How Rich Are You?

[Dan.Linehan]

How rich are you? Find out here.

Global Rich List

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

Originally Posted by Dan.Linehan

How rich are you? Find out here.

Global Rich List

Woah.

Major eye opener.

[Dave Kaminski]

You're in the TOP 0.91% richest people in the world!

That's disgusting. It makes me sick!

And it's only taking into account last year's income..

[Angela]

I don't have any significant income at the moment, so that website lists me among the poorest of the poor.

But -- good fortune for me -- I am aware that I am limitless abundance, rich beyond my childhood dreams. I have everything I want, and I want everything I have (at least, after my drop-off trip to Goodwill this afternoon.)

[schola]

I have a negative income of about $10,000 a year due to college so I'm at the bottom.

"You could spend $700 on that new flatscreen TV, or you could buy Schola a 3 credit-hour course to help him obtain a degree he does not really care about."

[Dannyboy1]

If I'm there, how horribly is the wealth distributed in this world??? That means that the people in the top few % have more money than the rest combined, right?

[Dave Kaminski]

Yes but I think it has a negative impact by a sheer force of numbers.

Many people below the top 20% still eat and drink and sleep; this is all that is necessary in life. Their cost of living is much much lower than ours; this comes with negative and positive things, though.

[ilovetoday]

I am a lucky person

[Doku]

Hmm. Not too sure how much faith I would put in that... I'm supposedly in the top 0.001%, but MANY of my friends make more money than I do.

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

Originally Posted by Doku

Hmm. Not too sure how much faith I would put in that... I'm supposedly in the top 0.001%, but MANY of my friends make more money than I do.

Yes, but there are billions of people in the world, most of them in poverty (or at the very least, making much less than you I'm sure).

[Savage]

The way I read the output is this:

"You're among the top 0.001% value producers in the world! Keep doing what you're doing!"

Many of the richest people in the world clearly aren't saints, but consider how much they collectively created during their lifetimes. Sure, there's some negative output, but there's a tremendous amount of positive output too, especially in the tech sector. How many others are willing to dedicate themselves to creating those kings of changes?

Btw this tool seems to lose accuracy after USD $200,000 per year. From $200,000 to $200,001 it leaps from top 0.01% to top 0.001% and never changes after that.

[Erin Pavlina]

The tool can't be correct because it says there are 107,000 people richer than me but there are millions of millionaires and I am not a millionaire so it doesn't have accurate data.

[Dannyboy1]

Originally Posted by Erin Pavlina

The tool can't be correct because it says there are 107,000 people richer than me but there are millions of millionaires and I am not a millionaire so it doesn't have accurate data.

It didn't seem accurate to me either. There is no way I'm in the top 11% of people in the world. How would they even obtain this data? Maybe they're collecting the data as people put in the numbers or something? Like every time someone puts in a number, it adds one person and the amount they make and run it through the computations? Even then, I can't believe I'm that high on the list... Who runs the site? What are the credentials? Anyone could put that thing up and claim anything.

[Dan.Linehan]

True story. There are millions of millionaires.

There are literally millions of millionaires in the United States. In fact, according to this 2005 article from MarketWatch, 8.9% of Americans are millionaires. That translates to roughly 2.6 million people.

Yet, if you type $200,000 into this tool it says there are only 786,570 people who make more. Something definitely wrong there.

I emailed them and let them know.

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

I think it's definitely true that the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of the overall population. But if this calculator is not on the up and up that only hurts the cause they are supposedly trying to forward.

[Savage]

The tool is based on income, not net worth. You can build a net worth of a million dollars or more w/o having a high income, such as by saving and investing for decades.

Erin and I aren't millionaires in terms of hard assets, but based on what our business is likely worth, we probably have more than $1M net worth already. If someone bought StevePavlina.com for $1M, they'd make a very healthy return even if they never posted any new content and just ran the site into the ground. Various online estimators have valued the site between $1.6M and $7.2M.

I prefer to think of wealth in terms of what is created (i.e. number of articles, books, hours of audio, original ideas shared, etc) as opposed to what is acquired (assets, income, cash).

[firefly]

You can find their methodology here. That page states:

The Global Rich List calculations are based on figures from the World Bank Development Research Group. To calculate the most accurate position for each individual we assume that the world's total population is 6 billion¹ and the average worldwide annual income is $5,000².

So yes, they're using quick and dirty calculations, but I suspect it's about as reasonably accurate as you could hope for.

Based on the table on that page anyone making over $47,500 is in the top 1%. Even if that's way off and such a person is only in the top 10%, it still conveys the message that most of us are a lot better off than we realize.