With 3 million dollars in liquid assets (ie: not a house), you can bring in about $120k from the safest of investments. Just a high yield savings account. Fully insured.

With an index fund, you can bring in $300k.

That's enough to live on, given how many people live on that much or less from their job.

So some millionaires may work, but they're not really the same.

Can’t even buy a house for $1m where I live. So not rich.

Seriously. My partner and I are millionaires. We're almost 40 and have a net worth just shy of $2M. We've a couple of DINKS. We're both engineers, are pretty good with numbers, and understand compound interest. We got on the property ladder pretty early. I bought my first townhouse in 2012 pretty much right at the bottom of the housing market. We've moved twice since then and have benefited from the full rise in house prices.

Our net worth is a little under $2M. About $10k of that is checking and savings. Another $80k in a taxable brokerage account as an emergency fund. $450k in home equity. The rest is in retirement accounts such as 401ks and IRAs.

We are working class. The closest either of us have ever come to hiring someone is when we've hired a plumber or electrician to fix something at our home. I've technically owned a business, but just for my own freelance tutoring work. And the closest either of us have ever come to being a landlord was when I had a couple of roommates at that first townhouse I bought.

We're doing very well; we have no complaints. And while we've achieved some modest amount of wealth, it's not ultimately about living large or in luxury. We live well below our means. We recently bought our first new car in many years, a new Toyota Corolla. It replaced a 15 year old Corolla that my partner bought new. We buy affordable reliable vehicles and drive them til the wheels fall off. I still get most of my clothes at thrift stores. We have a house worth over $600k, but our mortgage payment is just $2k, and that's on a 15-year note. A few years ago when I was in grad school, I was literally a millionaire who road the bus.

But again, we're not trying to get rich for the sake of getting rich. We don't want to own some huge company and lord over a room full of workers. We're not trying to hoard the largest possible amount of money we can. We don't view wealth as a lifetime high score. It's simply a means to achieve stability and safety. We're on the path to early retirement. We hope to retire by the time we're 50. We need to save up a couple of million not because we want to live in luxury, but simply because it's the only way to have a decent stable and safe retirement in this capitalist hellscape we live in. In a world with universal healthcare and a universal basic income, we would have no need for millions in retirement savings. If my partner and I each brought in say, $20k a year from UBI? If we had a paid off house and also didn't have to worry about healthcare? We could live quite well off just that $40k per year.

I'm a millionaire and I support much higher taxes on millionaires. I do this because ultimately the point for us for having a couple of million is not to have a couple of million. The point is to have safety and stability in our lives. And the more secure the social safety net, the less the need to cover those needs privately.

$1M ≈ 2 average single family homes

$1B ≈ 2000 average single family homes