What does it take in terms of assets, abilities, and/or income for you to consider them wealthy?
Depends entirely on where you live. In my part of the world, a decent 1800 SF house goes for around $1.5M.
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.
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.
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If you get a golden parachute after losing your job, you’re overly wealthy.
Lots of other good definitions in here as well
There are two thresholds that matter: “rich” is where you no longer have to really think much about money on a day to day basis, and “wealthy” is where you no longer have to work for a living. Both thresholds depend on your expenses and the lifestyle you’re looking for, I guess
I was about to type something very similar, but switching words. “Wealthy” to me implies having enough wealth to not really worry. “Rich” makes me think of Lamborghinis and yachts and mountains of cocaine.
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.
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.
Jeff Bezos is a
That’s a good one
$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
If you can basically do whatever you want and the cost is of little to no concern, you’re rich.
What if you don’t have to work and you can fly to Europe for vacation without much worry, but you can’t fly first class without worry?
Cost is a concern then.
Ok, so not rich at that point.
In general I would say you’re rich if you could stop working and live a life where you never want for anything
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.
Someone for whom the normal and inevitable experiences of suffering (illness, death in the family, natural disaster, etc) have no real economic consequences.
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.
