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To: TheStockFairy who wrote (93519)	10/31/2007 11:07:51 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 306849

Some of the folks who look like loud millionaires have a net worth down near zilch once all the debt is figured in. They are poorer than the meat and potatoes crowd (assuming they aren't really in the billionaire class).

To: TheStockFairy who wrote (93519)	11/5/2007 10:17:23 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Someone here mentioned Richistan as a good read. i mentioned it a few times, i think. the main takeaway i got from it was that there are plenty of extremely leveraged people at every net worth level. plenty of people with $50 million net worth who feel nervous about their situation. why? because they spend $8 million a year so their lifestyle is unsustainable unless they can manage to quadruple their net worth once again. and then he goes and finds somebody worth $1 billion who nevertheless feels poor because he can't buy as big a yacht as some Saudi prince. so, i got two lessons: 1. people will never be satisfied with how much they have. 2. this is especially true in America, where even extremely rich people spend more than they earn and live precarious, unsustainable lifetyles. and, since we know that if something can't go on forever it won't go on forever, Lesson 2 implies that we will see a bunch of people fall out of Richistania. probably many clinging to the lower rungs with 20-50 million will be hosed out in the now unfolding credit disaster. focused too much on billionaires as opposed to the meat and potatoes 1-10 million millionaires. The book said that those were the poor folk. they are poor compared to the people with 10x, 100x, 300x as much money. the author's point was that up to 10 mil you are still just upper-middle-class (especially so in places like Silicon Valley). there is a separate stratosphere of very rich people that begins somewhere north of 10 million and gets more rarified the higher you go. these are the people who have five mansions on different continents with a staff of hundreds. they are more like corporations than individual families. so in a very substantial sense the people at 10mil and below don't really inhabit "Richistania", even though they may have a net worth 100x greater than most of their upper-middle-class peers, and 10x greater than entry-level millionaires. on the other hand, i don't really get the impression that life is that much greater in Richistania than in upper-middle-class-stania. just more complicated.