<p>I feel pretty rich, but I guess it’s all about what your expectations are.</p>
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I don’t think this is correct. Should be more like $2.5M or more.</p>
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<p>I’m the opposite, at least according to the first percentile chart I found.</p>
<p>Rich is the point where you no longer refer to someone’s buying power by their income, but by their net worth. Somewhere in the low 8 figures. </p>
<p>1% of the population aren’t top-level executives, high-rung politicians, or significant heirs. </p>
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<p>I don’t think they’ve very useful. Income from work is still very important to a household with between 1M and 2M in assets. And then it went and listed super rich by income? There’s going to be a huge number of people who fit both the middle class and rich definitions, and more who fit both rich and super rich.</p>
<p>Additionally, the percentages don’t match. about 8% of people in the US are millionaires. </p>
<p>According to the article linked below, “the merely rich – those with wealth between $4 million and $20 million…”
<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/01/luxury/rich-wealth-gap/index.html?iid=EL”>Rich, really rich, and ultra rich -- the world's widening wealth gap;
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<p>I would say there should be a separate category for 500K-1500K, but otherwise those separations seem sensible. </p>
<p>You might not apply it until someone is 30 though. It’s hard to amass 500K even with a high income before your late 20s. </p>
<p>Poor is when you can’t afford to buy a newspaper.
Working class is when buy a newspaper so you can clip coupons.
Middle class is when you read the newspaper, and occasionally clip a coupon.
Upper middle class is when you look at the coupons, but never clip one.
Rich is when your staff throws out the ads before bringing your paper to you.</p>
<p>This is really interesting to me. My dad was a doctor and had a good income but both he and my mom were first generation college attenders. He always felt complete out of his depth with the country club set. He didn’t play golf, actually couldn’t swim, had never travelled, went to a state school. He would freely admit that there were conversations which took place at medical conventions that he couldn’t even follow. </p>
<p>He sent us all to good schools --LAC’s, Vanderbilt, etc. – and I remember having that same sense of realizing later that when someone said “Brearley” or “Grosse Pointe” I was supposed to have been impressed, which I wasn’t, since I grew up in a small rural town and had no idea what these things meant. </p>
<p>My dad was really anxious for us kids to have the things that he didn’t have, so that we wouldn’t be embarassed the way that he was all the time – He made us take horseback riding lessons, and learn how to ski. We all swam. He sent us on those study abroad programs in Europe when we were in high school. He really wanted us to be able to fit in in the ways that he didn’t.</p>
<p>But at college, I remember having the sense that really “rich” people had centuries of breeding that we didn’t have. We didn’t have a summer house or a boat – and I will never forget this bizarre admissions interview I had at Mount Holyoke where the interviewer ignored me after having just finished gushing over this family in the waiting room that apparently “summered” near her family in Martha’s Vineyard. </p>
<p>I always felt like we had a strong financial position but that we weren’t part of the class known as “rich people.” Now I’m a college professor and I don’t have the money that rich people have but I have a bit more of the cultural knowledge. I have lived in Europe, can order off a menu in French, etc. I know where (and what) Bruges is – I will never forget being in grad school and hearing people say “We went to Bruges” and having no idea whether it was a restaurant in the next town over, a city, a play perhaps? </p>
<p>To me, “rich” is about reading the New York Times and understanding the lingo and key words – I don’t think you can arrive at that in one or even two generations. Maybe you really do need to have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower.</p>
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<p>Throwing in profession as well as income leaves out a number of situations, such as well paid blue collar workers and low paid white collar workers. Such cases often result in unexpected social reactions, such as the very negative reaction to a transit strike by well paid blue collar workers. High and low paid white collar workers (many of whom use the transit system to get to work) apparently resented the fact that blue collar workers were often paid more than they were paid. There did not seem to be much support from low paid blue collar workers who probably saw the pay levels of the striking high paid blue collar workers to be a king’s ransom compared to their own pay.</p>
<p>The idea of blue collar work as being lower status than white collar work, even if the pay is better, has existed for a long time; Vance Packard noted that in his 1959 book The Status Seekers.</p>
<p>Momzie, my parents always used the term “white trash with money” to describe that. Sums it up well enough. My parents are the first to not work on a farm for their lives, and I’m the first born middle class. I feel I can understand the rich, I don’t feel out of place among them, but I do retain some of my white trash heritage. Just not bothered by it. </p>
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<p>Yes.</p>
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<p>What defines “rich”?</p>
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<p>From families of 8 figure networths.</p>
<p>Defining “rich” is like defining “strong.” It’s all relative.</p>
<p>Hunt, I love your newspaper analogy :)) .</p>
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Cr@p! I just knocked over my glass of wine on my computer keyboard.</p>
<h1>27 What you describe with your dad is how I’ve often felt as an immigrant, so I empathize.</h1>
<p>The truly rich live in their own world which only occasionally overlaps with our world.</p>
<p>"Even in the top 1% (which I’m not part of), there’s a big difference between the high 6-figures (usually high-achieving professionals) and folks who can own their own private jets (usually the top folks in finance, management of large companies, and owners of capital, whether self-made or inherited). If anything, wealth gets even more logarithmic there. "</p>
<p>Yep. Big difference between making 350K/yr and 350 million/yr. Lumping people in the same category is stupid. World of difference being in the bottom of the 1% category and the top part.</p>
<p>Thank god you’ve got a servant around to pour you another glass.</p>
<p>It’s my observation that there are many people in the United States who are rich by any reasonable definition of the word–especially if we consider a global scale–but who don’t “feel” rich. Perhaps it’s because we so often see much richer people in the media. So we use terms like “truly rich” or “really rich” to describe these people. I guess I think we should have a distinction between “rich” and “wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.”</p>