Having published Just Keep Buying to rave reviews – not least our own – bestselling author Nick Maggiulli is back with The Wealth Ladder (alternative link to the US edition). Here Nick explains why he believes his Wealth Ladder concept is the ideal framework for tracking and improving your financial life.
When I was five years old my father taught me how to play chess. For fun, he’d invite his friends over and have them challenge me to a game. They were always shocked when I won.
Picture it. You’re 27 years old and a kindergartner just crushed your self-esteem with a single word – checkmate.
Jokes aside, I wasn’t a future chess prodigy. My father’s friends were simply terrible at the game.
I stopped playing chess a few years later when my parents split up and didn’t pick it up again until my junior year of high school. I found a renewed interest in the game after playing against a friend, and we decided to start a chess club. To improve my skills, I spent hours studying openings and the best ways to respond to them. My first five to ten moves in a game were often automatic, pulled from memory. My strategy worked and I got better.
But it wasn’t until I entered my first real chess competition that I learned an unforgettable lesson.
When amateurs learn chess, many of them do the same things I did. They memorize openings and hope that their opponent makes a mistake along the way. They win based on good initial positioning and by avoiding simple blunders.
But Victor, one of the star players at my first chess competition, was different. He didn’t play chess like an amateur. Sometimes Victor would start a game with a traditional opening and sometimes he wouldn’t. He’d accept a gambit (the sacrifice of a piece) with one opponent, but completely ignore it with another.
It was like he wasn’t playing the same game as the rest of us.
Here’s the puzzling part though – no matter how much I watched him play, I couldn’t figure out how he did it. I had no frame of reference for his decision making. You’d think that if I kept practicing, I’d eventually be able to compete with Victor, but you’d be wrong. I could not simply take my approach of going through chess openings, do it for hundreds of additional hours, and get to his skill level. My strategy plus time did not equal Victor.
No, what I really needed was to find a different way to play chess altogether.
This is the lesson Victor taught me: Sometimes effort alone doesn’t determine your results. How and where you apply that effort does.
Years later, I realised that the same thing is true when it comes to building wealth.
Thinking different
Having the wrong framework when trying to get ahead financially can leave you spinning your wheels with little to show for it.
Many people try to fix this by working more hours or following the latest financial advice, but they still don’t see a big change. Then they attribute their lack of success to their work ethic, their boss, or bad luck, when their problem has been their approach all along. They’re trying to memorize openings while the Victors of the world pass them by.
As Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, once said, “There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”
Their problem isn’t effort – it’s strategy.
But what if there was a better way? What if there was a new framework for understanding how to build wealth, one that actually worked? Not a get-rich-quick scheme or a one-size-fits-all solution to your money problems, but a new philosophy for thinking about money altogether. What if this system didn’t tell you what to do, but taught you how to think about your finances?
Telling people what to do works fine when they face the same problem again and again. But, this approach doesn’t work with money and wealth, where things are constantly in flux. Interest rates change, our careers change, and our desires change, so why should our strategy for building wealth stay the same?
It shouldn’t. Instead, a better approach would be to have a solid framework to rely upon throughout our long and varied lives.
That framework is what I call the Wealth Ladder.
Introducing the Wealth Ladder
If I gave you $100, would that change your life?
How about $100,000? What about $100 million?
Your answer will depend upon a variety of factors, but most importantly, how much money you have today. For most people, $100 million would fundamentally transform their lifestyle. But for someone like Jeff Bezos, $100 million wouldn’t even register. This simple observation has profound implications for understanding wealth, and how our view of it can change as we acquire more of it.
For the record, when I say ‘wealth’ I am referring to your net worth, or your assets minus your liabilities. That is everything you own (i.e., property, financial assets, cash, etc.) minus everything that you owe to others (i.e., mortgage, student loans, credit card debt, etc.).
The problem is, we’ve been looking at wealth in the wrong way. We’ve assumed that more wealth is better and that it can solve all our problems. We’ve also assumed that more wealth means more personal consumption.
Unfortunately, this is only true in the extremes.
