Please redefine “rich” to lower than billionaire. Because that’s just stupidly limiting.
Where do you live that someone worth $100 million is not a rich person?
The lowest net worth of the top 1% is approximately $11 million. So somebody that is worth about 10x the bottom of the top 1%, doesn’t qualify as rich to you.
We’re comfortable inside the DC Beltway in the very low six figures, with one big but. We bought our house for 150K when we were earning about 40K combined, which we were only able to do because I did an automatic monthly investment mutual fund that doubled in value over a very short period. Thanks, Janus, for advertising in Runners’ World.
I just came across an article the other day showing the 1% and 5% benchmark per state.
Top 1% ranges from a high of $896,490 in Connecticut to a low of $350,212 in West Virginia.
Top 5% ranges from a low of $168,705 (Mississippi) to a high of $314,389 (Massachusetts)
I think the questions is are we talking about “Millionaire Next Door” rich or Bruce Wayne / Tony Stark / money is no object rich?
I thought it was clear that we were talking about “when we were kids in the 80s, millionaire meant something. What is the equivalent of that something today?”
But everyone keeps moving the goalposts into ‘mega-wealthy’ or ‘1%er’ and now it’s all muddled.
I think that when I grew up, millionaire meant you didn’t need to work if you didn’t want to, and could own luxury goods without worrying about the cost. So for me that would be $5m today.
But it depends where you live. New Yorkers may have a very different idea of wealth than I, who grew up in rural New Zealand, do.
But people started talking about “millionaires” long before the 80s, maybe in the 20s, when it meant a hell of a lot more.
Well why not go back to the 1550s? Or Ancient Greece? Where does it end?
We need to define terms. I assume we’re talking about popular understanding from when we were young, rather than some arbitrary time when you could buy a car for $150.
Arguably, it ends with the time when the word “millionaire” first entered into common usage, which, according to Wikipedia, was in the early 18th century for French and the early 19th century for English. As far as English is concerned, you’d also keep in mind that at that time, a pound was considerably more valuable than a dollar (nowadays, they’re in the same ballpark), so I would think the word had different connotations in Britain and America.
As for the ancients, the number million had no special ring to them; they didn’t even have a dedicated word for it: The Greeks counted in myriads, i.e. units of 10,000, so a million would be a hundred myriads (I think Modern Greek still does that). The Romans counted large sums of money in hundreds of thousands of sestertii, for which they had a dedicated term, sestertium. This was a shortening of the genitive construction centena milia sestertium, “a hundred of a thousand of sestertii”, but in that grammatical form, the word would be understood to refer to a unit of 100,000. So a million sestertii would be decies sestertium, “ten times a hundred thousand sestertii”, and so on.
I was a child of inflation. Like, literally, inflation went through the roof when i was in my teens. And so i was keenly aware that the term “millionaire” was being devalued, and didn’t literally mean what it then still implied.
So yes, I’m interested in what the term meant when it first became popular in the lexicon, not at some arbitrary date like "when i was 15.”
People talk about los millonarios in Mexico, too. Where one million MXN is under $50,000 USD today. They’re definitely using it as an idea rather than its use as a specific amount.
Wouldn’t that school’s students be atypical? I don’t doubt their replies, but Google shows the tuition at $115,000/year. I would assume any kid from a family that could fund that would have a skewed vision of “normal”.
The last 7 years I worked I made between $105,000 to $188,000 per year. I consider those all to be 6 figure incomes. The sad part to me was seeing the taxes I paid each year go from the low 5 figure to mid 5 figures.
Isn’t that the whole point? That these business school students are so out of touch with what most people earn.
Yeah, but I see this kind of meme as click-bait nonsense. Ask 100 average 20 year-olds (children of factory workers, office workers, farmers, etc.) about what people earn and you would get just as much inaccuracy.
Exactly. My uncle was/is a millionaire since the late 1980s; he owns his own successful construction company, and basically earned enough money to eventually own two houses and two commercial buildings (one of which houses his business), keep him and my aunt in nice cars, have nice furnishings/stuff, and most importantly let my aunt spend as much as she wanted without impact.
