Only about one in three Americans sitting on at least $1 million in investable assets actually considers themselves wealthy. That finding, from Northwestern Mutual's 2025 Planning and Progress study, lands at a moment when the gap between what the numbers say and what people feel has never been wider.
The survey pegged the figure at 36%. Barely a third. The rest, people who by any historical standard have made it, look at their portfolios and see something other than security. Nearly half of those same millionaires, 49%, told researchers their financial planning needs improvement. Their top worries: outliving their savings, the bite of taxes in retirement, and the cost of long-term care.
That disconnect between net worth and peace of mind tells a story the political class doesn't want to hear. Washington spends years printing money, running deficits, and inflating the cost of everything that matters, then acts surprised when even the people who did everything right still feel exposed.
Charles Schwab's 2025 Modern Wealth Survey put hard numbers on the anxiety. Americans said they need an average net worth of $839,000 just to feel financially comfortable. To feel wealthy? That number jumped to $2.3 million.
And the trend is heading the wrong direction. Sixty-three percent of Schwab's respondents said it feels like it takes more money to be wealthy today than it did a year ago. When asked why, 73% pointed to inflation. Sixty-two percent cited a worsened economy. Forty-eight percent blamed higher taxes.
Those aren't abstract complaints. They reflect the lived experience of people watching grocery bills climb, insurance premiums spike, and property taxes march upward, while politicians in both parties keep spending like the bill will never come due. Understanding what it actually takes to be poor, middle class, or wealthy in America right now requires looking past headline economic numbers and into household budgets.
Tom Mathews, a certified financial educator, CPA, and author of "How Money Works," framed the shift bluntly in commentary cited by Yahoo Personal Finance:
"Being a millionaire used to mean you had done really well and 'made it.' Today, it really just means you've crossed an outdated line."
Mathews laid out the forces eroding that milestone. Inflation. Rising taxes. Market volatility. The escalating cost of housing, healthcare, and education. He noted that a million dollars on paper doesn't stretch the way it used to, "especially when most of that net worth is tied up in illiquid assets like homes, retirement accounts, or businesses."
That last point deserves emphasis. A family with a paid-off house worth $600,000, a 401(k) balance of $350,000, and a small business valued at $200,000 is technically a millionaire household. But they can't eat the house. They can't spend the 401(k) without tax penalties before 59½. And the business value is theoretical until someone writes a check for it.
Meanwhile, the bills keep arriving, and the cost of the basics keeps rising faster than wages for most working Americans. As Fox News contributor Carol Roth has argued, Americans in 2025 may have access to more conveniences and consumer goods than any generation in history, but the stress of covering core expenses, housing, healthcare, education, food, has "increased exponentially."
"Are we truly wealthy, as individuals and as a nation, if a key tenet of wealth, that shield from financial stress, has been pierced?"
That question cuts to the heart of the matter. Roth's argument is that government policy and the Federal Reserve's long experiment with near-zero interest rates inflated asset prices, especially housing, while leaving non-asset owners further behind. The people who own homes and stocks saw their net worth rise on paper. But the cost of maintaining a middle-class life rose right alongside it, and often faster.
This isn't a new phenomenon. It has been building for years. Back in 2011, a Fidelity survey of more than 1,000 affluent households, with average investable assets of $3.5 million, found that 42% did not feel wealthy. Those who didn't feel rich said they'd need roughly $7.5 million to feel that way.
Sanjiv Mirchandani of National Financial summed it up at the time: "Wealth is relative, and to some extent the more you have, the more you realize how much more you need." If that was true when average investable assets sat at $3.5 million, imagine how it feels for the household barely clearing the $1 million mark in 2025 dollars.
The Northwestern Mutual data suggests millionaires are trying to address the gap. They are more than twice as likely to work with a financial advisor as the general public, 74% compared with just 34%. But professional guidance can only do so much when the underlying cost structure of American life keeps shifting against savers and planners.
Proposals to cap Social Security payouts for high-income retirees add another layer of uncertainty. If you've spent decades paying into the system at maximum rates, the prospect of means-tested benefits changes the retirement math in ways no financial advisor can fully hedge.
Mathews offered a broader diagnosis in his commentary. He argued that the real issue is "less certainty and control around finances." Accumulation alone, he said, no longer equals security.
"The real takeaway is that wealth is no longer about accumulation. It's about confidence. Confidence comes from education, strategy, and structure. That's when wealth finally feels like wealth."
That framing is useful, but it sidesteps the policy failures that created the confidence gap in the first place. You can educate and strategize all you want. If the federal government keeps running trillion-dollar deficits, if the Fed keeps distorting markets, and if Congress keeps ducking entitlement reform, no amount of personal financial planning can fully offset the macro risk.
The generation approaching retirement right now knows this better than anyone. Many Gen Xers are arriving at retirement age as the least prepared generation for estate planning, facing a future where the safety nets they were promised may not hold.
And the tax picture only adds to the anxiety. With 48% of Schwab's survey respondents citing higher taxes as a reason wealth feels harder to achieve, the interaction between retirement planning and federal tax enforcement matters more than ever. Even IRS staffing changes may not spare taxpayers from audits, adding one more variable to an already complicated picture.
Step back and look at the full picture from both surveys. Americans say they need $839,000 to feel comfortable and $2.3 million to feel wealthy. But even among those who've cleared the million-dollar mark, only 36% actually feel they've arrived. Nearly half say they need to do better. And almost two-thirds of the broader public say the bar keeps rising.
The common thread isn't greed or ingratitude. It's rational anxiety in an economy where the rules keep changing and the people in charge keep making it worse. Inflation erodes purchasing power. Taxes claim a growing share. Healthcare costs defy prediction. And the political class keeps finding new ways to spend money it doesn't have, pushing the consequences onto the very people who played by the rules.
For households that built wealth through decades of discipline, saving, investing, living below their means, the reward is supposed to be security. Instead, they get a moving target and a government that treats their savings as a revenue source rather than an achievement.
When even millionaires can't feel safe, it's not because they're out of touch. It's because the system that was supposed to reward their discipline has been hollowed out by the people running it.