Breathing Room Index compares the income, required outflows, housing position, debt, and wealth of U.S. households at similar ages across different periods.
Price inflation, monthly cash pressure, and household wealth are separate measurements. The site shows how they relate without compressing them into one unexplained score.
Editorial approach
The site begins with the question readers are trying to settle, then attaches the relevant definitions and source limitations to the answer. Generation names help people recognize a cohort; birth years and observed ages define the actual analysis.
Every released estimate will link to its methodology version, source years, cohort rules, sample size, confidence interval, dollar basis, and reliability status.
Mara Vance - Lead Editor
Mara Vance writes about how American households earn, spend, borrow, and build wealth. Her focus includes monthly cash flow, the cost of getting into a home, debt balances and payments, retirement assets, and the difference between wealth on paper and money available to use. She uses same-age comparisons to examine how those conditions have changed across generations, with particular attention to what each measure includes and what it can reasonably tell us.
As lead editor, Mara sets Breathing Room Index’s editorial direction and oversees its articles and the research behind its public tools. That research covers collecting official survey and economic data, cleaning and checking the files, and combining compatible sources into the published comparisons. Her work includes checking definitions, household groupings, inflation adjustments, missing values, and sample sizes, and making the assumptions and limitations visible to readers.
Mara also maintains the site’s data: she checks for new source releases, reviews revisions and corrections, and updates the tools and supporting explanations as new material becomes available. Her aim is to keep the figures traceable, the comparisons consistent, and the public results understandable.