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April 23, 2008 at 7:03 AM #193165
raptorduck
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My answer is $20M. As I have said before, “rich” to me means complete financial independence to support a societally lavish lifestyle. Rich in the media is the lavish lifestyle. Rich is not “comfortable” or “well off.” Rich has special meaning to me and connotes something far more than making gobs of money. That is simply someone well off.

That is not to say if you make $2M/yr you are not increadibly well off and lucky. You are. But you can also consider yourself lucky to make $30k/yr if you compare your financial life to somebody more poor than you, or less “rich” than you. Everything is a comparison, whether to people with hundreds of millions of dollars or people making 10 cents a day in a third world country. Without comparison, the concept of “rich” or “wealth” or “poverty” would have no meaning. So “rich” is indeed a relative term and, to me, it has a very high water mark to be used properly.

I would say IMHO a U.S. stratification as a rough starting point for an “individual” not a “household” is

  1. billionairs (>$1 billion liquid net worth)
  2. uberrich (>$100M liquid net worth)
  3. rich, (>$20M liquid net worth)
  4. wealthy (AKA “Working Rich”), (>$5M liquid net worth)
  5. upper class, (>$1M liquid net worth)(Millionairs)
  6. well off, (>$500k liquid net worth)(top 1% mark)
  7. upper middle class, (>$100k liquid net worth and/or >$150k/yr)(top 5% mark)
  8. middle-middle class, ($50k-$150k/yr)
  9. lower middle class, (under $50k/yr)
  10. upper lower class, (under $30k/yr)
  11. lower class, (under $20k/yr)(bottom 20% mark)
  12. poor/impoverished, (under $10k/yr)
  13. third world stratifications.

For a household of 2, multiple levels 3-13 by 1.5, for a household of 4, multiply levels 10-13 by 2.

For the first six, you measure by net worth only. For the next one, a combination of income and net worth. For the rest, by income only. That is because 95% of Americans have a negative liquid net worth. The first 6 classes above represent the top 1%.

Of course, take what I say here with a grain of salt. This is just my particular view today off the top of my head as a point of dialogue. Any apparent precision is an illusion. Note that lots of income in the “lower class” include students working at McDonalds etc, or top 3 B-school students putting themselves through HBS, GSB, or Wharton.

More importantly is that most sought after mongram “financially independent” which can be had IMHO by anyone in levels 1-8, which I have said before, is a different and arguably much better type of “rich.”