>My definition of wealthy == How long you can maintain your current, preferred lifestyle without working. I've heard your definition of wealth before, and it's

>My definition of wealthy == How long you can maintain your current, preferred lifestyle without working. I've heard your definition of wealth before, and it's better than most, but you need to factor in risk. For instance, I could stop work tomorrow... I could continue to not work until my employee got burnt out or until my accountant quit. I wouldn't call this wealthy, personally, just 'cause, well, I think that without my help and supervision the risk of him burning out goes up a whole lot. Well, that and if we don't keep growing, the inexorable downward march of prices would eventually catch up to us. I mean, I could be wrong. I might be holding the guy back. but the point is that I can maintain my current lifestyle without work until a certain event occurs. This is true of nearly all investments. Now, my wealth is certainly more fragile than a stack of T-bills that paid the same small stipend, (and with today's interest rates, you'd need a pretty big stack, even for the small amount of money I live on.) but even in that case, you'd be at the mercy of inflation; you'd have /some/ risk. Unless you used TIPS, in which case, the stack would need to be again larger, and then you are dependent on the government using a cost of living measure that is relevant to your lifestyle.