Good Question: What Does It Take To Be Considered Wealthy?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- A new UBS survey finds the majority of people worth between one and five million dollars don't consider themselves wealthy.
That had us wondering: What does it take to consider yourself wealthy?
"A nice place to live," said Leroy Kreisel of Minneapolis.
"It would be that I didn't have to look at price tags," said Susan Cavill of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Susan Zimmerman is a financial consultant and licensed therapist with Mindful Asset Planning.
She says there isn't one number that defines whether you are rich or not. She also says there are number of different ways to determine wealth, including net worth or annual income.
"It's all over the place, very personal," she said.
Zimmerman says some people define wealth by how secure they feel. In her experience, people who feel upset on a regular basis by anything in their financial picture would never say they feel wealthy.
"People carry lessons with them from their growing up and what their atmosphere was like in their financial family," she said. "They might even have attitudes they aren't aware of."
According to UBS, 28 percent of people worth between $1 million and $5 million call themselves wealthy. For people worth more than $5 million, just 60 percent of them say they're rich. Of those surveyed, 50 percent said they'd consider themselves rich if they had no financial constraints on activites.
Age is also a big factor in opinion. According to a study by the Spectrem Group, 45 percent of people under age 40 consider a net worth of $1 million rich. Only 22 percent of people over 60 feel the same way.
"People maybe shy about looking, appearing or sounding wealthy whereas other people might be proud of that," Zimmerman said.
According to the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, the average net worth for an American household is just over $500,000.
