Have you ever wondered where your finances would rank you globally?
Would you be in the top 1%, 5%, 10% or the bottom 50%?
Wonder no more! A tool exists to shine the light on where your finances rank you.
The Global Rich List
The Global Rich List is a website aimed to educate people where they rank in the world financially.
You can choose from two different financial measures of wealth, annual income or what is essential net worth, to benchmark yourself against the world.
The results might shock you.
Think You’re Poor? Think Again
What would you consider rich? Living in the top 50% of the world’s population?
Even if you think living in the top 10% is rich, you might be surprised to find out just how close you are to reaching your ideal.
Rich List Based On Income
On the income scale, if you made minimum wage (which equates to $7.25 an hour or $15,080 a year), you would already be in the top 10% of global income. In fact, you’d be in the top 7.8% of income earners worldwide.
If you make $50,000 per year, you would be in the top 0.31% of the world’s population in terms of earning income. Earning just $50,000 per year puts us in the top 1% of the world’s population.
Now does that make you wonder about all of the hate about the 1%? Granted, we’re not the 1% in the United States, but if we make $50,000 per year you’re in the 1% of the world.
Does that mean we should be helping others in less fortunate countries more? Something to think about…
The Global Rich List website gives you some stats to put this information more into perspective on a global basis. For instance, someone making $50,000 per year in the US would have to work for 49 years to earn the same income if they were instead an average laborer in Zimbabwe. CRAZY!
Rich List Based on Wealth (Net Worth)
The Global Rich List only lets you put your assets into the wealth calculator, but you can subtract out your liabilities if you want which will allow you to arrive at your net worth. Their calculator won’t let you enter an amount lower than $1,000 though.
Related: Not Sure How To Track Your Net Worth? We Explain!
Based on a net worth of just $1,000, which in this includes all of your possessions like clothes, you would be in the top 69% of the world’s wealthiest people. That’s not quite as dramatic as with the income side of things, but it would be easy to only have a net worth of $1,000 based on Americans’ awful consumer habits.
What about $10,000? That would put you in the top 32%. $100,000 would put you in the top 9% and $250,000 in net worth would put you in the top 5%. It would take a net worth of $770,000 to break into the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest people.
It’s hard to wrap your head around what these wealth percentage numbers without something to compare them to. Luckily, the website provides some staggering information. The following is based on a net worth of $100,000.
- 1% of your wealth could feed a family of four in Ethiopia for a year.
- It takes 56 average people combined in Bangladesh to match your wealth.
- You could buy over 18,000 mosquito nets that last four to five years to protect children from malaria in Malawi.
It’s crazy to see how far your wealth could go to helps others in less fortunate parts of the world.
Where Do You Fit In?
Want to see where you fit in? The old site no longer works, but you can still check using the Wayback Machine. Let us know where you fit in in the comments where you stack up in terms of income, wealth or both!
If you aren’t happy with where you fit in and want to move up on the Global Rich List, we’ve got a few places that can help you get started on improving! Here are just a few:
- How To Pay Off Your Debt When You Don’t Know Where To Start
- Is It Worth The Effort To Work Two Full Time Jobs?
- What Is An Emergency Fund And Why You Need One
Lance Cothern, CPA holds a CPA license in Indiana. He’s a personal finance, debt and credit expert that writes professionally for top-tier publications including U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Investopedia, Credit Karma, Business Insider and more.
Additionally, his expertise has been featured on Yahoo, MSN, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, Kiplinger, Reuters, CNBC and more.
Lance is the founder of Money Manifesto. He started writing about money and helping people solve their financial problems in 2012. You can read more about him and find links to his other work and media mentions here.
Kathy
Monday 20th of April 2015
Reading statistics like these makes me truly appreciate what I have. I've seen the statistics before, and they are indeed staggering to know that with my income and net worth, I'm quite wealthy in comparison. I do wonder how we stack up when compared to some of the European countries like Sweden, France or the UK, or in a country where the citizens have guaranteed incomes regardless of their work. I admit to being a HGTV House Hunter addict and seeing the prices of houses on the International version makes me wonder how they can possibly afford to ever purchase a house on an average U.S. income level. I'm curious how they do it in countries that are welfare states, which I see as the future in the U.S.
Lance Cothern
Monday 20th of April 2015
It would be interesting to see how we stack up to other countries. They definitely have a different system in place and I imagine that would make the comparison a bit harder.