Bolt
Evan Prodromou$100K or less
About $1M
About $10M
$100M or more
Poll ended at .
Feel free to give your reasoning!
Jonathan@evan $1M sounds like a lot if you're thinking in pre-year 2000 dollars, but these days, it isn't that much anymore
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-estate-million-dollar-homes-at-record-redfin/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-estate-million-dollar-homes-at-record-redfin/
A record share of U.S. homes are worth $1 million or more. See which cities have the most.
Many million-dollar properties are no longer considered luxury homes, with almost 1 in 10 U.S. houses costing at least that.
@jonathan Yeah, my searches give about $300K-400K median home price in the developed world, with cities like Toronto, Sydney and San Francisco having *median* home prices around $1M. So, owning your own home with a paid-off mortgage is putting you well into the $1M range for a lot of the world, without any other wealth.
Court Cantrell won't conform
UrsaRight now 150K seems to be the single person income in the US where you can be comfortably middle class, make savings, and, overall have a life free of financial worry. Multiply that by an average lifespan of 80, gives us $12M as what a person would need in their lifetime to be happy and unburdened. More feels greedy, assuming once you get it, you intend not to work for an income for the rest of your life.
Pete Prodoehl 🍕@UrsaAshBear @evan "150K seems to be the single person income in the US where you can be comfortably middle class"
Oh shit... I didn't realize I was *that* poor!
Our dual-person household income isn't even that much... though we are in the midwest of the US.
PapyrusBrigade@UrsaAshBear I don't think multiplying gross income x lifespan makes sense as a measure of personal wealth. It assumes you would have no tax, no rent, no food cost, etc. Personal wealth would more commonly refer only to assets net of debt.
The common rule of thumb for retirement is post retirement income would be 4% of savings. At a 70% post-retirement income, that means pre-retirement accumulated wealth would be 17x income. Which is much less than the 80x income you've assumed.
K. You have your reasonable wealth fantasy, I'll have mine.
🏳️🌈 Happy Pride-onphan! 🏳️⚧️@evan Nothing above $999,999 per person.
Enough to be set for life, but not overwhelmingly rich to the point of mental illness that we see with these shillionaires.
@mast0d0nphan the median home price in the developed world is about $400K, with a lot of variation. In Toronto, Sydney, and San Francisco, it's over $1M. So, $1M is enough to own your home and to live off savings with a $50K/year lifestyle for 12 years.
Magnesium@evan @mast0d0nphan the $50k/year is an interesting figure. I'm imagining this is per person? Is this after expenses or including them?
@magnesium @mast0d0nphan it's the median income in the developed world.
ZakIf your threshold is "set for life", which I'm interpreting as able to spend the median income yearly without earning more, a million dollars is set for 12 years in the USA based on the median income of $83,730 in 2024.
Someone with 60 years left to live would need about $5M in a savings account that keeps up with inflation. That's based on an overly simplistic view of net worth as liquid cash, which is not how it works for most people with a middle-class or higher level of wealth.
jeff
@jeff so, you're saying about $100M is OK, and $1B or more is not?
Jonathan T@evan Based on property costs alone in the current circumstances, anyone living in a remotely decent-sized and quality home is going to be closer to being a millionaire in terms of 'wealth' than they are someone with 100K. Therefore the lowest bound is too low.
@JonnyT I'm still waiting for the footnote
@evan Oops. An artefact that I will remove. I was going to say something about making an assumption that we aren't able to change any other parameters in society etc but it was proving too complex for my melting brain to cope with (it's obscenely hot today in London).
@JonnyT aww, you kept me in suspense!
Ryick@evan I’m curious as to why the answers are in dollars rather than percentages above the cost of living. Shouldn’t the acceptable amount of wealth fluctuate as the value of a dollar fluctuates?
@ryick you should do that poll!
Renaigh☭@evan depends on how its acquired, I'd be suspicious of how someone who became a millionaire but usually it just means they were born lucky and we can't control what life we get.
ClickyMcTicker@Renaigh @evan The median net worth for individuals entering retirement age is ~$400k
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/average-net-worth-by-age
That marks the halfway point. If we take some liberties with interpreting that data (just double/halve the population and amount in either direction), that would be the top 25% with $800k by retirement, and thus about 17% of people with $1M by retirement. That’s 1/6 individuals. By that measure, I’m not suspicious of somebody having a million ready for retirement.
I AM suspicious of somebody who has a million by age 30. You don’t get that following a normal person’s path. That would mean graduating college at 22 and making $125k per year with ZERO expenses including the college they just graduated from. It could also be somebody going straight into the trades out of high school and making $85k per year with zero expenses. Each of those requires significant familial support.
@Renaigh The median salary in the developed world is around US$50K and a typical career is about 50 years. Lifetime earnings around $2.5M. So $1M in personal wealth at that point means that someone retained about 40% of their earnings in the form of home equity and a retirement account. Or they retained less as a percentage, but it grew in value over time.
