>It is estimated that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third.[0]
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
The ones who go broke fast are usually the ones who also got rich fast, trough luck instead of work or knowledge, like from lottery wins or speculations.
I'm from Europe so my knowledge revolves around local examples.
Some countries have publicly available data on individual income filings. The US provides anonymized data, but scienentist have done a lot of fancy tricks to make the family connections clear.
Raj Chetty among others have done a lot of work on US social mobility[1]. They were able to trend parent/child incomes in the US going back to 1940, and have tons of great insights.
I dont remember all of the findings off the top of my head, but one was that relative social mobility (%s) for the US have been constant over time. Another was that economic mobility out of the bottom classes is dominated by poor immigrants. It is unclear if it is genetic, personality, or culture, but children of poor immigrants out perform native born poor by an enormous factor (2-3X better IIRC)
Income is a completely different thing than wealth and those two are not always directly correlated. You can have a good income but not accumulate much wealth because all is bein eaten away by taxes and a high CoL, and you can also have a low income but still decent wealth from an inheritance for example.
And the original claim was that wealth gets lost between generations by the majority of people which I find dubious.
In practice, if you aren't making income, you losing wealth.
By wealth, people tend to mean assets, not petty cash sitting in checking accounts. If you're sitting on inherited assets you're accumulating more wealth by just sitting on your ass without doing anything.
Just see the post-2009 monetary polices: from housing to stocks, everything went up like crazy, especially during COvid. You didn't have to be financially literate, all you had to do was sit on your inherited assets and not touch them and the government's money printer did the work for you in the last 10+ years.
So forgive me but I still see no proof that 72% people loose their wealth between generations, when everything went up up up in the last decades, especially housing. Unless that wealth we're talking about was an old carpet and $600 bucks in a checking account.
>Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.
N'ah bruh. Stocks or empty land in desirable areas requires no upkeep and wealth taxes in some EU countries range from laughable to zero, while income taxes in those same countries hover around 50%. Go ahead, tell me more how income is the same thing with wealth.
The vast majority of wealth isn't empty houses, ever rented, and never sold.
the interesting groups are the top .1% and .01%. there isn't that much fluctuation at that layer.
But we also have all those royal families from Europe and the Middle East, dictators like Putin, etc. whos' wealth are secret and very well hidden through crown estates, trusts, shell companies, all through Caribbean off-shores and often under different names. The best you have for those people is guestimations and some leaks from the Panam Papers to get an idea.
however for the 1 in 10_000 you may or may not know people in that tier and for the 1 in 100_000 let alone 1 in 1_000_000 you are close to that tier or part of it to personally know them (in such a way that they know you).
My personal observation is that the 4 generation has so many better options than the family business is holding them back with responsibility and the family unity has broken down through generational grudges.