As part of our recent focus on wealth, our previous column, “Millennials Are the Future, But Boomers Are Today,” addressed where household income and wealth currently reside among upscale consumers. For the first time, we also included mass-market consumers in order to provide affluent marketers with a benchmark of the rest of America, which is often a target market. While Millennials continue to be a hot marketing topic, our latest column indicated that total spending power in aggregate is still with the Boomers when share of total net worth and share of total household income are considered by generation. This led a number of readers to question whether or not the Boomers have the highest spending power on average of all the generations we track. In that regard, we're nowaddressing this specific question by focusing on the Gen Xers among upscale consumers and, again, among mass-market consumers to provide context. Gen Xers are the generation affluent marketers cannot afford to ignore based on their numbers, their average household income, and their average net worth. Following are estimated indices for American adults by their generation for their average household incomes and average personal net worths. The Bureau of the Census is the source for average household incomes, and our ongoing survey for average personal net worths. The estimated number of adults in each generation, based on Census statistics, follows the generation's name. Average Household Average PersonalGeneration (size) Income Index Net Worth IndexAll Adults (236.9 million) 100 100 Millennials (67.9 million) 94 75 Gen-X (60.4 million) 118 113 Baby Boomers (74.9 million) 99 108 Seniors (33.7 million) 62 112 Notably, the 60 million Gen Xers, who now range in age from 34 to 48, are the second-largest generation, constituting 25% of all U.S. adults 18 or older, and are ranked #1 by far for their average household incomes (which many marketers use as one of their targeting metrics) and for their net worths by a very small margin compared with the Seniors. A further look at the Gen X generation reveals the following that marketers cannot afford to ignore, including: