What salary does someone have to earn in order to for you to consider them 'rich'

Ray Palmer wrote: »

No it is being pedantic obviously meant in the common use of "rich" and not an academic meaning about assets.

by academic you seem to mean.....the common meaning of the word....?


anyways...a person on a six figure income is well off, depending on how long they have had it, how long they can expect to stay on it, and what their living expenses are

you literally, academically, non-pedantically cannot answer the thread question any more than the above imo

If I am forced to choose from the poll I would say 500k, since this would be about 250k net a year ie. about 21,000 net a month. I think there are very few people, in this country in any case, who wouldn't consider a consistent income like that to constitute being rich.

It really is so subjective though. There are people living in rich areas of New York for whom 20k a month would just keep them ticking over. But that is because what they consider to be the basics eg. prime living location, private schooling, comfortable lifestyle etc. costs a lot to maintain. Other people in the US would be rich on 10k net a month.

I don't know about anyone else, but my subjective sense of what constitutes being "rich" has become inflated in the last 10-15 years. For instance, in the mid 2000s I would have thought somebody worth even 2 or 3 million was rich and say 20 million very rich! A sum like 100 plus million like Dolores McNamara won back then was head-spinning in its enormity to me back then.

Nowadays I would consider someone worth 2 or 3 million to be comfortably off, set up for an easy life with their house, car, pension, kids college etc. looked after but still needing to work and not able to indulge in extravagant spending very often. Someone worth 20 million is rich but has to watch how they spend their money to ensure they stay that way. 120 million is still without a doubt very rich and unless you are totally reckless you always will be.

My inflated estimations of what constitutes being rich is, I believe, the result of a combination of things.
- Everything becomes less heady as you progress from your teenage years through your twenties, and the power of a large sum of money to strike awe into your diminishes a you age.
- As information became exponentially more readily available to us all since about 2006-2008, so too did information about wealth, the lifestyles of the rich, just how rich the rich are etc. My sense of how "rich" a "millionaire" is, for instance, has been crushed down when I see footballers being sold for 100 million euro, or billionaires being worth tens of billions.
- There ARE more rich people, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population, so being worth even the inflation adjusted "equivalent" of say 2 million punts from the mid 90s (say 8 to 10 million euro nowadays?) probably doesn't produce the same psychological effect of "being rich" the former sum would have.
- The baseline standard of living as conceived by people in recent years is much higher than it was even during the Celtic tiger. Most people now can afford whatever foods they want in the likes of Aldi and eating out and fast food are no longer only occasional treats. People expect hot showers daily, comfortable beds, instant entertainment from technological advances. People fly regularly on city breaks, something not done in the past. Formerly luxury cars like Audis and BMWs driven by the middle and lower income strata of society. Girls and guys of all social strata groomed like rich spoilt brats and unabashedly so, where even during the Celtic tiger era such self-indulgence was scorned and socially unacceptable. So when the baseline is so high, and the dopamine reward systems of the lower income strata of society are already saturated, money has far less power to create a subjective sense of enhanced satisfaction than it once did.

I'm a fan of the "you're rich if you live somewhere you like, can go eat what you like when you like, holiday where you like, and not be concerned about money." idea.

Above that sort of lifestyle, I'd start to call someone wealthy. As in, a few million to play with in business or on a boat or something.