Posted on 07/29/2025 9:37:06 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
NEW YORK (AP) — As a child, Heidi Barley watched her family pay for groceries with food stamps. As a college student, she dropped out because she couldn’t afford tuition. In her twenties, already scraping by, she was forced to take a pay cut that shrunk her salary to just $34,000 a year.
But this summer, the 41-year-old hit a milestone that long felt out of reach: She became a millionaire.
A surging number of everyday Americans now boast a seven-figure net worth once the domain of celebrities and CEOs. But as the ranks of millionaires grow fatter, the significance of the status is shifting alongside perceptions of what it takes to be truly rich.
“Millionaire used to sound like Rich Uncle Pennybags in a top hat,” says Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors, a wealth management firm in El Segundo, California. “It’s no longer a backstage pass to palatial estates and caviar bumps. It’s the new mass-affluent middleweight class, financially secure but two zeros short of private-jet territory.”
Inflation, ballooning home values and a decades-long push into stock markets by average investors have lifted millions into millionairehood. A June report from Swiss bank UBS found about one-tenth of American adults are members of the seven-digit club, with 1,000 freshly minted millionaires added daily last year.
Thirty years ago, the IRS counted 1.6 million Americans with a net worth of $1 million or more. UBS — using data from the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and central banks of countries around the globe — put the number at 23.8 million in the U.S. last year, a nearly 15-fold increase.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Unless you can use the word ‘billion’ in the description of wealthiness, you ain’t rich.
1/4 billion, yes, you’re rich. 1/2 billion, of course, you’re rich. Billionaire, who can doubt you’re rich.
Over a billion, you’re filthy rich and should give me some. ;)
A paid off house, a couple of 401(k)s, a brokerage account and it’s not hard to be a ‘millionaire. ‘
If she has $1 million outside of that then I'm impressed.
I’m the first millionaire of the family and don’t let them BS you, it’s pretty freakin sweet.
According to a constant dollar calculator, $1 million in 1994 would be $2.12 million in 2024. It shows the same result for 1995 to 2025.
Unless you can use the word ‘billion’ in the description of wealthiness, you ain’t rich.
There used to be a TV show when I was a child, where an anonymous fatcat would find a worthy recipient to hand over a check for $1,000,000. Today, that check would have to be somewhere between $10-20,000,000 to have the same wealth-generating effect.
Also, before the war, the average Japanese made maybe 5-10 yen a month. Today, a 1,000,000 yen equals maybe a month’s salary of the junior management class; in Japan you have to be a trillionaire to be rich.
It’s not what you have, it is what you make. Most of my millionaire friends were teachers. Two teachers’ pensions and a 403b. They live like kings.
In the past 60 years inflation has added a zero to every dollar value, so a millionaire now is like someone with $100,000 back then.
Well duh, 1 million today isn’t the same as a million 30 years ago. What kind of idiot wrote this article? Certainly not anybody with a calculator.
I would guess that almost every dual income couple that has been working and contributing to a 401(k) has $1 million. The only question is how to make that last through retirement.
But $1 million in investments, with a 4% annual withdrawal strategy, is just $40K to live on that year. So you need to either have a low expense spending habit and debts paid off, or more investments to withdraw from (to have higher spending habits and live it up more). If I'm comfortable enough to fully retire before my wife and I are old enough to start collecting SS, then we won't worry about the politics of SS. SS will be gravy on top, not something we depend on.
That's also the reason for having lots of solar and doing most of our driving in the EV. One of the expenses we've taken control of is energy. With only a small portion of our energy consumption having to be bought from the energy market that the left always heavily distorts, that's one less expense I worry about in retirement.
I remember as a kid calculating how much $1 million would be worth when I retired. At that time (probably in the late ‘80s) $330,000 at that time was the equivalent of what $1 million dollars is today. Meaning, $1 million ain’t worth anything near what it used to be.
I must have watched it in syndication, I was six when the show ended
I must have watched it in syndication, I was six when the show ended
That classic television show was called The Millionaire.
John Beresford Tipton is a multi-billionaire, and among the things he does with his money is to give away $1 million to people he doesn't know. Every week Tipton, who is never seen, instructs his assistant, Michael Anthony, to deliver a check to to the person he chose--and ask each to sign an agreement to never tell anyone how s/he got the money. Also shown is how the recipients' lives are changed.One of the strict conditions for the gift was that the recipient was not allowed to divulge to anyone how he had come by the money. In several instances, this was an important plot point, and in some cases, the recipient was compelled to renounce the bequest (e.g., because doing so provided him with an alibi he desperately needed to avoid imprisonment).
Regards,
I remember it, but I was in the single-digits years old when it first ran, so I must have watched reruns too.
Marvin Miller, who played Michael Anthony, got his start in television in “Space Patrol” in 1951.
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