Geoff Coffey@evan @Renaigh If you bought a modest home at the start of that career in many markets, that home alone would be worth well over a million dollars today.
For instance in San Francisco the median home price was around $75k in 1976. If you bought that house then, and did basic maintenance, it would be worth over 2 million today. "retaining" income isn't a very good model for wealth if you assume home ownership (and 401K/IRA would have the same problem).
Kommadieb@evan Minimum wage * debatable factor between 2 and 10 * 12 months * 85 years. So, very roughly, something between 2 and 25M$. So 10 in your poll.
@kommadieb 85 years is a loooooooong career.
@evan does it sound more reasonable when I replace "minimum wage" with "basic income"?
@kommadieb sure? I'm just not sure where 85 years came from, except maybe average lifespan. Most of us start working in our teens and retire in our 60s, so I think a 50-year career is more reasonable.
Thijmer@evan I'm okay with people having up to 3 million, but IMO having that much money comes with serious moral responsibilities. If they take their responsibility and do good for the community and help people in need, or donate to important things that aren't profitable, I don't have a problem with them.
baconandcoconut
δανσωWHY @evan do you make polls that have a big gap between the options 😭
My feeling is that it’s between $100K and $1M
@danso I'd respond "about $1M" then.
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@evan Sustaining my current income level through a 30 year retirement would cost $4.5M.
Of course if we assume that money is invested, I don’t actually need the full amount on hand at any given time, but definitely more than $1M in the bank upon retirement would be desirable.
So $10M doesn’t feel outlandish for someone to have, allowing them what is very much a middle class life.
That’s where I landed.
Michael 🇺🇦@evan Question is how you define the amount of "wealth". Is it everything that you own or only the amount that you have "at hand"? Means: You can be the owner of a factory that is worth millions in buildings and machines, but you might have got only some 10k on your bank account, because everything above this yozu invest in your company.
@heluecht I didn't use the term "net worth" since I think a person's worth is not only financial, but the idea of "personal wealth" is about the same. All you own, minus all you owe.
@heluecht I think for younger people, having $1M means having a giant pile of cash to spend on parties and speed boats, whereas for middle-aged and older people, it feels like owning your own home and having a retirement account.
Taylor Brooks@evan If we’re talking about a wealth cap as economic policy, the shock to the market even in the $100M scenario would be so extreme that almost everyone would be worse off.
If we’re talking about morality, then I don’t think it’s necessarily immoral to own $100M in assets. But I also don’t think owning a business is inherently immoral. Having that much wealth could also allow you to impactfully fund charities, public institutions, research, or legal funds, etc. that you couldn’t with $10M.
Brian Danger Hicks@evan I figure one can live a comfortably upper middle class life off of the interest and dividends of somewhere in the single digit millions, and I rounded up.
Jessamyn@ckape @evan This was exactly my reasoning (though I rounded down and probably should have gone the other way). I live somewhere where real estate is cheaper than the median but I have very erratic income. I tried to think about what one would need banked or, probably more realistically, invested to be able to not think about money much. I think that's 4-5 mil for a person, more for a family, more if you don't own a home or have a less-than-stable renting environment. More if you have med bills.
@ckape this is an interesting metric!
aeva
⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ stg@evan id say like $50m, $10m was the closest though so i voted that
Darcy Casselman@evan There's a few ways to look at this. I'm going to go with "attempting to exceed this level of wealth will be considered a mental illness and you will be restrained and put into state supervision," which I don't think is a terrible future outcome. So I'm going high. I think $10M is too low for something like that and I'll explain. I'd likely go as high as $1B, but $100M is probably reasonable.
@evan $10M is on the level of a reasonably large farm or small factory. I kinda feel like that something an individual should be able to own, if they've put in the work and made something valuable. Maybe in this speculative future we say that anything this large needs to be some sort of (restrained) corporate entity, but I dunno. I like people owning farms.
@evan I said $10M. I used to despise millionaires but then I learned about billionaires and eventually found out "regular" people I knew were millionaires.
So in 2026 $1M doesn't even seem like that much. (More than I'll ever have, but that's okay, I just need to survive.)
Renae [ ze/hir | she/her ] 
@evan or maybe the problem is with us maintaining the concept of money in the first place
Maybe we should just throw out the idea that we need to earn the supposedly “inalienable” right to life by collecting pieces of paper with old white men’s faces on them
@renae so, less than $100k?
@evan in an ideal world nobody would either have or need money, and $0 is less than $100k so…
IME people with that much money are assholes. $100k is $97.3k more than I’ve ever seen in my life and I don’t trust anyone with that much money
@renae how old are you, roughly? 20s, 30s?
@evan why does that matter?
@renae because people who have been earning and saving for decades are often more used to bigger bank accounts. Median savings at retirement are in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you're not used to being around people with that much money, it might be because you're not around middle-aged or older people.