Wealthiest 10% of Irish households have as much wealth as all others

chuchuchu

The older generation who bought houses in the 80s, early 90s, would of saw their networth 10x, just by sitting on their hole, with all this money printing going on.

supue

€518B wealth held by the top 10% of households. 1.841m households in Ireland, so 10% of these have an average wealth of €2.813m to arrive at this figure. Obviously skewed by the super wealthy, would expect entry point for top 10% to be closer to €2m.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121869406#Comment_121869406

In 2022, 12% of households had a net wealth of 1 million or over as per the Central Bank's research. Probably a bit higher now given the subsequent increase in property prices.

Tow

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121868648#Comment_121868648

10x. It has increased a lot more than that. My parents house was 3 times a single junor civil service salary. Now it is worth over a million.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121867564#Comment_121867564

I feel that there is sometimes a narrative that folks dont need to own their own home and it's ok to rent forever.

Whereas in reality, for a lot of folks, it is not.

Scipri0

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121870431#Comment_121870431

That's right, but have you noticed that most of the people that say it's okay to rent, don't rent themselves? They have a home of their own. What they want is to turn housing into a subscription service just to make more money.

beachhead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121866297#Comment_121866297

Too true.

beachhead

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121868113#Comment_121868113

325 billion and counting

rob316

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121866568#Comment_121866568

Exactly in my experience the wealthiest pay little tax.

Tax is for little people.

gym_imposter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121868375#Comment_121868375

Ireland is a wealthy country by any measure, now if you measure wealth by natural resources ?, then no but using that yardstick, Congo is extremely wealthy and Singapore extremely poor

mariaalice

We are a wealthy country nobody is living in an economic hell hole.

The big issues here is housing and the amount of 'wealth' tied up in housing.

SharkMX

While we are moaning about how wealthy people compared to us have it all and should give it to us.

Someone on the dole and rent allowance in Ireland is richer than 99% of Africans. Maybe they should send all that money they get from the government money to Africa.

Some incomes in this country are basic, including many public service ones. If you don’t inherit there isn’t a hope of getting a mortgage on one of these incomes, not a hope. That is the consequence of the type of capitalism we have built in this country.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121878137#Comment_121878137

If property were realistically priced we mighn’t be quite as “wealthy” a country. Some of our wealth is “printed money” as someone alluded to above.

Former Former Former

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you include property value in the definition of 'wealth', and property is by far the biggest type of wealth, then obviously home owners will be the wealthiest people in the country.

But it's not particularly meaningful. Some lad who bought his council house back in the 80s and is now living off the state pension would be regarded as very wealthy by this measure, simply because his house is now worth 500k, even though he might have very low disposable income and no other assets.

Bit of a nothing story really.

Bob Marley Park

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121866273#Comment_121866273

About 10%?

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121912335#Comment_121912335

I don't think that person would fall in to the categiry we are talking about. Many people on pensions with ordinary valued houses in fall in the middle.

The top 10 % are not just homepwners, they are wealthy homeowners.

There are people living outside of Dublin in homes that would not be worth as much as a home in top Dublin locations who are millionaires through business ventures. Some inherited wealth.

Many choose not to flaunt it for obvious reasons.

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121868375#Comment_121868375

No no not the rest of the population, just 13.1% of them... much better.

https://www.socialjustice.ie/publication/poverty-focus-2023#:~:text=One%20in%20every%20eight%20people,households%20that%20were%20experiencing%20poverty.

Bob Marley Park

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121913419#Comment_121913419

The idea that this 10% is mostly elderly homeowners, raises two issues; owning a home makes you wealthy? Only (less than) 10% own a home?

There's a massive wealth gap.

dubliniift

This is almost true for many countries. Nothing new or exclusive to Ireland.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121913720#Comment_121913720

? Maybe not getting your post but thats not what I said at all..

I believe the top 10% are some wealthy landowners but it is mainly those in big business or tech.

