A few months ago I had a bunch of credit card points built up that I needed to use. There wasn’t really anything I wanted/needed available for the points I had, so I used them all on something like 12 magazine subscriptions. Just a weird mishmosh of what there was to choose from – Esquire, Rolling Stone, House Beautiful…crap like that. I do dig magazines still and I’m going to miss them once the rest of the world figures out that they’re an obsolete medium for distributing information and entertainment, but I digress.

One of the magazines I got was Smart Money. The cover story this month is titled, “How To Make $5 million.”

It’s an interesting read about the new wealth in America and the types of people that get there. (there’s a condensed version on their website, but it’s not nearly as good as the print version)

But the one thing that struck me in the whole article was this:

It also pays to consider what the rich are not: the proverbial frugal, steady, “Millionaire Next Door,” described in the 1996 bestseller of the same name. For one thing, a million bucks hardly ranks you among the elite these days; one in 12 U.S. households already has at least $1 million tucked away in home equity and other assets. You can’t swing a dead cat in a local Starbucks without hitting a half-dozen millionaires. To enter the nation’s top 1 percent, you need more than $5 million and even then you’ve got plenty of company.

Interesting stuff right there alone and that’s just a part of one paragraph of the ten page article. The thing is, I never had hard numbers laid out in front of me like this, but this is something I always sensed* – that there are a lot of people doing very well for themselves anymore. To me the old milestones don’t apply anymore and this article kind of says that.

A millionaire? Pfft. Call me when you have five.

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*On a completely unrelated note, it also reassures me that when another one of those cost, pricing or financial threads come around on CoasterBuzz that I’m indeed not the one out of touch with the way things are these days ;)