Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning & Progress Study: Half of American Millionaires Think Their Financial Planning Needs Work Quick Read – Nearly half of American millionaires (49%) say their financial planning needs improvement despite 79% describing their wealth as self-made,…
vealing a confidence gap between net worth and security that widens when millionaires lack financial advisors. – Millionaires are stress-testing plans against persistent inflation (CPI at 330.213 in April 2026), lower savings yields from Fed rate cuts to 3.75%, and shifting legacy priorities away from inheritance toward funding longer retirements and healthcare costs. – The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks. Get them here FREE
Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning & Progress Study reveals that nearly half of American millionaires (49%) say their financial planning needs improvement, and only 36% describe themselves as wealthy. People who reached seven figures are reassessing their plans and finding them inadequate. The reality: if a million dollars does not feel like enough, the rest of the country has every right to ask what “on track” actually means in 2026.
The confidence gap The Northwestern Mutual data describes people who saved, invested, and ran the math themselves. The big takeaway is that 79% of American millionaires describe their net worth as self-made, compared with only 12% who inherited it and the 5% who got it through a windfall. Roughly one in two still rate their own plan as inadequate, a gap that sits between net worth and confidence.