According to the Federal Reserve's "Flow of Funds" report, released Thursday, the net worth of households in the United States is $50.4 trillion. That's $1.3 trillion less than the total at the beginning of 2009, and $14 trillion less than at the beginning of the recession in December 2007.

Numbers that huge are hard to grapple with, so here's a simple way to think about it. U.S. households are about 25 percent poorer than they were at the end of 2007.