By Clark Troy

"How affluent Americans systematically underestimate what they have.”

I was talking to someone the other day with a net worth of $10 million or so who said with a straight face “I’m not wealthy.” I checked myself from correcting her then and there, though I really wanted to. It’s difficult for people who were brought up viewing themselves as middle class and still perceive themselves as such to come to grips with the fact that they are by any objective measure wealthy. We are all susceptible to benchmarking ourselves against the fortunes of the very richest of us: tech magnates, hedge fund managers, professional athletes, movie stars, and so on. Their world seems so enchanting and so on view everywhere.

People’s tendency to compare their status to only the very wealthiest obscures the fact that there are lots of people in the United States with plenty of money. A 2022 study by the Richmond branch of the Federal Reserve Bank found that the median net worth of someone in the 90th percentile of US households was about $1.56 million. To be in the 99th percentile, a household needed about $11.6 million. That’s a lot of money. Not Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk money, but a lot of it nonetheless, and this survey was done before capital markets recovered from their abysmal 2022 and were infused by AI happy juice in 2023 and 2024. So my guess is that someone with $10 million is probably in the top 2-3% of US households by wealth in 2025.

If we further break down wealth by age, we can see that a large portion of Americans approaching retirement have squirrelled a fair amount of money away in homes and other investible assets. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the Fed’s triennial survey of US Consumer Finances, more than 20% of US households between the ages of 55-74 had greater than $1 million in assets, with slightly more than half of those having net worths in excess of $2 million. Amongst those with college degrees, the numbers are even more pronounced. About a quarter of households helmed by college graduates aged 55-74 have more than $2 million.

It’s right about here that the financial monkey brain that infects so many of us starts to chatter away at us: “You see, if that many of my peers have the same amount of money as I do, that means I am in fact not wealthy.” That’s because we all too often conceive of wealth differentially, in how it compares to others’ wealth and how it projects status.

But that’s not the right way to think about wealth at all. The fact is that not just the proverbial top 1% but an awful lot of Americans are rather affluent. Never before has a there been a society with such a large number of affluent people. Which is far from saying that wealth is equitably distributed or that all Americans are wealthy. The 2022 Richmond Fed study found that US households in the 10th percentile had effectively no net worth and that median household net worth was about $162,000. Not all Americans are affluent, but a lot of us are.

On a global scale, the number of Americans possessing substantial wealth is even more striking. The Credit Suisse 2025 Global Wealth Report estimates that about 1.6% of the world’s population owns total assets exceeding $1 million. Which means that of about a fifth of US households headed by people aged 55-74 (and almost half of the college-educated amongst them) are in the global top 1-2%.

But that’s not how Americans feel. All too often even the pretty affluent feel like they are strapped for cash and their taxes should be lower but that “the 1%” should be paying more in taxes, giving more money away and generally carrying the burden of funding public goods. Our perception of our relative financial instability probably explains why charitable giving remains stable in the neighborhood 2% of GDP, despite changes to the tax regime. We don’t feel like we can afford to give more. The really rich people should take care of that, just like they’re the ones who should be paying more taxes too.

What people who are objectively but not subjectively wealthy are really saying is that we don’t appreciate what we have. That we’re not grateful. All too often we need some sort of focusing event drive home for them the fact that we are wealthy. Cancer, for example, will do that for a person. Since about 2 out of 5 of us will have some sort of cancer experience along the way, maybe more of us will get there in time.

This article originally appeared on Straight Edge Finance. Click here to read more from Clark Troy.