Is it weird that I’m ok with people in the $50 mill range? Like yeah, they’re stupid rich. But they’re still closer to us than to people with $100 billion. And also, a lot of them just inherited it. Which is also bullshit, but they may not have done any evil to become that rich, necessarily. The question is whether or not they keep up with the evil. Bezos ex wife is a great example as she has spent tons of money on charitable organizations that opposed her ex husbands bullshit. There’s a handful of good, rich people out there, but they’re few, and far between.
We can put a number on the difference between “rich” and “filthy rich”. It’s about $10M.
I say this with regard to the Trinity Study, which backtested a retirement portfolio to see how long it would take for a given withdrawal rate (and adjusting for inflation each year) to fail. It went all the way back to 1925, which means it would have seen boom and bust, high inflation and low. What it comes out saying is that if you withdrawal 2.5% per year of a balanced portfolio, you can live on that indefinitely.
2.5% of $10M is $250k. That’s enough to live very comfortably anywhere you want. Yes, even Manhattan and San Fransisco–lookup median household income for those areas and you’ll see that $250k is far above it. Also, you can live basically anywhere if you do this, so maybe don’t live in a high cost of living area. There’s plenty of nice places to live that are cheaper. That said, if something is keeping you there, you can do it and still live pretty well.
So that’s the limit. Anything above that is just hoarding wealth.
Is it weird that I’m ok with people in the $50 mill range? Like yeah, they’re stupid rich. But they’re still closer to us than to people with $100 billion. And also, a lot of them just inherited it. Which is also bullshit, but they may not have done any evil to become that rich, necessarily. The question is whether or not they keep up with the evil. Bezos ex wife is a great example as she has spent tons of money on charitable organizations that opposed her ex husbands bullshit. There’s a handful of good, rich people out there, but they’re few, and far between.
We can put a number on the difference between “rich” and “filthy rich”. It’s about $10M.
I say this with regard to the Trinity Study, which backtested a retirement portfolio to see how long it would take for a given withdrawal rate (and adjusting for inflation each year) to fail. It went all the way back to 1925, which means it would have seen boom and bust, high inflation and low. What it comes out saying is that if you withdrawal 2.5% per year of a balanced portfolio, you can live on that indefinitely.
2.5% of $10M is $250k. That’s enough to live very comfortably anywhere you want. Yes, even Manhattan and San Fransisco–lookup median household income for those areas and you’ll see that $250k is far above it. Also, you can live basically anywhere if you do this, so maybe don’t live in a high cost of living area. There’s plenty of nice places to live that are cheaper. That said, if something is keeping you there, you can do it and still live pretty well.
So that’s the limit. Anything above that is just hoarding wealth.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.