Australians' Loss of Wealth

According to an article in the Australia the Treasury Department says that the average wealth of Australians fell from $A249,000 in 2007 to $A225,000 at the end of 2008. This is described as unprecedented. Well, I can't find any information on Treasury's rather uninformative and unattractive website about this. A Google search reveals that the data is included in the "Modeller's Database" released today by Australian Bureau of Statistics. It appears that the numbers given by the newspaper are "private sector wealth" averaged over Australians of all ages. So I downloaded the population figures from ABS too and came up with some charts. First up is wealth per capita in December 2008 dollars (GDP Implicit Price Deflator):



In real terms, Australians' wealth is at the same level as in late 2003.

While doing the calculations I noticed that from when we arrived in Australia in September 2007 till the end of December prices rose 9.1%. Snork Maiden's salary rose 8.9%. Some of that salary increase was supposedly due to a rise in the pay scale. But we are just keeping up with inflation.

The next chart shows that we were near average wealth levels for Australia in late 2007 but since then have dropped dramatically below the average:



These numbers are not adjusted to inflation. The Moominvalley variable is our net worth divided by two.