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Walter P. Paepcke, Aspen Institute Co-Founder
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  • In Person

Convening on Measuring U.S. Household Essential Wealth

Note: This is a past event, additional resources may be available below.

Sep 23 – 24, 2025

Date

Sep 23 – 24, 2025
5:30pm – 4:30pm EDT

Location

Boston, MA

Contact

    [email protected]

Hosts

  1. Financial Security Program

Wealth provides the resources families need to provide stability today and use as a springboard into greater opportunities tomorrow. It is essential for families’ financial resilience, economic mobility, and well-being, but exactly how much is needed to support those goals?

To begin answering that question, the Convening on Measuring U.S. Household Essential Wealth, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in September 2025, gathered more than 60 leaders—representing academic and think tank researchers, investors, consumer finance leaders, nonprofit service providers, local government leaders, and more—to lay the foundation for greater empirical understanding of how much wealth is “enough” for a U.S. family to thrive.

View the Agenda

Event Goals

The Convening’s presentations and discussions focused on four key goals:

  1. Explore potential strategic and methodological approaches to creating new metrics for essential wealth.
  2. Identify how key parties might use the metrics to better understand how families benefit from having this essential amount of wealth and guide their organizations’ efforts to support wealth building.
  3. Hear from leaders in communities that experience financial hardship about their perspectives on wealth, their financial goals, and what they need to thrive.
  4. Surface potential solutions to the technical challenges involved in developing essential wealth metrics.

Learn more about how Aspen FSP’s insights and evidence-based research helps illuminate the financial realities—and wealth-building opportunities—for U.S. households.

See Our Insights

We are grateful to the following funders for their support of Aspen FSP’s Essential Wealth work: Gary Community Ventures, Prudential Financial, Surdna Foundation, and World Education Services.

Disclaimer

The views represented at this event, including any findings, interpretations, and conclusions, are the participants’ own and do not necessarily represent the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve System, or its Board of Governors; nor those of Aspen FSP’s funders.