If you still look at the prices of the stuff you intend to buy then you're not rich.<p>Once you stop looking at prices you're rich, no matter how much actual money you've got.
Great snakes! <i>That's because $100 million is really a 'tweener number: You can be Richie Rich among your upper-middle-class friends or a hanger-on in the superrich crowd.</i><p>It takes tens of millions to be an upper-middle-class person? That would be news to most of us, and to the IRS, I bet.<p>It appears that this whole article is skewed by the editorialist's particular place in the very rich of society. I think that everything else he writes should be examined carefully.
<i>Two million bucks is the great dividing line between middle-class comfort and worry in America right now.</i><p>Is this irony or just staggering cluelessness? A family net worth of $2 million puts you in the top few percent.<p>(From <a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/scf_2009p.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/scf_2009p.htm</a>, it's somewhere above the 95th percentile of family wealth in 2009)
Keep in mind that Forbes (and this author) live in a world where people make money almost exclusively via cash investments. Given THAT world-view, the article makes more sense, and $2M is indeed a dividing line between classes.
"A million dollars then would be about $20 million today, which is, interestingly, $1 million a year at a 5% aftertax return."<p>5%?? Does anyone know what investment is he talking about?
> the chief technology officer ... of a tech startup ... might own a golf membership or two at fancy clubs, costing $300,000 each<p>Really? This strikes me as rather implausible, and makes me doubt a lot of the other claims.
Very interesting, all the comments this post has received. I posted this link on HN because I guessed that several readers here are entrepreneurs like myself, who would one day like to be amongst the 'rich' (or according to the articles author 'upper middle class') and would like to know how that segment of society lives. I had no intention of starting a discourse on class warfare ;)<p>On the other hand, personally I found this article to be extremely instructive on the relationship between 'net worth' and 'income'. As someone who has worked a job all my life, till date, I have always looked as my salary as my measure of how well I was doing financially. This article made me take an alternative perspective and look at 'net worth'. If and when I decide to stop working for money (side note - someone said Steve Jobs worked so he was middle class. He worked, yes, but I am sure it was not for money! He was Rich.) I would like to still have cash flow coming in from my investments and other passive sources. I believe that is what the author is getting to. If that amount at which I can stop working for money is $100,000 per year, I need to have $2 million in net worth; for an income of $1 million (whew!), I need to have $20 million, and so forth...
I was expecting a socio-philosophical analysis of why schools are being closed down, the government and people are becoming indebted, yet supposedly the wealth has multiplied in the recent decades etc etc.<p>But instead you get counting of money, like kids do when they're maybe ten: how much money everyone's daddy and mommy have.<p>What is wealth in America? Having more money than others.
You really have to be a member of the clueless aristocrat club to write for Forbes.<p>"Two million bucks is the great dividing line between middle-class comfort and worry in America right now. That $2 million is $100,000 in income, if you base it on an aftertax 5%."<p>Obviously everyone in the middle class is sitting on $2 million in wealth.
I always had this discussion with friends. Let's say you had Bill Gates money - it would be very very very hard for him to use up all his money even if he kept buying up things (Mind you - giving it all away is not included). Imagine how hard it would be to use up $50 billion?
Someone preserve this so that when TSHTF, Paris 1793 style, we can see what conditions led to it.<p><i>That's because $100 million is really a 'tweener number: You can be Richie Rich among your upper-middle-class friends or a hanger-on in the superrich crowd.</i><p>Ok, this is stupid on so many levels. First among them is that the difference between upper-middle-class and upper class is not, in reality, based on an income threshold. Steve Jobs was a billionaire and solidly middle-class. He worked too hard. Bill Gates is possibly lower-upper but he had to push himself into the right circles to get there.<p>The upper class (the real one) is a well-connected, socially closed set of parasitic people who peddle social connections and influence as a means of sustaining their insanely expensive lifestyles. They generally have the resources to accrue $1-2 million per year without really working, just by selling and exploiting their social connections, but they aren't all in the $50m+ net worth crowd. Just like us, some of them negative net worth. In their cases, it's usually a consequence of doing seriously stupid shit.<p>You can separate the lower class from the middle class based on education, income, and job prestige because the middle class's values are defined based on an ethic of <i>production</i> and these are taken as evidence of a productive life. The middle-class line corresponds to an income around $100,000 per year per adult at age 40, adjusted for cost of living and job prestige. (Yes, this means that 50th-percentile is not "middle class"; society is pyramidal.) The upper class, by contrast, defines itself based on an ethic of <i>consumption</i>-- materially speaking and in terms of social access (the ability to consume the attention of important people). Different things entirely.
It would be interesting to see Forbes 400 adjusted for local economy. For instance, Warren Buffett who spends most of his time in Omaha certainly gets more bang for his buck than the Billionaires that live in Silicon Valley.