Where do you draw the line between “rich” and “not rich,” @yucca10 ? Top 25% Top 10% 1% 0.1%
Lest anyone worry, my dad got by during retirement with an income of $4000 per month (pension + ss) and wasn’t having to eat dog food to get by. He was fortunate to have a decent pension. There were no savings. None. Nada. Zip.
Well… he owned his house and a second property. Combined their assessed value is around 80K. He was a hoarder, so there’s lots of stuff (sigh). Personally, I don’t think most is worth much.
But still, he had a decent food/heat/transportation budget + extra to donate to his favorite causes/charities. One truly doesn’t NEED a lot to get by if they own a house and have reasonable income.
https://dqydj.com/retiree-net-worth-retiree-wealth-america/ suggests that the 90th percentile of retiree-aged household net worth is about $2.0 million, and the 95th percentile is about $3.5 million.
The median retiree-aged household net worth is about $239k, which is about 1/10 of the $2.4 million above. So that would give $7,200 using the same 3% per year drawdown. Presumably, that is why Social Security is so important to retiree-aged people’s political preferences – most retirees will be dependent on it. Medicare also (often preferring “socialized medical insurance for me, not for everyone else”).
@marvin100 Good question, but the point of natural-language words is that their meaning is fuzzy. It’s impossible to draw a line even for myself, let alone the one other people will agree on. I probably have a few gut feelings about what being rich entails, and they don’t necessarily describe the same set of people. For example, people who can buy their groceries in Whole Foods without bothering to look at the prices, people who fly business class as a matter of habit, or people who don’t have to worry about losing their medical insurance because they can pay all possible bills out of pocket (those may actually qualify as super-rich).
See, those criteria, @yucca10 , are based on consumption, not wealth, so they’re even less useful (and, I’d argue, a further distortion of the reality of socioeconomic class). Personally, I think anyone in (at least!) the top 20% is rich.
However, many people do look at high consumption as a way of signaling wealth, even though the signal can be false in that the high consumption may be bought with debt. Even if not going into debt, some income-rich families spend everything they earn (complaining about taxes, high cost of living, and not getting any financial aid from colleges, of course) so that they are unlikely to become asset-rich and be able to retire as capitalists (as opposed to dependents).
Sure, but we’re going around in circles. The thread is about why rich people don’t feel rich, which presupposes the existence of rich people. If rich people exist and are capable of denying that they’re rich, then there must be something objective to deny. And wealth and income are quantifiable. Furthermore, “rich” doesn’t mean much without comparing it on a spectrum, so we can look at family wealth in the United States, examine the percentages, and set a definition; after all, that’s a lot more useful to the discussion than throwing up our hands and saying “there’s no way to ever know!”
That is why I specifically wrote “income-rich” and “asset-rich” in reply #505. The “rich who do not feel rich” appear to be the income-rich with spending habits which are likely to prevent them from becoming asset-rich, which is why they do not feel rich. However, that is a problem largely of their own making (spending habits which are too high), so that is a problem that they should be capable of solving (reduce spending), instead of complaining about taxes, high cost of living, and not getting financial aid from colleges.
The question is FEEL rich. Not are you rich (measure of quantifiable wealth) but “feel rich” which means things to different people.
Aren’t these assumptions?
Right–why are the rich either in denial or delusional?
Perhaps because their definition of rich is not the same as yours. You might declare then as “rich”, however if they still worry about bills, are concerned about the future, maybe they don’t consider themselves rich, whether others have deemed an arbitrary number as making them rich.
A strata among a population in an economy is hardly “an arbitrary number.” It’s beyond relativism to wave away class that way.
I would reserve the term ”rich” for the few among us who have so much wealth that they can truly go through life with no concerns about their spending.
There are people whom most would describe as rich who later end up spending their way into poverty or bankruptcy.
https://www.si.com/vault/2009/03/23/105789480/how-and-why-athletes-go-broke
https://theundefeated.com/features/why-do-so-many-pros-go-broke/
…and it’s not just jocks!
https://www.rankred.com/billionaires-who-are-now-broke/
Way back in the dark ages when I took an advertising class as part of my Psych major one of the big things companies tried to do was cultivate the belief that “You’re not rich unless you have _____.” (Rich could be substituted for a different word or similar idea. “You haven’t made it.” “You’re not in the cool group.” etc.)
I think they (companies) have done a great job.
FWIW, that class ranks as the #1 best class I ever took in college - beating all the Physics, Math, etc that I used for my Physics major. It helped me see through all the fog we’re exposed to that plays with our minds. Brain games - for their profit.
I do what I can to share that info with my high schoolers, but it’s tough to fit in a whole college class’s worth of info while still teaching the actual high school math/science class. 
IMO it should be a required class on its own in high school. Catch the youngsters early and at least let them be informed. Who knew that pretty young lady selling cars/meds/whatever is just a prop who knows nothing about the product?
According to statistica.com, there are 126 million households in the US. If a family has an income that’s greater than 123.5 million of those households, I don’t really understand how you can classify that as anything but rich.
The reasons for that have been discussed at length in this thread. Why do you continue to ask this question? Really, what else do you want?
The article that started this thread was not about why the rich don’t feel rich, but about about why the 1% don’t feel rich. That leaves open the question of whether they actually ARE in fact rich.
I think that a percentile cuttoff is not the best way to define rich because the comparitive population is arbitrary. Are the top 10% of earners in a certain impoverished area of the country or of a particular city rich? I have argued upthread that most Americans are rich if we compare ourselves to the rest of the world.
I do believe “rich” is a subjective and poorly defined term. So of us feel it is being able to afford necessities comfortably and others believe it is being able to spend on luxeries routinely and still others think its being able to live like Hollywood royalty.
I think many people don’t consider being rich as just being wealthier than most people. For example, one can realize they are better off than most, yet if they still worry about bills and can’t spend freely without being concerned about it, they may not feel they are rich. Not everyone is just comparing themselves with others. People have varied backgrounds and all sorts of reasons for feeling financially insecure, whether or not they are in some percentile.