The person with $100,000 can afford a lifestyle that is quite different from the person with only $1,000. However, the person with $500,000 lives nearly identically to the person with $400,000. Though these two people are separated by $100,000, they likely shop at similar stores, drive similar cars, and live in similar homes. In this sense, our enjoyment of wealth isn’t something that goes up with every additional dollar (or $1,000) we get, but something that increases in steps.
From this perspective, wealth isn’t a straight line, it’s a ladder. And each rung of this ladder corresponds with a wealth level that will impact nearly every facet of your financial life.
From how you spend money, to how you earn it and how you invest it, each level of the Wealth Ladder is unique.
What are these wealth levels?
- Level 1 (<$10,000)
- Level 2 ($10,000–$ 100,000)
- Level 3 ($100,000–$ 1 million)
- Level 4 ($1 million– $ 10 million)
- Level 5 ($10 million– $ 100 million)
- Level 6 ($100 million+)
The levels are separated by a factor of 10, because this corresponds with the increase in wealth needed to create a large lifestyle change.
Wealth around the world
You can see these wealth levels with their respective net worth ranges in the chart below.
For example, Level 1 is for those with a net worth less than $10,000, Level 2 is for those with a net worth of $10,000 to $100,000, and so on.
From this we can infer that each level up the Wealth Ladder is exponentially more difficult to reach than the one before it. This explains why the number of people around the world in each level tends to get smaller as we go further up the ladder.
For example, the following chart is a breakdown of the percentage of people in each wealth level around the world and in the United States as of 2023:
As you can see, the majority of people around the world fall in Levels 1-2, with increasingly smaller groups of people in each level above that.
There are roughly 1.5 billion adults in Level 1 (<$10k), but there are only about thirty thousand adults in Level 6 ($100M+). Given the amount of wealth concentrated in the United States, the distribution of people across the Wealth Ladder is shifted upward here. As a result, most households in the U.S. are in Level 3 ($100k-$1M), not Levels 1-2. Despite this upward shift, there are still far more households lower on the Wealth Ladder than higher. For example, there are 56 million U.S. households in Level 3, but only about 10,000 U.S. households in Level 6.
Since such immense fortunes are rare, some people have warped perceptions of wealth and what it means to do well financially.
If we map the different economic classes in the U.S. onto the Wealth Ladder, we can see this more clearly:
- Level 1. Lower class (<$10k)
- Level 2. Working class ($10k–$ 100k)
- Level 3. Middle class ($100k–$ 1M)
- Level 4. Upper middle class ($1M–$ 10M)
- Level 5. Upper class ($10M–$ 100M)
- Level 6. The superrich ($100M+)
From this perspective, you can begin to understand why some people with lots of money don’t feel rich – it’s because they’re looking at higher economic classes or Wealth Levels. People in Level 4 look at people in Levels 5-6 and say, “I’m not rich, they are rich.” Though people in Level 4 are millionaires, they can’t afford to live like the stereotypical rich person depicted in the media and popular culture. Those people, who are in Levels 5-6, can actually afford to fly in private jets and own supercars.
From this simple categorization of wealth into levels, we can also imagine how your financial strategy might change as you move up the Wealth Ladder
For example, the strategy to get you from Level 1 to Level 2 will be fundamentally different from the strategy to get you from Level 5 to Level 6.
How to climb the ladder
This categorisation of wealth into levels also explains why different financial experts give seemingly contradictory advice.
One may argue that budgeting is the key to financial success, while another claims that starting a business is more important. Who is right?
The Wealth Ladder teaches us that both of them are, they are just talking to people at different levels on the Wealth Ladder.
While budgeting can be useful for someone in Level 1 of the Wealth Ladder, it likely won’t make a difference for someone in Level 6. This would classify budgeting as Level 1 strategy. Similarly, starting and scaling a business could help someone in Level 6 build more wealth, but probably isn’t the right strategy for someone in Level 1. This would classify running a business as a higher- level strategy.
Just like a fitness coach would provide different diet and exercise advice to an obese person than to a well-trained athlete, the Wealth Ladder will provide different financial advice based on where you are on your financial journey.
