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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

Given the massive growth of this industry, most engineers are still relatively young. Therefore, I'd certainly would expect any engineer making an upper middle class income would think by the age of 65 that they would would end up with millions in wealth.

http://money.cnn.com/calculator/retirement/retirement-need/

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The term "millionare" needs updating. I think what people actually mean by "millionare" is something like "net worth of at least over 10 million dollars".

According to Google ngram, the word millionaire peaked around 1910, when a million dollars was about 25 million 2014 dollars.

Likewise, the buying power of $1M in 2014 would be like having $40k in 1910.

Forbes defines weathly as $1M/yr in income and $10M in assets. If you were to retire today with $25M and put this money in bonds, you could collect about $1-2M/yr.

Sources:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=millionaire&ye...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+1910+1+million+dollars

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+dollars+in+19...

This definition of "wealthy" seems really, really arbitrary. My ancestors made a living by exporting lumber which was chopped by hand, and came close to dying of cold and hunger four or five times during the early 1900s. By that measure, we are all living like kings.

You could live comfortably for the rest of your life on much less than $10MM in assets, even in the absence of an income. So I'd say if there's an absolute limit to "wealthy" in our geographic region, it would have to be "don't have to work for a living", which would be around $1-2MM for a middle-class lifestyle and a 4% annual return on capital.

I totally agree. The definition of "wealthy" really depends who you are talking to (subjective). This is why I used the Forbes definition because I am not sure if your definition matches mine.

The term also varies internationally as well (emerging vs developed countries). Like having a car, hot water, etc.

The term isn't wrong, a person with a $1M net worth is still a millionaire. People just need to be aware that $1M has a very different buying power today than it did for our parents' generation. Retirement is expensive and $1M doesn't go as far as people expect.

I think you're right, and mystified by the downvoting.

In common conversation people often want to use a term that means that one can live a semi-extravagant lifestyle off of the nestegg without working. A very small minority of people use "wealthy" for that, but not enough that I could use that term and be understood to mean what I want to mean. Commonly people use "millionaire," but that's wrong as you point out.

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