Can anyone afford to be rich?
My point is — and this is why my own definition of rich is at a crossroads — that it’s damned hard to afford the ordinary things in an ordinary life. Forget anything near what most people envision as rich!
If you dream of luxurious vacation homes, retiring early or sailing the south Pacific in your yacht, remember that it takes more money than you’d think to be rich. Paying your yacht staff, berthing fees — not to mention the cute little nautical outfits — phew! Imagine what that would add up to.
Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at NYU who studies wealth, points out that even the people we think of as being “rich and famous” — i.e. movie, rock and sports stars — may not be as rich as you think.
“These are people with big incomes, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to big wealth,” he says. “Just getting it is half the battle — then you have to maintain it, and that takes a continuous flow of big income.”
What does it take?
About half of the very rich have inherited their wealth, Wolff says. “The rest of the super-rich tend to be business owners or have an (ownership) stake in their work.”
Now, you don’t have to be among the Forbes 400 to be wealthy (you’d need $600 million just to hit the bottom of the list). But you do need to ask yourself some hard questions:
- Even if you just want to be “comfortable,” does your vision of that include some things that go well beyond mere comfort?
- If you want to be rich, what does that look like? What kinds of decisions (about your career, for example) or sacrifices would you have to make to get there?
- If you’re not aiming for rich, could you be happy with what you have instead of living a life of fruitless self-torture because you’re not?
- Or, will this be the moment when you face the fact, as I am, that what you do for a living will never make you rich (nor will your parents). And thus, will you decide to switch gears?
These are big questions, but they’re essential. At some point in this crazy world, you have to level with yourself about who you are, what kind of life you want, what will make you content. Are you on the path to great wealth? Or have you achieved what millions of others might consider — what you yourself might want to consider — a very wealthy life indeed?
Rich, after all, is relative — as the folks at Poke, a creative agency in London, want to remind us. They created something called the Global Rich List.
Based on World Bank data, this little calculator tells you how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. By their estimate, I’m in the top 0.7% of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Now that’s rich.
source : moneycentral
