A CONCEPT DEVELOPED BY VESTED FOR MARINER · ALL DATA SHOWN IS ILLUSTRATIVE AND SYNTHETIC · NOT A REAL STUDY
Ready Isn't a Number · the companion study to The Calluses · Mariner 2026

The industry sells a number.
Nobody feels like they hit it.

We asked 6,000 Americans how they actually decide they've made it. The answer has almost nothing to do with a balance, and almost everything to do with what it cost them to get there. Every cut of the data is here, exportable, and attached to a spokesperson who can talk about it.

Explore the data → For journalists →
Close-up photograph of a pair of weathered, calloused hands
From The Calluses · a museum of everything they built
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Gallery installation: large-format photographs of hands above plaster casts on plinths
The exhibition this data belongs to

The Calluses

An exhibition of hand casts and close-up photography — plumbers, surgeons, athletes, founders, welders — each paired with the financial number they hit the day they made it. No faces. No golf courses. No boats. The first wealth campaign built entirely on the physical evidence of labor.

Opening 2026 · admission free · new casts added in every city.

Hands being cast in plaster
The casts

Physical evidence, on a plinth

Cracked knuckles, a surgeon's steady fingers, a pitcher's scarred throwing hand. Each cast paired with a one-line story and a number.

Wall of visitor fingerprints under the question What are your hands building?
The wall

“What are your hands building?”

Every visitor leaves a fingerprint. By closing week the wall holds several thousand of them, and no two days look the same.

Creative board showing the campaign's photography and gallery treatment
The subjects

Twelve pairs of hands

A pipefitter, a NICU nurse, a farrier, a relief pitcher, a line cook who opened her own room. Each cast paired with one sentence and one number.

The premise

Every firm in this category measures readiness. None of them ever tell you you're ready.

The financial industry has spent fifty years building instruments to answer one question: am I going to be okay? Scores. Projections. Dashboards that turn green. Monte Carlo simulations run ten thousand times to produce a percentage.

What almost nobody has measured is whether any of it works — whether the people on the other side of those dashboards actually feel any different. This study measures that, and the answer is no.

Readiness turns out not to be a threshold people cross. It's a feeling people either have or don't, and it correlates far more tightly with what their work cost them than with what their portfolio is worth. That is a different story than the one the category has been telling, and it is a story with data behind it.

"No calculator built what you built. No formula worked the hours you worked."

Ready Isn't a Number · Mariner · 2026
The companion study to The Calluses — an exhibition of hand casts and photography from the people whose work leaves physical evidence of what it took.
The explorer

Drive the data yourself

Pick a generation, a net-worth band, a kind of work and a gender. Each cut returns a headline number, a citable quote, and one-click export. Options that would leave too few respondents to report are struck through before you click them.

Viewing all respondents n = — MoE —
Say they have "financially arrived"
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Ready Isn't a Number · illustrative
Build your own cross-tab

Any question, any breakout

Choose a question from the study and a dimension to break it out by. Your filters above still apply to every other dimension.

Use this
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Key findings

What the study surfaces

Five findings from the first edition, each with the chart and the base sizes behind it.

Segment lens

Five kinds of work, five different relationships with money

The study's sharpest divisions aren't by wealth — they're by what someone does all day. Drill into each, with a downloadable cut for every segment.

Ask the study

The source an AI cites

Ask a plain-language question and get a grounded, sourced answer drawn only from this study — the same structured data an assistant would surface when someone asks whether they're financially ready.

Spokesperson bench

Who to talk to, and what they know

Five spokespeople across Mariner's investment, advice and client-facing teams. Requests reach the communications team directly, with the cut of the data you're viewing attached.

In the data

Nine threads worth pulling

Each with the figures behind it and the person at Mariner closest to it.

Media kit

Built for journalists first

Findings, charts, methodology, spokespeople and the full respondent file. No form, no gate, no email required.

How to cite

Use of the data is free with attribution. On first reference:

“Ready Isn't a Number,” a survey of 6,000 U.S. adults conducted by Mariner, May 2026.

Charts may be reproduced as exported, including the base size shown. Subsequent references may shorten to the Mariner readiness study. Every figure carries its own n and margin of error — please keep them attached when quoting a subgroup.

Need a cut that isn't here — a region, a metro, an occupation we didn't break out? Ask, and we'll run it.

Press contact
Mariner Communications
press@mariner.example
Vested · agency of record
team@fullyvested.com

Spokespeople available on 48 hours' notice; on-site interviews bookable at the exhibit. Placeholder contacts — demo purposes.

Downloadable assets

Every chart is exportable as PNG or CSV via its "Use this" bar, with a citable quote and an embed snippet.

Get the full report

Ready Isn't a Number: the full study

Forty-four pages of cross-tabs, methodology and analysis — the complete first edition, formatted for citation.

  • Every generation × net worth × work × gender cut
  • Full instrument, weighting and disclosure
  • All charts, print-ready
Illustrative demo — nothing is submitted and nothing is stored.
🔒 Unlock the full report

No spam. Illustrative demo — nothing is submitted or stored.

About the data

Methodology & disclosure

The study segments illustrative attitudes toward financial readiness across four axes — generational cohort, investable net worth, kind of work, and gender — for a field period ending May 2026.

Every figure derives from a single internally consistent respondent-level file: subgroup percentages reconcile against the topline in every view, "all" rollups are true weighted combinations of their parts, and no cut is displayed without its own base size and margin of error printed beside it.

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Sample
6,000 U.S. adults 18+, fielded online May 4–19, 2026. Quotas on age, gender, region and household income set to Census benchmarks.
Oversamples
Skilled trades and athletics/performance respondents were deliberately oversampled to permit subgroup analysis, then weighted back to true national share in all topline figures.
Net worth
Self-reported investable assets excluding primary residence. Respondents unwilling to disclose a band were screened out.
Kind of work
Coded from primary occupation, or most recent primary occupation for retirees. Single-select.
Margin of error
±1.3 points on the full sample at 95% confidence. Subgroup margins display live in the explorer. Cuts below n=100 are flagged; below n=40 they are suppressed rather than shown.
The "multiple" measure
Respondents named the total they would need to feel financially ready. That figure is expressed as a multiple of their own self-reported investable assets, so a value of 1.0× would mean a person feels ready at exactly what they already hold.
Synthetic-data disclosure

Ready Isn't a Number is a concept developed by Vested for Mariner. All data shown is illustrative and synthetic, created to demonstrate the format and storytelling potential of the study.

No survey was fielded. No figure on this page was measured. The data was generated from a directional model so that every cut behaves the way real survey data behaves — but nothing here should be reported as fact, quoted to a reporter, or used externally.

Spokesperson names are real Mariner executives; their platforms and topics are proposed, not approved.

What a live version would add
  • · A fielded instrument with real weighting and disclosure
  • · Regional and metro cuts for each exhibit market
  • · Live interview routing into Mariner's comms inbox
  • · Annual re-field, so the study becomes a tracker reporters return to