In this way, the Wealth Ladder is a grand unifying framework that will fundamentally change how you think about wealth and how to build it.
Once you’ve grasped the concept of the Wealth Ladder, it will be difficult to look at your finances the same way again. As the saying goes, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Your shift in thinking will influence how you choose a career, how you take risks, and, ultimately, how you live your life. You’ll see that the difference between those who build wealth and those who don’t isn’t necessarily how hard they work. Rather, it’s what strategies they follow and where they focus their time and energy.
Thankfully, you won’t need to guess about where to focus yours. The Wealth Ladder already has the answer.
The Wealth Ladder works
Before we start climbing The Wealth Ladder, let me tell you a little bit about my story.
I grew up in a working-class family in Southern California. My mom was a loan processor. My dad bounced between jobs – limo driver, insurance agent, and more. They divorced when I was young and declared bankruptcy multiple times before I turned eighteen.
This unfortunate set of circumstances meant I had no financial role models. No road map. I had to figure out money on my own. I became the first in my family to graduate from college – and not just any college. I went to Stanford, an elite private school where I met people from different walks of life, many wildly different from my own.
From there, I started my career in litigation consulting, working alongside high-powered professionals across the business world. For a few years, I even played in a band with a handful of lawyers.
Now, I work at Ritholtz Wealth Management, a firm that manages more than $5 billion in assets for thousands of clients. I’m also a financial writer and author of the bestselling book Just Keep Buying.
Because of these experiences, I’ve seen wealth from every angle. I’ve met people at every level of The Wealth Ladder. I’ve also analyzed an enormous amount of financial data – everything from the Survey of Consumer Finances (run by the Federal Reserve) to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and more. These datasets contain financial information on tens of thousands of US households over the span of five decades.
The Wealth Ladder distills what I’ve learned from this research along with my own journey with money.
Time to step up
Most importantly, I’ve built life-changing wealth – for myself, my family, and for thousands of people around the world – because of it.
The Wealth Ladder is the framework I’ve developed to help you do the same. And while I’m not at the highest wealth level, I know many who are. Some are my mentors. Some were colleagues. Some I’ve met online. I’ve seen the benefits of great wealth – but also its pitfalls.
My book is both a guide and a warning. It’s about how to build wealth – and knowing when enough is enough.
My goal? To help you climb The Wealth Ladder in a way that actually improves your life.
The only question left is: Are you ready to climb it?
Obviously the first step on this ladder is to grab your own copy of Nick’s book – which is available in UK as well as US editions. On that score, I’m curious… how do you think Nick’s Wealth Ladder levels map to the UK? Are our rungs closer together? Share your thoughts below. You could also let us know where you’ve reached – and whether you’re done climbing!
Sounds like a good holiday book for me.
Does anyone have a view on whether these number (and US numbers in general) include Social security?
From memory the max US SS is about £$60k per person, which is a completely different ball game to ours – yes I know our is a different system.
It’s just I’m always amazed at the US wealth numbers 16% of adults are dollar millionaires ex SS I assume. And average SS is $24k dollars and much more for this 16%.
I think we tend to ignore state pension in the UK because it’s ~£300k and isn’t guaranteed to be paid (means testing , it’s a benefit etc).
Frankly it’s staggering how much wealthier they are than us – NOTE this isn’t an open door for more Brexit comments, let’s have 4 weeks off.
Thanks for sharing @Nick and @TI.
I always greatly enjoy Of Dollars and Data. Everyone has an opinion, but it gives the facts, the evidence to back them up, and then draws conclusions in a measured and thoughtful way. Only this week, I found it really helpful to consult the June “What’s Better Than U.S. Bonds for Downside Protection” piece.
The very best of success with the book.
The different levels of wealth does look like it could be a helpful framework.
Seems to me that for the Monevator community it’s largely about getting from Level 3 to 4, and then scrambling your way up 4.
Speaking of which, Level 4 seems pretty wide. For almost everybody in the US and UK I’d think there’s a qualitative difference between $1m and $10m. $10m buys complete freedom for almost anybody, $1m probably not or only just.
