The millionaire next door may be you

 Is your home worth more than when you purchased it? Good for you.  Your net worth has probably risen over time and that is a good thing.  Hopefully you have more wealth in reserves for your retirement, your children’s or grandchildren’s education or doing whatever you want. You earned it.

But are you a millionaire?  What seemed like an impossible dream several decades ago is now reality for more and more people.  Politicians have taken note, and they want to t i to your wealth before you get around to needing it or enjoying it. Wealth Envy is a terrible and contagious disease. The cure is to not give the afflicted any power and to excise those who have power now.  

How rich are you? 

All homes below are priced at about $1 million.  

Which one is in Lake Oswego?  

Are you a millionaire?  

Photos are from Trulia (What a Million Dollar Home Looks Like Across America) and Zillow current listings.

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(Home #2 is in LO:  2,750 sf. at 6073 SW Carmen Dr.)

Millions and Millions of Millionaires

Don’t mistake them for billionaires, who are far richer and fewer.Wall Street Journal By Robert D. Hershey Jr. Nov. 2, 2021 

As Democratic lawmakers look for ways to tax billionaires, the ranks of millionaires are expanding by the million. The U.S. minted 1.73 million new millionaire households last year, lifting its total at year-end 2020 to 21.95 million, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. 

For the first time, 1% of adults world-wide are millionaires. Although the term can apply to any currency, the U.S. dollar is considered the standard gauge. (The British sometimes snarkily refer to upper-middle-class Americans as “dollar millionaires.”)

Credit Suisse, which unlike other researchers includes the value of residences in calculating net worth, projects another 6.1 million American millionaires by 2025. Does this trend mean an ever-growing target for politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren—worth $12 million in 2019, according to Forbes—or might it inspire a larger number of wealth-tax opponents to dig in their heels against it?  

Ms. Warren proposes a 2% annual wealth levy starting at $50 million plus a 6% surcharge on billionaires. (Forbes now lists 724 billionaires, compared with a mere 13 when it first tallied in 1982.) Those fearing the threshold would come down can point to the alternative minimum tax. When Congress introduced it in 1969, the AMT was designed to snare 155 high-income earners who had paid little or no tax. By 2017 it reached far into the middle class, with 5.2 million affected, mainly because it hadn’t been indexed for inflation. (The Trump tax cuts sharply reduced the impact.)

The words “millionaires and billionaires” are as inseparable to politicians as “giant corporations” and “hard-working Americans.” Yet the rhyming words obscure the huge difference. A billion dollars, 1,000 million, invested at 1% returns around $10 million a year. A million dollars gives you a princely $200 a week, enough to treat the family to dinner or a baseball game.

The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, are different from you and me. That’s no longer true of mere millionaires.