About How Poor Am I?

How Poor Am I? is a free tool that makes wealth inequality tangible. Instead of abstract Gini coefficients and quintile tables, it shows you exactly where you stand in your country's wealth distribution. And how long it would take you to match the fortune of a billionaire. The goal is simple: turn dry economic data into something you can feel.

How It Works

The tool has two modes:

  • Wealth Percentile — Enter your net wealth (or income with optional refinement factors) and see which percentile you fall into within your country's wealth distribution.
  • Billionaire Comparison — See how many years, lifetimes, or entire historical eras it would take to earn as much as the wealthiest person in your country.

Data Sources

All calculations are grounded in peer-reviewed or institutionally maintained datasets:

  • WID.world — Wealth shares by percentile group (Distributional National Accounts)
  • OECD — Economic indicators and household statistics
  • SWIID — Standardized World Income Inequality Database (Gini coefficients)
  • Forbes — Real-Time Billionaires list

Open Source

The entire codebase is open source under the MIT License. You can inspect the data processing, suggest improvements, or run your own instance. Find the repository on GitHub.

Privacy

All computation happens entirely in your browser. Your income, wealth, and personal details are never sent to any server. There is no tracking, no analytics, and no cookies.

Support this project

How Poor Am I? is free, open-source, and ad-free. Maintaining the data pipeline, adding new countries, and keeping translations fresh takes real time. If the site has helped you understand inequality better, a small contribution keeps the site running and free for everyone.

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Further reading

If the site sparked your curiosity, the books that informed it are the deeper read. Piketty, Saez & Zucman, Wilkinson, Milanović, and others. We've curated the canonical titles into a list at Bookshop.org, which sends a portion of every sale to independent bookstores.

Browse the reading list

Affiliate links. Purchases also help support this project.