What's your definition of a wealthy person? Sure, Bezos is rich, but where do you put the threshold?
What's your definition of a wealthy person? Sure, Bezos is rich, but where do you put the threshold?
What does it take in terms of assets, abilities, and/or income for you to consider them wealthy?
Not only live off investment portfolios, but live well.
I.e. one or two summer houses, take multiple foreign vacations. And do that comfortably with what they already have or are passively earning.
Nobody wants to give a hard number?
I’ll say six million dollars earning ~5%/year. That’s $300k/yr before taxes. Assuming long-term investments, that’s 15% gains tax, so take $45k for taxes (fed), no idea what state will be because they’re all different, so just round it down to $250k year income in your pocket.
$250k/yr isn’t a lot of money…(I can hear the wtf’s…just hang on)…out of that has to come all your expenses including medical insurance in the US, your mortgage, car payments, etc.
This is not “fuck you” money. This is living an upper middle class lifestyle. You’ll have nice cars but not crazy nice. A decent house but not a mansion. You can tweak it a little this way or that depending on the CoL of where you live, but not a lot. Yeah, you can earn more in interest, but I was being conservative.
You’re rich because you don’t have to lift a finger to enjoy it, and you have the time to enjoy it.
Want closer to fuck you money with the above conditions? Try $20 million in the investments at 5%. That’ll get you a million a year before tax.
If they own a house, make at least 100k a year and can support their family comfortably, I would consider that wealthy. My father is in this bracket and he goes on vacations over seas, owns 3 relatively expensive vehicles, and still saves enough for retirement.
You don't need a million dollars to live a rich, fulfilling life.
If literally running around in a warehouse full of 20 dollar bills collecting all you can with your hands and unlimited bags makes less money, there's no fucking way your actual work is producing so much value.
Which kind of rich do you mean? The 'this person is truly wealthy but it's not unreasonable' or 'this person is unacceptably rich and should have their money taken away if not worse'?
The former can be somewhere around....$10,000,000 or so. Lower the older the person is really (cause I consider rich versus remaining expected lifespan), so maybe even as low as $6,000,000 for someone who's currently 40.
The latter where it's simply unacceptable for people to have that much I'd start the cutoff around $400,000,000 or so.
And slight sidenote on the unacceptable levels: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both are so unacceptably wealthy that they could make one person a day wealthy by my $10,000,000 standard...every day...for 100 years...before running out (and that's assuming they stopped accruing money at the beginning of this)...and still be unacceptably wealthy to a crazy degree.
Oh and all my numbers are assuming no additional income and definitely no interest or investment (but also assuming the money remains the same value it has today).
I think calling Bezos rich is an understatement. My mind cannot comprehend the amount of wealth he has.
Wealthy and rich have nothing to do with one another.
Wealthy is a person that lives in a stable environment, where they aren't threatened with death on a regular basis (such as, losing one's job).
Wealth is anything beyond having the necessities of life covered.
If you can afford a reasonable home, your bills, food, any dependents, eating out once a week, hobbies, taking a holiday or two per year, and contributing to your retirement then you're living comfortably.
Anything beyond that is wealth, it allows you to splash out on luxury products, luxury holidays etc.
Some people may never realise they're wealthy because they live excessively and believe that's the norm, ie payments for an overpriced car, spending excessively on hobbies etc
For me, being wealthy would mean that if they never intentionally earned another penny for the rest of their life, that would not prevent them from doing anything that they wanted to do within reason.
For normal people that would mean between two and five million dollars in liquid assets available to them.
I liked it back when the aristocracy was just called the "leisure" class. At least they didn't spend their time playing at being an executive and pretending they earned what they have.
If you could retire and have enough to keep you comfortably housed and insured until you're 90, that's wealth enough.
My definition for myself to be rich is:
I have enough money that I can pay someone(s) yearly wage to manipulate my wealth into enough money to cover their salary and then some.
Personally, I'd consider myself rich. I live in Germany which is already among the richer countries in the world giving me access to an insane amount of infrastructure and opportunities. Furthermore, I work for an IT company and make more money than average and more than I need to satisfy my immediate needs (shelter, food, transportation etc.) and pay for my hobbies (mostly outdoor stuff). I might not be a millionaire and I can't just retire tomorrow but still I'm very aware of what a huge privilege I have compared to a vast part of humanity.
Personally, I think already my taxes are too low. Not to start about millionaires or billionaires.
$5 million of spare money. Not net total wealth but actually $5 million investable dollars.
At that point, I'd you stick that money in a very conservative and safe brokerage account allocation, 5% return per year is $250k. That is a higher salary than almost anyone needs, meaning you can live very comfortably without working. You can't buy a yacht but you can be "done" and so can your children and their children if they aren't stupid.
