate do not share a denominator: marriages are divided by a population of 334,914,895 and divorces by 279,800,079, because five states — California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota and New Mexico — do not report divorces. Census cohort data puts the share of ever-married adults who have ever divorced at 34% of women and 33% of men. Provenance File verdict: MUTATED | anchor 2023 (CDC); 2016 data published 2021 (Census) | CMG computation CDC/NCHS national marriage and divorce rate trends, 2000–2023; US Census Bureau, Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 2016 (P70-167) |
| Of the 2,663 taxable estate tax returns filed in 2024, 362 reported any farm assets, and farm assets were 2.26% of taxable estate value. Publicly traded stock was 33.27%; farm assets and closely held stock together were 13.12%. Provenance File verdict: FALSE | anchor filing year 2024 | quoted source IRS Statistics of Income, Estate Tax Returns Study, July 2026 (Table 1, filing year 2024) |
| Vanguard’s 2025 average account balance was $167,970 and its median $44,115, across roughly 5 million participants in Vanguard-recordkept plans — not a national figure. The Federal Reserve puts the median retirement-account holding at $87,000 among the 54.3% of US families that hold one at all. Provenance File verdict: MUTATED ⚠ Recordkeeper averages describe their own book. 45.7% of US families hold no retirement account and cannot appear in one. | anchor 2025 (Vanguard); 2022 (SCF) | quoted source Vanguard, How America Saves 2026; Federal Reserve, 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, Table 6 |
| In 2026 the standard Medicare Part B premium is $202.90 a month with a $283 annual deductible, and the Part A hospital deductible is $1,736 per benefit period — not per year, so a household can pay it more than once in twelve months. Original Medicare has no annual out-of-pocket maximum without supplemental coverage. | anchor 2026, read 2026-08-07 | quoted source medicare.gov — Medicare costs |
| The median age at which Americans are widowed is 73, not the widely circulated 59. Only 16.8% of newly-widowed people are 59 or younger. Provenance File verdict: FALSE | anchor 2023 | CMG computation ACS 2023 1-Year PUMS, national person file (20,536 person records representing 1,625,966 people, weighted by PWGTP) |
| 21 of 51 US jurisdictions depart from the NAIC model life-insurance guaranty limit; 30 match. California is the only percentage jurisdiction — 80% coinsurance against a $300,000 cap, so a $300,000 policy is covered to $240,000. | anchor 2026 | CMG computation state guaranty association statutes and NAIC model |
How this list is built
- Every anchor was checked on the rendered page before it was listed. An anchor that does not exist is worse than none, because a citation to it breaks silently.
- Every fact carries its figure, its vintage and its source inside the sentence, so it survives being copied away from this site.
- Where the honest answer is a range, the range is the fact. No midpoint is offered anywhere on this page.
- Facts we computed are labelled as ours. Facts quoted from a publisher are attributed to that publisher. We never blur the two.
What we deliberately do not claim
A list of facts that quietly omits what it could not verify is a worse list than one that says so.
- the average Social Security benefit — ssa.gov is hard-blocked to this toolchain (403 on all nine routes tried on 2026-08-07, including robots.txt and the socialsecurity.gov alias). The only figure available was a secondary citation, and this desk does not republish a second-hand federal statistic as a sourced one.
- the average funeral cost — NFDA publishes a median through a study we could not read; three candidate URLs 404’d. /funeral-cost-statistics/ states that plainly rather than reproducing a figure at second hand, and no verdict is issued because a primary source that exists but is unread supports none.
- the small-estate probate gap — Held on method. A probate estate turns on property titling that the SCF does not capture; at a $50,000 threshold the answer moves between 67.3% and 33.0% on that assumption alone. A 34-point swing is not a bound.
The machine-readable version
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Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to Clear Money Guide. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.
Where these come from
The datasets and studies behind these facts are indexed at the data hub. The verdicts are issued by the Provenance File, whose method is published at how we check money claims.