As a child, Heidi Barley watched her family pay for groceries with food stamps. As a college student, she dropped out because she couldn’t afford tuition. In her 20s, already scraping by, she was forced to take a pay cut that shrunk her salary to just $34,000 a year.
But this summer, the 41-year-old hit a milestone that long felt out of reach: She became a millionaire.
A surging number of everyday Americans now boast a seven-figure net worth, which was once the domain of celebrities and CEOs. But as the ranks of millionaires grow fatter, the significance of the status is shifting alongside perceptions of what it takes to be truly rich.
“Millionaire used to sound like Rich Uncle Pennybags in a top hat,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors, a wealth management firm in El Segundo, Calif. “It’s no longer a backstage pass to palatial estates and caviar bumps. It’s the new mass-affluent middleweight class, financially secure but two zeros short of private-jet territory.”
Inflation, ballooning home values and a decadeslong push into stock markets by average investors have lifted millions into millionairehood. A June report from Swiss bank UBS found about one-tenth of American adults are members of the seven-digit club, with 1,000 freshly minted millionaires added daily last year.
Thirty years ago, the IRS counted 1.6 million Americans with a net worth of $1 million or more. UBS – using data from the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and central banks of countries around the globe – put the number at 23.8 million in the U.S. last year, a nearly 15-fold increase.
The expanding ranks of millionaires come as the gulf between rich and poor widens. The richest 10% of Americans hold two-thirds of household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve, averaging $8.1 million each. The bottom 50% hold 3% of wealth, with an average of just $60,000 to their names.
Federal Reserve data also shows there are differences by race. Asian people outpace white people in the U.S. in median wealth, while Black and Hispanic people trail in their net worth.
Barley was working as a journalist when her newspaper ended its pension program and she got a lump-sum payout of about $5,000. A colleague persuaded her to invest it in a retirement account, and ever since, she’s stashed away whatever she could. The investments dipped at first during the Great Recession but eventually started growing. In time, she came to find catharsis in amassing savings, going home and checking her account balances when she had a tough day at work.
Last month, after one such day, she realized the moment had come.
“Did you know that we’re millionaires?” she asked her husband.
“Good job, honey,” Barley says he replied, unfazed.
It brought no immediate change. Like many millionaires, much of her wealth is in long-term investments and her home, not easy-to-access cash. She still lives in her modest Orlando, Fla., house, socks away half her paycheck, fills the napkin holder with takeout napkins and lines trash cans with grocery bags.
Still, Barley says it feels powerful to cross a threshold she never imagined reaching as a child.
“But it’s not as glamorous as the ideas in your head,” she said.
All wealth is relative. To thousandaires, $1 million is the stuff of dreams. To billionaires, it’s a rounding error. Either way, it takes twice as much cash today to match the buying power of 30 years ago.
A net worth of $1 million in 1995 is equivalent to about $2.1 million today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A seven-figure net worth is, to some, as outdated a yardstick as a six-figure salary. Nonetheless, “millionaire” is peppered in everything from politics to popular music as shorthand for rich.
“It’s a nice round number but it’s a point in a longer journey,” said Dan Usen, a 41-year-old from Providence, who works in information technology and who hit the million-dollar mark last month. “It definitely gives you some room to breathe.”
No other country comes close to the U.S. in the sheer number of millionaires, though relative to population, UBS found Switzerland and Luxembourg had higher rates.
Kenneth Carow, a finance professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, says commonalities emerge among today’s millionaires. The vast majority own stocks and a home. Most live below their means. They value education and teach financial responsibility to their children.
“The dream of becoming a millionaire,” Carow said, “has become more obtainable.”
Jim Wang, 45, a software engineer-turned finance blogger from Fulton, Md., says even if hitting $1 million was essentially “a non-event” for him and his wife, it still held weight for him as the son of immigrants who saved money by turning the heat off on winter nights.
The private jets he envisioned as a kid may not have materialized at the million-dollar threshold, but he still sees it as a marker that brings a certain level of security.
“It’s possible, even with a regular job,” he said. “You just have to be diligent and consistent.”
The resilience of financial markets and the ease of investing in broad-based, low-fee index funds has fueled the balances of many millionaires who don’t earn massive salaries or inherit family fortunes.
Among them is a burgeoning community of younger millionaires born out of the movement known as FIRE, for Financial Independence Retire Early.
Jason Breck, 48, of Fishers, Ind., embraced FIRE and reached the million-dollar mark nine years ago. He promptly quit his job in automotive marketing, where he generally earned around $60,000 a year but managed to stow away around 70% of his pay.
Now, Breck and his wife spend several months a year traveling. Despite being retired, they continue to grow their balance by sticking to a tight budget and keeping expenses to $1,500 a month when they’re in the U.S and a few hundred dollars more when they travel.
Hitting their goal hasn’t translated to luxury. There is no lawn crew to cut the grass, no Netflix or Amazon Prime, no Uber Eats. They fly economy. They drive a 2005 Toyota.
“It’s not a golden ticket like it was in the past,” Breck said. “For us, a million dollars buys us freedom and peace of mind. We’re not yacht rich, but for us, we’re time rich.”
