What does it really take for a family to get ahead?

By Julie Stone, Director of Family Economic Mobility

We talk a lot about what families need to make ends meet. We talk far less about what they need to actually get ahead.

That distinction has become increasingly important in our work at Gary Community Ventures. 

Wages matter. Families need enough income to pay the bills and cover the rising costs of housing, child care, groceries and health care. But for more and more working Coloradans, wages aren’t keeping up. Wealth has become essential for everyone.

Today, Gary Community Ventures and the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program are releasing the Colorado Essential Wealth Metric, a new benchmark designed to answer a question that has been surprisingly difficult to answer: How much wealth does a family actually need?

The answer isn’t about getting rich. Essential wealth is the level of savings and assets a household needs to weather financial shocks, own assets that grow in value, prepare for the future and have greater choice over time.

This new data on family wealth in Colorado is sobering: Two-thirds of Colorado households do not have essential wealth.

However, there is good reason to be optimistic: more than half of Colorado households have some savings and assets and are already on the wealth-building path.

We hope this new measure invites philanthropists, financial institutions, policymakers and community advocates alike to shape systems that make wealth building more possible at every age and stage of life. Working together, if we double the number of Colorado households with essential wealth in the next decade, it would cut our state’s wealth gap in half.

I hope you’ll read the report, use the metric in your work and join us in imagining what it would take to make Colorado a place where wealth isn’t just for the wealthy.