How big a salary would you need to feel successful? For Gen Z, it’s at least half a mil

Most people don’t think they’re making enough money to consider themselves “financially successful,” but younger people are more likely to set the bar much, much higher. 

A new study from Empower found that the average American thinks making just over $270,000 would make them feel “financially successful.” (The study goes into what that actually means, but you can generally interpret it to mean happy, content, or fulfilled financially.) The sad part is the average American makes just under $60,000, implying that most of us don’t feel particularly satisfied with our paychecks.

Gen Z, the cohort born between 1997 and 2012, has particularly high aspirations: according to this survey, they believe they have to earn almost $600,000 a year to really make it. That’s compared to $180,865 for millennials and $212,321 for Gen Xers. 

Boomers, of course, said they’d be happy making just under $100,000. Expectations about net worth follow the same trend, with boomers happy being at $1 million and Gen Z hoping to reach nearly $10 million.

As a member of Gen Z, let me try to make the case for why we aren’t complete brats.

Many of us came into consciousness around the September 11 terrorist attacks. Then came the 2008 financial crisis in the middle of our childhood; while homes around the country were being foreclosed and Wall Street was bailed out, we sat in the backseat of our parents’ car playing “Pokémon” on our Nintendo DS. Then right as we entered adulthood we were hit with a pandemic with an inflation chaser. Oh, and this whole time, the world has been getting hotter and natural disasters more frequent.

Under those circumstances, it might make a little more sense that when asked, “How much money do you want?” our response is, “I don’t know, man... A lot?”

And even though the study found that most people feel they aren’t close to being financially successful, that doesn’t mean they aren’t optimistic. Besides boomers, every generation reported feeling capable of achieving financial success in their lifetime. They also reported that the most important factor in getting there is “hard work.”