How Much Wealth is Enough?

"There are only two families in the world: the Haves and the Havenots."
- Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote

Wealth is relative.

Consider three people. Larry lives in a village where most of the houses are 2-bedroom bungalows. He owns a 5-bedroom 2-storey house, with an attic, on a fenced 900-square meter lot, and parks three cars in his garage. He lives alone.

Beside his property is a 2-bedroom bungalow owned by Mario, a father of two grade school kids. Mario works as an automotive shop manager in a car dealer company. He acquired his house on terms and he has religiously paid his monthly instalments for the last eight years. In his small garage is parked a 10-year old but well-conditioned bantam which his company assigned to him as a service vehicle.

Across the street is a government property that has been taken over by migrants to the city. Right in front of Larry's house is a small sari-sari store, part of the makeshift house, of Rodelio, a 40-year old father of five children, and who works intermittently as a construction carpenter.

Easily, we can see that Larry has more than Mario and Rodelio, and may not want more of the conveniences of living that the other two may relatively aspire for. But Larry is aching. His wife and children left him and he has been living alone for the last three years.

Mario dreams of buying a new car and is patiently laboring and saving for its down payment. His wife works as a cashier at a downtown drugstore and their two children attend the village school. Once or twice a month, on Sundays, he takes the whole family to the mall. At his level, he definitely wants to have more.

Rodelio may not have a regular work in his construction company but he never really runs out of job. His mastery of his carpentry skills has allowed him to take on house repair work at the nearby villages, thus enabling him to buy the necessities of living relative to his surrounding and his lifestyle. His five children are all studying at the public school and his wife manages their sari-sari store. Every Sunday, the whole family looks forward to the "cool air" of the mall. Rodelio dreams of having his own house and lot someday.

When these three heads of families walk into the mall, we can see wealth at three different levels. Wealth means differently to different people. Even as Cervantes classifies families as having or not having wealth, the distance between these two categories spans a chasm as wide and as far as our imagination can take us. The three personages presented symbolize the presence or absence of wealth at three different levels, and the relativity does not stop there. It moves from individual to individual, depending on what economic level we find him in.

Wealth has come to mean the presence in sufficient quantity of items of economic value, including the power to control such items. Such items may include money, house, land, business, proprietary possessions and personal items such as cars, jewelries, artwork and other items of worth. It is also measured by one's reference to non-financial values such as education, health, successful children, power, authority and other evidences of convenience or social elevation.

Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad Poor Dad, defines wealth as nothing more than a measurement of time: how long one can maintain his lifestyle when he stops working. In essence, he places a quality and time tag on the items of economic value.

Indeed, it is not our income level which defines our wealth but what remains of our income and what we do with that remainder. When the remainder is accumulated over a period of time and evaluated, it becomes our networth, which in financial terms, is the result of our asset-minus-liabilities operation.

This is the pathway of our advocacy. The wealth we mean is being in a minimum state of having "enough" of the things we need to live comfortably, even when we are no longer capable of active production.

I know that even that distinction will lead us to ask "What is enough?" or "How much is enough?" Hello relativity!

But let us not allow relativity to delay our quest for wealth. Let us define what we mean by "enough" by establishing certain tresholds. The important thing is we are into this journey, and we have the intense desire to better our present position and aim for more.

Which means we need to have a starting point.