Wealth is relative

Wealth is relative; it depends on how many relatives you have. This is a common joke because most people regard relatives in a negative way. If you take a positive perception on the reality of your relatives, this joke becomes an acknowledgment and an act of gratitude to your relatives who have helped you reach the level of material, social and spiritual well being that you are in now.

The topic of this article is on the definition of the state of being "wealthy." After 40 years of working as a commercial banker, as an investment banker, as entrepreneur, and as a professional manager, I have a fairly good idea of the state of being wealthy. I have worked with a number of multimillionaires, including the 500th richiest man in the world in the FORTUNE magazine list in 1988, two of the Filipino taipans, and had/ have dealings with a number of people who had at least P2 billion in net worth. This has brought me to places I could not really afford on my own, like eating a $200 dinner in Taipei, or staying in a $700 suite in Hongkong. I also get to observe how the extremely rich live and behave, or how material wealth affects some people.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, an American writer in the 1920's, once said that "the rich is different from you and me," to which Ernest Hemingway replied: "yes, they have more money." Aside from the obvious, the materially wealthy are different from the middle class in some ways but not in all ways. In a recent survey in the U.S., the wealthy have the following characteristic: they live below their means and have little debt, they pay off their credit card every month, they are thrifty but not misers, 92% are married and their divorce rate is 1/3 lower than national rate, they are well educated with 90% having college degrees and 52% having advanced degrees, most did not inherit their wealth, they are not workoholics and 45% play golf, 37% consider themselves religious, 64% contribute heavily to charity, they do not gamble, and they have better teeth.

The above characteristic is not exactly the exclusive domain of the materially wealthy. I have known a lot of middle class people, and even lower than middle people who have the above characteristics. These characteristics are of people who have or are handling their lives well, of people who have arrived and contented with their lives. These are characteristics that make people successful and achievers regardless of the material wealth they have accumulated. These are characteristics of good people who have done well and lived well.

The state of being wealthy, cannot be measured only in terms of material wealth, it is the totality of ones condition. The social and the spiritual is as important and will lead to the material, and the material will lead to the social and spiritual wealth in a virtuous cycle. It is really a contentment issue of the spiritual, social, and material; of wanting what you have and not having what you want.