Is there any route to Level 6 other than inheritance or building and selling a very successful business? More or less the same for Level 5, though I guess the most successful professional services people get there too.
@Boltt (#1):
Re: US vs UK, etc
You might find the chatter (from a couple of years back) that follows this comment of some interest: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2023/12/03/we-are-all-millionaires/#comment-32377
Damn, now I’m gonna have to buy the book for the warnings about what happens when you have too much wealth …
Intriguing takeaway that you should spend according to your wealth, which is in the Kindle sample. Also the decision level below which you shouldn’t allocate too much thinking. In his taxonomy, it would appear I sweat a little bit too much of the small stuff. So I did buy his book, because he showed me something worthy of consideration.
I can see how the wealth ladder might work for the young guns just starting out and putting together career plans and the like (with one immediate takeaway being get to the US ASAP – that will just amplify my opportunities to move up the rungs).
Not sure it’s as easy later in life. With key promotions or business success we might move a step (most likely 2-3 in early working life then 3-4) but moving 4-5 is a big move and for most careers possibly a significant stretch (sure no big deal for hedge fundies or tech founders).
Then we get to the concept of “enough” once you’re at level 4 – does the person who has $1-2m and enjoys plentiful time in part or full retirement end up net “lifestyle” better off than someone with $8m still striving for the $10m?
@ermine (#6):
Re: “My book is both a guide and a warning. It’s about how to build wealth – and knowing when enough is enough.”
Does the book have anything useful/interesting to say about “enough” or should I perhaps say “Enough”?
I wonder if Nick has any kids?
Perhaps the most important factor re building wealth for the middle classes
xxd09
Definitely a book I am going to take a look at. Interesting stuff.
@Boltt #1 – slightly puzzled by your comment that US citizens are so much wealthier than we are in the UK. Just like us, an awful lot of their wealth is tied up in pensions and property. So they can be wealthy on paper and still struggle with day-to-day payments. Depending on how you draw the boundaries, somewhere between 8% and 40% could not cover an unexpected $400 bill.
About 2/3 US households are homeowners, with the average equity around $315k. 40% of those own their homes outright. Which fits with the average house price in the US being $385k. So, just being a homeowner in the US tends to put you in level 3.
The median household wealth in the UK was £293k in 2022 (equivalent to $398k). Half the UK households fall squarely into Levels 1- 3. Allowing for the headroom in Level 3 up to $1m, it is probably rather more than that (top decile of UK household wealth starts at £1.2m (about $1.6m)). Finger in the air, 75% UK households are somewhere in levels 1-3 vs 82% in the US. So yes, US households have more wealth, but not massively more, and they are just as cash-strapped as UK households because, like us, their wealth is largely in property and pensions.
In a similar argument, my boss in my very first paid job in 1972 explained that, whilst pay rises were nice, you needed to double your salary to make a meaningful change to your life. Not a factor x10 as here, but the same idea. An observation that has helped me to control the speed of the hedonic treadmill throughout my life!
I’m interested in how much of US wealth is in depreciating assets also. Observationally outside of urban centres as soon as you get into vaguely middle class suburban areas you see a lot of (big) RVs and boats etc on driveways. Maybe due to consumer finance they never really hit the balance sheet at all but I wonder how the fondness for toys starts to bite.
@old-eyes
The key statistic that shocked me was that the top 1% of wealth in the uk starts at about £3m whereas the US numbers I’ve seen range from $9-14m – both household level I believe.
Us average earnings are similarly impressive v ours.
I agree about doubling salary to be meaningful. I once upset my underwriting director by saying an extra £40k year wouldn’t make that much of a difference, how do I double my earnings..
@Boltt #12. Yes, at the high end you do need a lot more money to get into the top 1% in the US. I think this comes from much higher levels of inequality in the US (GINI coefficient). It is a more spread out distribution.
The thing that fascinated me was how close the percentage in levels 1-3 was in both countries. That was a surprise. Differences in purchasing power parity brings the two groups even closer together. Apparently, despite significantly higher salaries in the US (for professional roles anyway), the bulk of the population in the US and UK end up in the same sort of place for wealth.