If you choose to work, then you can just reinvest that $250k and let compound interest do its thing and get richer. Lucky you.
I consider anything above $500k to be "well off". Once you start to pass $10M, that's truly wealthy. $1B rhymes with obscene
not having to work and still get to live comfortably and afford most of the things you desire
The tiers for me are: Doesn't worry about money -> Doesn't work -> Can afford a US senator to protect money. There are not titles for this kind of thing.
We need a new word beyond rich. Everyone takes rich as a personal achievable goal.
We need a word for someone who has more money than is healthy. An easy to use word.
They are so rich they no longer know the cost of things. They can't relate to their neighbors. They no longer need to be a part of their community to survive.
Anyone who can forego any form of future income and live off their current wealth for the rest of their life in relative luxury/comfort.
Someone for whom the normal and inevitable experiences of suffering (illness, death in the family, natural disaster, etc) have no real economic consequences.
Access to a warm fire to dance around, food and libations, and friends to share them with.
Someone who has everything they could possibly need and no bad debt. Does not need to be rich.
Wealth is the feeling of having all your needs met and being satisfied with life in a stable and permanent way.
Living in London and working in the City so long really skewed my view on this. I guess because I worked with so many people earning six figures (and double that for household income) who were still very much "workers", were paying off the mortgage and hated commuting like anyone else. They didn't seem rich to me. Maybe if they sold up and moved out of town, sure, but just trying to live day to day they were counting the cost like an average person just up-scaled.
I feel like being able to live off passive income / interest AND living where you want is where "rich" starts for me. I could live off passive income now, in a basic place far from London but I'm not "rich". I can live pretty much where I want in London, but I'd have to continually work for it. Being able to do either of these things would put me in many people's "rich" bracket but for me it's when you can do both at the same time.
Bezos is not wealthy. He just has a lot of money. I can't imagine he's found any real happiness with it. Sure a brand new Ferrari every week can buy you some happiness, but that's short lived.
The man has a serious mental illness that will not be addressed, because he has too much money and power for anyone to be allowed to tell him he's ill.
Billionaires are a danger to themselves and others. They should be admitted into a mental hospital against their will and they should be treated until they are cured.
This isn't even a "CEO bad" joke. I honestly believe it's a mentally disorder. Or maybe a specific mix of different disorders and unfortunate environments, circumstances and enablers.
It's always "wealthier than us", isn't it?
But I'd say whenever you have no money worries, that's wealthy. Like you could retire today if you wanted and not just survive but buy a new car or house if you wanted to, go on a long vacation, anything that just needs money to do is within your reach. Never have to say no simply because of money. That is what I define as wealth (financial wealth) and it's different amounts in different places.
In general I would say you're rich if you could stop working and live a life where you never want for anything
If you get a golden parachute after losing your job, you're overly wealthy.
Lots of other good definitions in here as well
Rich - enough money to throw around and buy expensive things, but could lose everything with some poor decisions because they are spending their income instead of focusing on future wealth
Wealthy - expenses are easily paid using income from investments, easily accessible loans from property, or some other wealth based process. They don't need to actively work to do the same kinds of thing a rich person can do, and it is difficult for them to lose their wealth.
There are not any specific dollar amount thresholds, because it depends on spending and local cost of living. Wealthy people will make decisions that maintain enough wealth that will increase in value over time to beat inflation, rich people make decisions based on whether they can afford it right now.
You are wealthy/rich at the point where you no longer know or care about the well being of the people that count on you to survive–the point of dehumanization is the threshold of a monster.
Anyone with a net worth listed on their wikipedia page.
Anyone who can lose several million dollars at work and might still have a job the next day.
Anyone who can damage fancy clothing and think "I'll just get a new one."
Anyone who can have a holiday abroad every year. Especially if they have a summer home.
Anyone who gets surprised when they find out someone has never been skiing.
$500,000 combined household gross income
Wealth, to me, is relative, measured by how far-reaching you can do things.
In the top tier, there are billionaires who can make decisions on the world stage, such as Elon Musk making satellites to help various countries or L Ron Hubbard buying a navy and putting places of worship in other countries.
In the middle tier, there are people who can make decisions on the national level, such as smaller business chains putting their businesses in various states.
In the low tier, there are people who can make decisions on the local level, such as buying management at a local school.
And then there are the rest of us, who have our whole empires concentrated on a single street.
A wealthy man has no bills
Could you buy a second house if you wanted to is what I consider very rich. Though honestly buying one house is hard for most people these days
You're not really wealthy until you can raise your own legion.