Before we examine these issues in more detail, we should explain that there are at least two ways to measure how well you’re doing, financially speaking. One is to look at how much you earn in any given year — your income. The other is to look at how much you would have left over if you sold all your assets and paid all your debts. This is your net worth, or wealth.

You should examine both income and net worth to get a full picture of your financial situation. A recently graduated 30-year-old surgeon may have a high income, but not much net worth — yet. On the other hand, a retired farmer may have only a modest pension income, but an enormous net worth, because of the millions of dollars that his acres of prime farm land would fetch if he chose to sell them to a property developer or the corporate farmer next door.

The paycheque pyramid

The easiest way to start assessing your financial situation is by looking at your income. To give you the most accurate notion of how your paycheque stacks up, we’ve divided Canadians into two groups — those who are single and those who are part of families of two or more people. You would expect families to have higher household incomes than single-person households and so they do. The average unattached person has an income of $37,800. The average family has a household income of $91,500, or 2.4 times more than the unattached individual.

The table below lets you see where you fit on the income ladder. We’ve split people into five equal subgroups based upon their incomes. These subgroups are known as quintiles. Each quintile holds one fifth, or 20%, of the larger group. We put the lowest earners into the first quintile, then the next lowest earners into the second quintile, and so on. You can think of these quintiles as five equally spaced steps up the income ladder.

Looking at the dollar value of each step gives you a sense of what typical paycheques look like at various levels of society. To squeeze into the middle quintile for unattached earners — in other words, to make it nearly halfway up the income ladder, ahead of 40% of your peers — a single person requires an annual income of at least $20,901. To achieve the same status for a family, a husband and wife need combined incomes of at least $59,901.

These relatively low numbers may surprise you, especially if you live in Toronto or Calgary, but they are reality for most of the country. While it’s common to read about about million-dollar executives or multimillion-dollar hockey players, the typical Canadian earns less than a postman. You don’t have to be a CEO, a highly paid athlete, or even a doctor to break into the top tier of income earners. A single bookkeeper who makes $52,000 a year ranks among the top 20% of unattached earners. Two married school teachers who together earn $120,000 a year qualify as a top-quintile family.

Rich man, poor woman If you’re not used to thinking of bookkeepers and teachers as members of Canada’s financial elite, it may be a matter of where you hail from. There are vast differences between provinces. We’ve outlined these differences in the singles scene and the household hierarchy charts below. The tables show the average (not the minimum) earnings for each quintile of society. As you can see, Alberta and Ontario are the highest-earning provinces, while Newfoundland and PEI are the lowest. The average top-quintile family in Alberta earns a joint income of $233,800; the average top-quintile family in PEI makes only $136,300.