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What happens if you click that up to $10mil? $1mil isn't what it used to be with housing rising as it has over the past couple decades. (It doesn't actually r

What happens if you click that up to $10mil? $1mil isn't what it used to be with housing rising as it has over the past couple decades. (It doesn't actually reference the study, so I can't look at their data.) I expect that "millionaire" now reflects the top tiers of middle class people without an accompanying increase in purchasing power -- they just inflated across a boundary and now suddenly there's a bunch of "millionaires", without that term meaning what it used to 40-50 years ago.

anovikov 9y ago
In any income bracket short of outright billionaires (at least up to top 0.01% of population), majority of income is salaries. Not return on capital in any form. So, it can't possibly be inherited (of course your daddy paying for good college and providing you with good upbringing and mindset still counts, but you don't need to be very rich for that).
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  We're discussing asset brackets, so your point is less relevant. My point was that a middle class family (say, 120-150k/yr) is going to have around a million dollars in assets by retirement age. But that's not what most people think of when they hear "millionaire", because our cultural expectations are a generation or two old -- they don't reflect the effects of the last couple decades on housing value or inflation. So instead of looking at families with assets of $1mil, it probably makes more sense to look at families with assets of $10mil if you want to discuss the mobility into "wealthy" instead of "upper middle class".
chillingeffect 9y ago
Definitely. A mostly paid-off house and two retirement plans = millionaire family at say 55 years old. In a country of 300 million people, 8 million households are are millionaire households.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Since you mixed units: there are about 115 million households, so 7% of US households are millionaires, and (to speak to my point) being a millionaire doesn't make you part of the "1%".

anovikov 9y ago

In any income bracket short of outright billionaires (at least up to top 0.01% of population), majority of income is salaries. Not return on capital in any form. So, it can't possibly be inherited (of course your daddy paying for good college and providing you with good upbringing and mindset still counts, but you don't need to be very rich for that).

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
We're discussing asset brackets, so your point is less relevant. My point was that a middle class family (say, 120-150k/yr) is going to have around a million dollars in assets by retirement age. But that's not what most people think of when they hear "millionaire", because our cultural expectations are a generation or two old -- they don't reflect the effects of the last couple decades on housing value or inflation. So instead of looking at families with assets of $1mil, it probably makes more sense to look at families with assets of $10mil if you want to discuss the mobility into "wealthy" instead of "upper middle class".

chillingeffect 9y ago

Definitely. A mostly paid-off house and two retirement plans = millionaire family at say 55 years old. In a country of 300 million people, 8 million households are are millionaire households.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Since you mixed units: there are about 115 million households, so 7% of US households are millionaires, and (to speak to my point) being a millionaire doesn't make you part of the "1%".