I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
I did say VTWAX (i.e total “world”), which diversifies out of a lot of problems like the Nikkei 225 and the potential collapse of America, but yes the math is not 100% gospel because at the end of the day anything can happen. Oftentimes, when calculating for a decades-long downfall of the entire world economy, the real answer is that if that happens everything is super fucked no matter what you planned for. All we can do is run simulations on historical data and get statistical significance for numbers we’re pretty comfortable with. If someone is actually pulling the trigger (i.e. retiring) for real on these numbers, I’d strongly suggest they get more familiar with why these numbers are what they are and are prepared to spend less when needed in a rare edge case scenario.
And as you said, for this thread in particular it’s just an estimation to ballpark how much capital realistically translates into what sort of wealth for someone’s life. IMO it’s very useful to be able to estimate how a layman’s capital generation/retirement works because most people just give up on finances immediately and have no concept of what wealth even means. Does someone ever really need 20 million dollars? I’d wager most people just aren’t sure. Now we know which people we can eat.
VTWAX is still like 65% US equities. It hasn’t diversified out of U.S. exposure (and frankly, international stocks aren’t protected from U.S. economic crises). A lot of people think about full blown collapse and crisis, but wouldn’t know what to do about lethargy and stagnation for decades, but still roughly the same economic and financial paradigm.
I think U.S. equities are overpriced right now, especially when looking at market cap weighted indexes (because the U.S. tech bubble seems to represent a much higher percentage of any given index). And I’m concerned that the correction will just be decades of tepid growth or even stagnation where decades of investment won’t actually earn a good return. Not that I’m investing in something else, other than maybe the soft skills I’ve described in my earlier comment.