Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind

Re:Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind by baxter001 on Tuesday August 05, 2008 @03:03AM (#267244)

I started to doubt the wisdom of the article when I read:

"To enter the nation's top 1%, you need more than $5 million."

I know 'more than' isn't the same as 'greater than or equal to' but doesn't this indicate 1 in 100 Americans are multimillionaires?

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Re:Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind by gojomo on Tuesday August 05, 2008 @04:32AM (#267309)

The article is pretty sloppy with numbers and definitions. There's no indication their survey of 3000 is representative of all pentamillionaires, for example.

But, there were about 106 million 'households' in the US in the 2000 census. Perhaps there are 110-115 million households today. If 930,000 of those households have a net worth over $5 million, that's very roughly in the 1% range.

Wikipedia's article on {Millionaire} suggests about 9 million households have a million-dollar net worth, so 930,000 at the 5-million level seems plausible.

So it's not that 1-in-100 Americans are pentamillionaires as individuals, but almost 1-in-100 live in a pentamillionaire household.

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Re:Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind by reitzensteinm on Tuesday August 05, 2008 @03:11AM (#267245)

It then goes on to say that there are 930,000 of them.

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