My immediate reaction is similar to CGT101’s above: Level 4 covers quite a range, so it’s not as if moving within that range is easy. Perhaps the ‘factor of 10’ framing is a little forced. Or I wonder if our perception of the ranges is strongly influenced by where we sit?
Still, thanks for the sample and I may be curious to read more.
Nick is my kinda guy. Unlike the title of this post, your home is not an asset when if comes to the thesis of his work – spend according to your wealth, not your income (chapter 1 spending up the wealth ladder – I am a Kindle-tard so no idea what the page # is)
You go, Nick. Sock it to ’em. The value of a house is in the rent you don’t have to pay, plus a decent intangible value in not having to deal with Britain’s nasty little army of amateur landlords, less the cost of maintenance. It is not the capital value of the house, and the capital uplift is realised by your kids on the way beck from the crematorium.
Your net worth in his ontology is the value of your liquid assets. Which is the same principle and banks qualify HNWI etc
@Boltt @old_eyes
US wages may be higher but the cost of living is much higher, things like property taxes, college, student debt and healthcare costs. As I understand it US SS funding will be coming under pressure in the near future, like every country with an aging population. Medicare is being cut by Trump.
The last time I was there about 10 years ago we visited various family members over the course of a 4 week trip. We met up with friends of my brother in law, he and his wife were both engineers, she was an MIT graduate, they had kids of a similar age, anyway they said they would have had no chance of being able to do a similar trip to ours, even though they clearly earned loads more than us. I did consider moving there at one stage as I have a route to do that but those thoughts are long past….
On the numbers in the article I find it fascinating that level 6 is only 30k people worldwide. Even if we say there are 10 dependents for each of those it’s still only the equivalent of a small city in population.
I think mentioning it’s the Of Dollars and Data guy might get him a few more clicks. I know it says it in the linked review of Just Keep Buying, but I didn’t notice until I read the comments here.
@xxd09
I don’t think Nick has kids, yet, he’s newly married.
I’ve been reading Of Dollars and Data for a while, usually interesting with data to back it up.
If your ladder had exponentially spaced rungs it wouldn’t be much use when it comes to cleaning the gutters out.
I get a little bit frustrated with book blurbs like this. You start with an intriguing narrative like Victor and his chess set. This then leads to a bog standard observation like budgeting is useful for poor people and running highly successful businesses is useful for rich people. No link is made between the two. Malcolm Gladwell is the master of this approach. It’s a sleight of hand you see all over the place. You never get to find out how Victor did it.
So what we’ve got is a framework so we can compare ourselves to one another, and we all know what comparison is right (the thief of joy).
So FIRE concerns itself with level 4. Levels 5 and 6 are about becoming super rich. If that’s of interest, I’d suggest reading Felix Dennis, he is very honest and brilliantly funny. Key takeaways from him are never give away equity (running businesses are the route to riches) and your chances of success recede exponentially with age.
A little gem in his book is the story of his friends (he doesn’t have many) who retired early and simply on a couple of million, he recognises this as the only alternative to becoming super rich, as he did. He’s pretty good at describing some of the pitfalls of being super rich, from first hand experience, and how one might find longer term peace of mind.
Part of the FIRE movement ascetic nature would say thst once you hit Level 4 – you go monk mode and live a quiet life with less hustle.
It’s a bit of a shame, because our aim is to limp over the finish line instead of blasting off to Level 5 / 6 success.
The other blurb prerequisite is the mandatory CEO quote,
“As Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, once said, “There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”
Their problem isn’t effort – it’s strategy.”
This is plain wrong, the problem is incentive. To be Andy Grove you have to be suitably incentivised. A suitable analogy is the difference between wanting a nice cake and wanting a bag of heroin. With the cake, you’re pretty relaxed, it would be pleasant, but then again, might get a bit sickly, you could take it or leave it. With the heroin, you *have* to have it. No ifs, no buts, you are going to give it everything in your arsenal to get that bag no matter what the consequences.
