What does it mean to be rich? Is it possessions and financial security? Or simply to have the good fortune to have a family and good health?One thing is certain, wealth is a subjective reality according to one's lifestyle, relationships, age, and education.
Measuring wealth is far from simple and what is considered material affluence depends on various criteria. But this has not prevented some institutions, such as the Observatory of Inequalities in France, from trying to set a threshold of wealth.
According to the independent body, one can be considered rich in France if you earn over €3,673 per month after taxes. As for couples (with two dependent children), the wealth threshold is set at €7,713 euros net monthly. These results are obtained by doubling the median income, that is, the threshold that divides the population in two, one earning more and the other less.
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Those who earn this amount are in the most wealthy 7% of the population, meaning there are approximately 4.5 million rich people in France.
Yet Louis Morin, the director of the Observatory of Inequalities, stresses the need to be more specific with the findings: "To properly understand the threshold, we must take into account a person's location, their age, and additional heritage they may have... Being rich at 25 does not have the same meaning as at 45. Living on €3,700 a month is not the same when you live in Paris or Charleville-Mézières."
Not simply salaries
On the heritage side, the Observatory considers a household to be rich if it has more than €490,000 in wealth – i.e. three times the median wealth in France.
According to Statbel, the average gross monthly salary of a full-time Belgian employee used to be €3,027. Today it is €3,758. The median salary has increased from €2,639 to €3,486. As a reminder, the median wage corresponds to what half of the population earns at most, meaning that 50% of Belgians earn less than €3,486.
According to this government report, the two extremes of the population show that the poorest earn less than €2,295 gross monthly with the richest earning more than €5,886.
Are millionaires so rare?
The 2022 edition of the World Wealth Report shows that there are 141,000 millionaires in Belgium – equivalent to just over 1% of the population. There are 7,000 new millionaires this year but 47,000 new poor. Indeed, in 2021, 19.3% of the population (or 2.1 million Belgians) was at risk of poverty, a little higher than in 2020.
According to a study conducted by Knight Frank (who published the Wealth Report) one has to own a little more than €2 million to be part of the richest 1% of Belgians. In France, it is €1.8 million and €1.7 million in Germany. Monaco (€6.6 million) and Switzerland (€4.3 million) are top of the ranking.
If you want to belong to the category of the richest 0.1% of the inhabitants of the planet, the threshold reaches more than €5.6 million in Belgium.
