Americans Think You Need $2.2 Million to Be Wealthy, a New Survey Says
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Wealth isn’t an easily defined concept, and you can’t determine just one dollar amount that makes someone wealthy. But if you could, Americans have collectively chosen $2.2 million as that sum.
Charles Schwab asked a nationally representative sample of Americans to estimate the average net worth that would allow someone to be called “rich,” and that’s the amount they settled on, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. That finding is just one of many in the financial-services company’s 2023 Modern Wealth Survey, which polled people on their perceptions of wealth.
“There’s this paradox of people defining wealth differently for themselves versus others,” Rob Williams, the company’s managing director of financial planning and wealth management, told Bloomberg. “When you ask someone for a dollar amount, they don’t put it in the context of the rest of their life and financial health.”
That’s evident in the fact that despite the $2.2 million wealth threshold, 48 percent of survey respondents said they already feel wealthy, with an average net worth of just $560,000. And that feeling was more abundant with Millennials and Gen Zers (57 percent and 46 percent, respectively) than with Gen Xers and Baby Boomers (41 percent and 40 percent, respectively).
Elsewhere, 47 percent of people said that being able to afford a similar lifestyle to their friends made them feel wealthy. That split along the same generational lines: 61 percent of both Gen Zers and Millennials agreed with that statement, while just 39 percent of Gen Xers and 31 percent of Boomers agreed. And more than one-third of social-media users said those comparisons happen online, as they keep an eye on what their friends and family post.
While wealth is largely associated with dollar amounts, the participants in the Charles Schwab survey also had a broader, more intangible perception of being rich. Rather than having a lot of money in your checking and savings accounts, 70 percent of people said that wealth was more about not worrying about money. And almost two-thirds said that having healthy relationships with their loved ones described wealth better than having a fat wallet.
Maybe that old saying about money not being able to buy you happiness is true after all.
Source:https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/finance/american-wealth-perceptions-charles-schwab-1234855195/amp/