That is how you have to feel to become a CEO. It necessitates absolute, single minded commitment to the exclusion of everything else. If you don’t, then you won’t compete with someone who does. Even then, you are still going to have to be very lucky. That’s what it boils down to.
I think the log 10 framing looks rather irrational. Clearly the base needs to move over time, perhaps as a multiple of median earnings or something similar i.e. wealth is measured in median earning years, rather than an absolute ranges of USD.
My feeling is these ranges have moved substantially over my career. In the 2000s, I can still remember a liquid $2mm being the sort of amount JPM Private Bank would consider a starting point for a client relationship. That is now $5-10mm. Ultra high net worth (UNHW) was $20mm, now it’s $50mm etc.
The idea that upper middle class starts at just $1mm seems far too low. Perhaps in 2000, not in 2025. People with a $1mm net worth in SE England probably only have a house, limited savings, would need to think thrice before private educating kids etc.
@ ZX – sounds about right, BOE inflation calculator tells me £10 in 1999 now worth £19.20, so almost 100% increase..
If you leave primary home out of the net wealth valuation then the divisions do start to make sense. I agree home is massively distorting in the boundary between 3 and 4.
Feels pretty much level 4 is becoming a minimum to have FI for most lifestyles and the reality being that the $1m threshold will inflate pretty quickly.
As to whether limping over the finish line is desirable, I suspect few people actually hang it up the day/month/year they cross into their own personally defined Level 4. But you kinda have to get to fair approximation of FI to know emotionally how you feel about expending the necessary energy/time/opportunity cost to push higher up the bracket.
And it only takes one health scare or similar to put wealth into stark relief.
Would I prefer twice my wealth? – sure. Would it make me happier? – not necessarily, possibly would just make me less dilligent about purchases and have me buying experiences that don’t really pay back or actively bore me. And it probably gives me more of an IHT problem to defuse so its not like the extra wealth would ultimately be mine.
I guess the guy looking down on me having just squeezed into the next bracket might say that’s because I’m an unambitious loser but I don’t really know. I look at people who are clearly only ever going to be at upper half Level 3 (unless windfall inheritance boosts them) and they seem pretty content with their lot.
@GFF #20 > FIRE movement ascetic nature
Au contraire, the FIRE movement is rich kids of London nowadays 😉 It has to be, to get ahead at current valuations.
It will be the guys crawling from the twisted wreckage of the forthcoming AI crash who will be the ascetics clipping coupons and saving hard. Because they will be able to talk about SWRs of 5% and not immediately get laughed down.
Hopefully a grizzled TI will be sitting in a darkened room in his London flat. He has a solution to the frequent AI-induced power failures with the put-put-put of his generator on the balcony keeping the champagne cool as he keys up this post once more with feeling. And somewhere out there there will be today’s recent graduates whose careers have been terminated a decade or so early by that suckout. And they will buy VWRL aat £70 in real terms and inherit the FIRE crown.
Really the ladder has now got 9 rungs, with numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 each topping out, respectively, at $1 bn, $10 bn, $100 bn and $1,000 bn – given that the technogarchy dominated “three comma” club has now got members counting wealth in the muti hundreds of billions of dollars or euros.
For somone like Musk ($378 bn), Ellison ($297 bn), Zuckerberg ($274 bn), Bezos ($246 bn), Page ($181 bn), Ballmer ($178 bn), Brin ($169 bn), Huang ($158 bn) Arnault ($156 bn) and (relative pauper due to his generous giving) Buffett ($144 bn) spending the tier 6 threshold of $100 mn is about as consequential as someone at the top of tier 1 (up to $10,000) buying a cup of coffee or a Big Mac (depending on which of the Top 10 wealthiest we’re using to compare with).
Maybe this is why the luxury watch/art/yacht [insert chosen foible] market exists? (I’ve never spent more than £25 on a watch tbf, and that’s done me just fine – but, IIRC, @TA spotted Mark Z sporting a $900,000 piece when the Zuck did a piece to camera to try to get down with the MAGA base).
