There are fewer millionaires than you might think!
If you live in a city like New York with everyone is seemingly richer than you, you imagine that there must be millions of millionaires in New York alone. However, many high income individuals seemingly spend to impress and don’t accumulate much wealth. It’s those who lead ordinary lives, work hard and save who end up being millionaires.
According to recent studies there are:
• 24.2 million millionaires, 0.5% of the world’s population
• 81,000 people with assets over $50 million
• 30,000 with assets over $100 million
• 2,800 with assets over $500 million
• 1,000 with assets over $1 billion
I am happy to report that the most common way to get rich is to start a business and 47% of the world’s wealthy people are entrepreneurs.
You can read more on the topic at: http://www.economist.com/node/17929057
Interesting numbers, thx !
Although NY is indeed a millionaire city.
I had read that there’s almost 700K millionaires in NYC alone :
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2010/08/los-angeless-millionaires-recover-but-not-as-quickly-as-new-yorks.html
whereas only 300K+ in France 🙂
I always thought it was the 1 percent that was millionares but now it looks only 0.5 % due to rapid population growth.
Interesting numbers !
Switzerland is the world’s largest by population rate
Hi Fab, those studies -like Forbes rankings- are always extremely conservative and only mark people for whom they can easily identify their assets (stocks, other public holdings).
One example: Forbes shows 1 person from Argentina in its billionaires list. You know the country so you can do the exercise. Try dig into its economic matrix, and you will count at least 15 real billionaires by assets (if not 20), easily. Apply same logic to the whole planet and you get 10k billionaires alone. To say the least
Those figures are completely inaccurate