That’s what “millionaire” always implied to us growing up- having enough money to not have to worry about it at all on a day-to-day basis. Making $100k didn’t ever really imply that- it was more of an implication that you were doing quite well, but not that were so wealthy that money wasn’t a concern.
Basically the difference between the two was basically the divide between being wealthy vs. having a high income.
I’d guess it’s more that they’re business school students at a nationally renowned business school that’s part of the Ivy League. I don’t know if you could have cherry picked a more financially privileged set of graduate students. But I would guess that if you were to go and poll say… community college students in the Rio Grande valley, you would get a number for average American salary that undershoots by a similar amount.
People’s perceptions of wealth are all relative to their own frame of reference. I’ve had people say that making $100k a year is “rich”, or having more than $50k in assets that isn’t tied up in your house is “wealthy”. Which I’d argue is far from the truth. Most people’s concept of what “rich” or “wealthy” lifestyles are actually starts around the $200-250k/year income range- that’s owning a 3500 sq ft. house with a pool, having new cars AND being able to fund your “fun” stuff like European travel, hunting leases, fishing boats, and so on.
Now this is interesting. It’s the amount to be in the top 10% of income in each state. The number is somewhere around 170-190k for most states, which also happens to be what $100k in the late 90s is worth today. I wonder if that’s coincidence or not; it would make sense for the “six figure income” to indicate an income roughly around the 90th percentile I think.
How Much You Need To Earn To Rank in the Top 10% of Your State | GOBankingRates
But those people are not expecting to be running businesses that pay those salaries when they graduate. The dig is that business school students ought to have an order-of-magnitude sense of one of the main contributors to the cost of doing business if they are seriously learning about how businesses are run.
Otherwise “business school” is just a fancy country club that kids from wealthy families get sent to so they can get a degree before being given a job at their parents’ company.
Honestly? People running businesses have Compensation departments, who do market equity analysis to set salaries. The people running businesses see consolidated human resource cost figures. The salary of individual job titles are as important to them as the unit cost of heating the building.
If you count the net present value of retirement packages and homes, there are a LOT of millionaires out there.
A rule of thumb is that every $100 of pension income is equivalent to an asset of $18,000. Between my wife and I, our retirement packages alone are worth more than a million dollars. If you want to add Canada Pension or U.S. Social Security, that’s even more wealth. If you have defined benefits like prescription drugs or health care, that’s also worth a lot. Which is why most companies don’t offer them any more.
So being a ‘millionaire’ today isn’t all that. Between savings, home, and pensions we probably have two million in assets and no debt, but we still drive two older cheap vehicles and have to watch what we spend. We can’t afford a second home or expensive vacations, and we can’t afford maids and gardeners and all that stuff. The only reason we have that much in assets in the first place is because we’ve never bought fancy cars or gone on expensive vacations or otherwise blown money on the trappings of the ‘rich’.
That was part of the point of ‘The Millionaire Next Door’. You think of millionaires as peolle who live extravagantly, but most millionaires get there because they don’t live extravagantly.
In Canada, a two professional family can quite easily make $200,000 to $300,000 per year. Our neighbors were two teachers who both worked full careers. Their joint income at the end was likely over $200,000. They retired in their 50’s with full pensions that would have netted each of them about $3500/mo. And at 65 they would get another $900 each from Canada Pension. That’s $8800/mo in pensions for two teachers - worth close to two million bucks.
So if ‘millionaire’ means ‘rich’, I’d say it needs to be at least $5 million now.
That’s not entirely true. If you are starting a business or even running a small one you will need to know labor, facilitates and other costs. In my line of work leading complex IT projects, I need to know what various roles bill out at, which is directly tied to their compensation.
Although that has been a big complaint about MBAs. That they aren’t actually being taught to run a business. They are being groomed for some executive role or more “strategic” jobs in investment banking or management consulting where everything becomes very abstracted. Someone like that might view the world where they start making low to mid $100,000 as a new analyst, the partners and managing directors in their firm make orders of magnitude more, so the “average” person struggles to get by on a couple hundred thousand a year.