Fascinating question, and it will probably be hard to give a clear answer to it. It depends whether you believe in things like the Law of Attraction or not.
Myself I don't cling to religions or belief-systems, but I'm more of a enjoyer of symbols. Now I have a book about buddhism, I never finished it completely. But I did find a little jewel inside of it. The book talked about what Buddha said. He seemed to have said that everyone has the same amount of suffering. This can be on spiritual/material/emotional and every other possible way.
This really struck home for me since I never bought into the idea of "Poor and homeless people have a worse life then people who have a house and money. People from all different levels of life all have their own experiences, problems and issues to deal with. Someone who is homeless can be very close with family, where a rich person would be lonely and burned-out.
Normally we value family and friends higher than money, so why is having less money worser than having no friends and family?
But then we get to the second point, do problems equal suffering? Some people seem to have all the problems, but don't suffer by them. And some people seem to always suffer, while having no problems.
I think you can't generalize the problems/suffering concept, but I do believe that it really depends on every person how he or she deals with problems.
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