The occasional pad in Killiney etc would push one or or two into that bracket (is it above 2m?) but many of these would have been wealthy to start with.

Or people who invested in property in the 80s and 90s.

Yes its a big gap alright.

Most elderly people lucky to have a house, never mind mortgage paid off before they draw their pension, and usually have to help their adult children with accommodation or deposits as well as pay their iwn bills.

Would be ok but not wealthy by any measure.

Think the only difference between our gen and the next is the lack of housing despite the very good jobs market.

Bob Marley Park

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121914089#Comment_121914089

I was asking my own questions. Some where saying these wealthy people are regular folk who own their house a long time.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121914873#Comment_121914873

Ok. See now.

But they are not wealthy people. Just because a house has escalated in value over the years does not change its size or the money left in pockets after bills and mortgage paid.

Saying these are wealthy people is maybe a paper excercise.

But the gap exists between these people and the top10%

The wealthy top 10% are people with real wealth not just a house.

Geuze

The wealthiest 10% own 33% of the housing.

Geuze

Here is a chart on the composition of net welath, by deciles.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915105#Comment_121915105

As the charts posted by Geuze show, this used to be true, but is less so now. Back in 2013, for the top 10% housing wealth represented less than a third of their aggregate wealth; now, it's more than half.

But, yeah, to be in the top 10% you are still likely to have signifacant non-housing assets. By far the largest component of the non-housing wealth is business assets, so the top 10% mainly get their by owning their own business. (I assume that "business assets" includes farmland.)

What's really interesting is the comparison between the charts for the bottom 50%, and for the 40% above that. For both of them, gross assets are largely represented by housing, and the difference between being in the bottom 50% or the next 40% is that the bottom 50% have signficant mortgage debt, relative to their housing assets, while the next 40% do not. Which in turn suggests that graduating from the bottom 50% to the top 40% — once you own a house — is largely a matter of time. Stay in your house, keep paying the mortgage, and at the back end of the loan period your net wealth rises rapidly. And that suggests that, for homeowners, which wealth decile you fall into is going to be strongly correlated with age.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915350#Comment_121915350

Yes. Those graphs clarify it very well.

Thanks Geuze and Peregrinus.

And your wealth increasing in old age very nuch depends on whether you can pay the mortgage off.. Or have to remortgage to help your adult kids get a deposit / pay for a hone of their own / pay exorbitant rent.

Approx 50% of deposits for new homes obtained this way.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915355#Comment_121915355

Yes. Because of house price inflation — the price of houses rises faster than the price of other assets — more and more of the country's net wealth is represented by housing wealth. If you do own a house, your wealth inexorably rises, with no particular effort on your part, so long as you don't default on your mortgage; if you don't own a house, it becomes harder and harder to acquire one. Those who do own houses will tend to use the resulting wealth they accrue in later life to assist their children in acquiring houses, because what else would you do with your wealth? It's a form of advance inheritance, if you like.

You make the point earlier that high wealth and a high income are not the same thing. This is very true. With so much wealth represented by housing, most homeowners will be at their wealthiest when they pay off their mortage — their house will have appreciated substantially in value over the years, and they now have little or no debt to set against it. But this tends to happen at about the time of life when you retire, so your income goes down as you move from earning a wage to drawing a pension. So relatively high-wealth, low income households are a real thing.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915363#Comment_121915363

But definitely these households would not be falling into the top 10% ??

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915373#Comment_121915373

Some would though, almost by definition, most would not.

To be in the top 10% it's likely that, as well as owning a valuable house largely free of mortgage, you also own a business, or an interest in a business. You can, of course, continue to own an interest in a business even after you have retired from active participation in it. So there would be some households headed by retired people in the top 10%.

I'm thinking most households in the top 10% are likely to be headed people who are in their 50s or older; it takes a while to build up that kind of wealth. But that's very different from saying that most households headed people who are in their 50s or older are in the top 10%; of course they aren't.