how much income/networth does P&N require to classfiy someone as rich?

[Agent11]

All I know is that I'm worthless and lots of folk here hate me.

You do lay it on pretty thick some times. I do wish you would lay off with the brain defect bit, it's the worst sort of insulting pseudoscience. . . Analogous to anthropometrics. I don't hate you though.

I would say rich is 500k+ a year. I think I could operate a helicopter and or a yacht on that.

If I could finance my own personal space station that would qualify as well. Seriously I can't be the first person who's thought about it, billionaires must be lazy these days.

 

[Michael]

I'd say you're rich if you don't have to go to work (whether you do or not is beside the point) and can live very comfortably off of your investments.

So let's say you have everything paid for (car, house, boat if you want one etc), and enough investments to pull in $200k/yr. So that's something like $1.5M in the bank I guess.

If you want to reliably make $200K off of your investment, $1.5M is not enough.

If everything is paid for, you may not need $200K, but $1.5M is not enough.

Assuming a relatively safe dividend paying stock like AT&T and where capital preservation is not important as long as the 5% keeps being paid on your initial investment, you'll need closer to $4M if $200K is your goal. If you bought government T-bills and had zero tax on the earnings you would need about $5M (assuming 25% taxes).

Michael