As for “crawling from the twisted wreckage of the forthcoming AI crash” / “the suckout”; paraphrasing from a pre ChatGPT 2018 Tweet to sum it up:
‘The Optimist: AI has achieved human level performance!
The Realist: ‘AI’ is just a collection of brittle hacks that, under very specific and limited circumstances, mimics some minor surface features of the appearance of aspects of intelligence.
The Pessimist: AI has achieved human level performance.’
We just have to hope that if we’re heading for a world of more inequality it’s going to be because, to misquote Deng Xiaoping when resetting China’s course from Marxism Leninism to Market Leninism, for the people to become rich some must get rich first.
totalling the number of adults in the world from the table, I get a figure of under 3.2 billion, which seems far too low?
@Larsen #16
That would be my observation as well. I have family there and a number of work colleagues. Despite significantly higher salaries, they do not seem to accumulate significantly higher wealth.
Most comparisons of living costs are based on consumer goods and home rental, and I feel they leave out some of the other substantial costs.
@xeny – Google suggesting 2.3 billion children as of 2023, approx 25% of total pop. So the numbers do look a bit off.
I don’t know why but I kept mentally replacing investing with weight lifting. Maybe it has that gym bunny feel
@AlCam #8 > Does the book have anything useful/interesting to say about “enough”
Not really, but this is in the nature of the beast, it’s highly subjective. Most of the Monevator crew get off the ladder in the £1mn to 10mn bracket. You have to be exceptionally driven and have good luck to swing past level 4, the summary of the levels is given here (and diagrammatically in the Kindle sample)
I didn’t get a good return on my 9.99, because the key takeaway for me as a retiree was don’t sweat decisions < 0.01 of your investable networth (ie excluding your house, FFS) which I got from the Amazon sample, there was literally no other insight for me in the rest of the book, and this probably applies to most Monevator readers.
For my 40-year younger self, sure, there would have been much of value. But the don’t sweat decisions < 0.01 of your investable networth is a great qualifier. I sweat too much of that. I’ll probably still do it, but either more intentionally or know when to let go earlier. Instinctually I am getting there. I am going upmarket in some areas, I don’t chop my own wood, I don’t work and if a little bit of money will transform something for people I care about I JFDI, because life is short, and I tell ’em never pay me back, pay it forward to some other guy in their hour of need if your circumstances change.
.01 of investable NW is a good insight. I didn’t need to spend £10 to get that, but considering the whole thing reflexively I don’t mind the hat tip 😉
I bought the book after reading this blog post. I like the way he describes the freedom of each level, i.e. grocery freedom (level 2), restaurant freedom (level 3), travel freedom (level 4), house freedom (level 5), and impact freedom (level 6). It’s a framework that’s easy to understand.
I’ve found the book helpful in putting my own situation (level 4) into context. For example, I’ve been modest in choosing my home. He mentions that the average person at level 4 has about a third of their wealth in their own home, which reassures me I’ve got it about right.
It’s also useful when comparing myself to friends who own dream homes plus second homes abroad… the difference is that they are business owners at, I’m guessing, level 5.
I relate to him saying that at level 4, another $1mn isn’t going to make much difference to your lifestyle. It’s perfectly OK to stop at level 4, he says, because of the hard work and stress required to get to level 5, typically by setting up a business.
I wish this book had been around when I was younger… the focus on spending according to wealth rather than income could have encouraged me to be more disciplined.
This will now be one of my top finance books along with Lars Kroijer’s ‘Investing Demystified’ (for choosing what to invest in) and Robert Pagliarini’s ‘The Sudden Wealth Solution’ (for dealing with an inheritance).
Did read the book while on vacation. After the excitement of a new book by Nick, whose writing I thoroughly enjoy, I have to say I did not enjoy it a lot. It could have been a blogpost and the wealth ladder frameworks feels oddly artificial to justify writing the book. Lots of advice is common sense (if you are already into personal finance already), the book touches too many topics at once and in the later chapters the usual data backing is missing almost completely.
My advice: get a used copy to save some money. But it is an easy read.