Prosperity Anxiety

While considering getting rich (and why you want to get rich), consider what prosperity anxiety it creates in today’s culture. While getting rich is everyone’s dream, few people know what they’d do with all that money. But first, let’s look at how much money you need to be rich.

Prosperity Anxiety: Is There an Official Number?

To be considered a millionaire, you must have a million bucks. It’s as simple as that. I mean, there are other considerations, and one of them is: Can you maintain your millionaire status if you just crossed the line between pauper and millionaire recently? To maintain it, you must have an annual income of $100,000. If you married the person of your dreams, you must now have 2 million in the bank and an annual salary of $250,000 to call yourselves a “millionaire couple.”

Unfortunately, a million bucks is rather blase by today’s standards. Charles Schwab says you must have $2.2 million to be rich. So, if you’re a couple, does that mean you need $4.4 million? I guess that the semantics make everybody look insignificant, wealth-wise or otherwise. Grubby, even.

The sensibility in the annual numbers is that you should enjoy your rich person status and have a lifestyle that takes two hundred grand to support.

To mitigate your prosperity anxiety, you could live like a hermit and walk dogs for a living, making an abysmal annual income, but since you don’t live beyond your budget, you will have over 2 million bucks in your bank accounts after twelve months.

You’re still rich, even if your 2 million bucks is like an ATM, limited to distributing only the interest your 2 Million bucks earn, not the principal. The principal must be preserved! In this imaginary scenario, the ATM says as much when you try to access the principal.

It matters to some people, so that’s the last dollar amount I heard. All that does is set the floor for being rich. At least in America, the ceiling is as infinite as the stars late at night, despite your odds.

Prosperity Anxiety: A Single Person With Money

It’s not hard to imagine a single person saying nothing short of two million bucks would make them happy. Still, people with less than a million bucks believe they’re rich, so clearly, the definition of a rich person is relative. What are the variables that determine how rich is rich?

• Location. This one is tied to your cost of living.
• Cost of Living
• Income for their particular profession

Many professionals consider themselves wealthy because many people in their professions are wealthy. It’s more about possibilities in their life compared to your average homeless person’s prospects.

Professionals tend to live rich as well, seeing their income gobbled up by lifestyle expenses, and a few of them live beyond their means, relying on forms of debt to maintain it.

Prosperity Anxiety and Net Worth?

A dictionary definition of net worth is the total wealth that someone has, including all assets and liabilities. With today’s financial software, it’s not hard to know one’s net-worth just by looking at their smartphone.

So, net worth includes the cash value of everything you own, including your home, cars, furniture, cash in the bank, and money in various savings accounts, including retirement and rainy day accounts. Digging around in the cushions of your furniture for loose change could be described as investigating your net worth. By searching, you discover everything you have of value and subtract your liabilities from it. That’s your net worth. Net worth is just another word for wealth.

In the formula for whether you’re wealthy, by most accepted standards, net worth must be $2.2 million. Your income should be around $250,000.

Can I Stay Rich Forever?

Truthfully, this sounds like a silly question. The more wealth you have, the more cushion between you and a state of poverty. Yet, for all the financial services, banking services, and leveraged muscle the rich have, many exhibit severe anxiety over remaining wealthy.

Many fret about the financial issues. Most people fret about retirement and the size of their bank accounts. Many nouveau riche come from, as the rock star David Bowie described it, a place he’d never want to return to. Meaning a place of dullness.

It might be an American phenomenon, the new rich fearing their past will rise up and take them back. Most Americans come from what might be described as “Sh#@ holes” somewhere.

A Swedish-American example

I have four Swedish grandparents, for instance, and I’m pretty sure 75% fled Sweden as economic refugees, fleeing famine, and found their prospects improved in the new world.

There’s a myth about Scandinavian people who came to America. When they arrived, the myth says, they spoke American English forever after, even to each other. It’s a myth, but as a person of Swedish descent, I can testify that I do not know a word of the Swedish language and spent most of my youth ignorant of where Sweden even was on a map.

Swedes can be mean and selfish, maybe explaining why they’re socialist. After Trump said stuff, Swedes have asked my relatives, “What sh@#hole in Sweden did you come from?” It startled my relatives and even angered them. So, perhaps my ancestors gave us a great gift, never speaking Swedish again after arriving in America: The gift of no memories of awful poverty.

But if some form of poverty is where you started, and you’re rich now, chances are you’re anxious. Could it be about the past, reaching out with sticky fingers to take you back?

Dealing with Prosperity Anxiety

So, What to do about your existential angst after you grow rich?

• Accept that you’re rich. Start acting like the rich, thinking like them, dressing like them, consuming like them. It’s who you are. There’s as much bliss in numbers as there is misery.
• Generate a budget and stick to it. Your budget should not be tight. Be generous with yourself. Spending money is very spiritual, and you should feel the spiritual benefit of it.
• Set up emergency and other funds so your future is ensured. That includes funds for retirement, education, legacy, and rainy days.
• Understand your investment portfolio. You took the time to get sound advice on investing. You have an investment plan, so start getting to know it. Don’t stress your understanding of your investments off anyone else, a spouse, planner, or lawyer. Know it yourself.
• Monitor your wealth. Make daily checks on your accounts and demand answers when things don’t look right.

How Europeans Build Family Wealth

To consider how to build ancestral wealth, let’s look at Europe. Experts say the key to building ancestral wealth in Europe is to leave the estate only to the most capable heir, one heir, usually the eldest child, and let this sole heir dole out crumbs to the rest of the brood.

Prosperity Anxiety: Wealthy Vs. Rich

Observers say that American society has four tiers or castes, and even the wealthy have castes. One is the ultra-rich, who have enjoyed old money for decades and whose wealth is so astronomical they can’t even measure it.

Then there’s the super-rich who have billions of dollars but weren’t born to it.

Then there’s just the plain wealthy. People with tens of millions of dollars, with a snoozy history, but not the story of the fabulously wealthy, but at times hanging on as poorer relatives to the super-rich.

Finally, there’s the upper middle class, a collection of bourgeoise pretensions to values things like church, family, job, work ethic, etc. Mundane in the extreme. Professionals occupy this group. Needless to say, they suffer prosperity anxiety a lot.

If you liked my article, consider signing up for my newsletter below: