Wealth is an industry term. It doesn't imply that one should be wealthy (rich) to use this tool. Wealth management is a tool for planning your own personal wealth for the future.
For example, you add all your accounts/investments and have the software calculate how much you need to save so that by age 65 (retirement) you have $X which you will need so that by the time you reach life expectancy (say 90 y/o) you have > 0$ left.
There is other stuff you can add in, like "I would like Y$ saved by 20XX so that I can purchase a house. How will that affect the amount I need to save now and how much will that affect my savings at retirement."
> Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.
It is probably a good idea to have a financial advisor do this for you since they have the know-how (and certification depending where you live) and will know about regional benefits you can apply which can increase your "wealth". However, if you want to do this yourself because you know the space then there is software like this, or Wealth Simple for example.
Most of the wealthiest people in the world actually manage their own wealth as their primary occupation (which can take many facets). There are places to hire professionals to assist, but until you are in the tens of millions or more in net worth it's usually a better deal to self-manage because professionals expect a percentage of assets under management as a fee. Once you have a high enough net worth you operate a family office / self-organized finance company and hire people directly.
You don't get wealthy by giving someone else 1% of AUM for performing on-par with a passive investment in index funds you could self-manage. So, sure, this is "wanna be wealthy", but what even is "wealthy"? I have a plan using spreadsheets and other tools that is on track to take me into low-mid double digit millions prior to retirement, I can't imagine giving someone 1%, which can be six-figures or more, every year for clicking some buttons. At some point managing my own wealth is worth more investment of my time than any other occupation.
> You don't get wealthy by giving someone else 1% of AUM for performing on-par with a passive investment in index funds you could self-manage.
This is how advisors are typically paid, but this isn't all that they do. Empirically, as people make more money, they turn more to advisors and away from self-directed or robo apps.
Lots of people have opined on why, if you follow the trade publications for advisors. To me, the reasoning comes down to risk: if you have a lot at stake then you will pay money for a lawyer to review for $$$$ per hour. If you have a lot of money you will pay 1% if you can feel more comfortable that the advisor is handling all the aspects of it and you can sleep better at night.
What do you define as wealthy? If you read bogleheads / fire blogs, there are plenty of people I would define as wealthy that self manage their assets. A lot of them use spreadsheets, some use free / cheap software online.
Everyone in my family with a net worth over 5MM self-manages their assets. Many financial advisors/managers are percentage based commission which ends up being about as close to a scam as you can get without it being unethical. (very much just my own opinion here)
I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.
Worked in wealth management (and am now building something similar to the OP but from a totally different direction), it is a complete scam.
The original comment says that no-one is using apps...what do you think wealth managers use? Wealth managers are usually the same products that are re-skinned for professional use with a few added features that most advisors should know how to do themselves...but usually don't (I worked for someone managing nine figures who didn't understand that you could use Excel to do calculations, so he would sit there with a calculator and hardcode every number...this man is worth $10m+ himself).
If you have the ability, I appreciate that some people have neither the time or inclination, do it yourself. At medium levels of wealth (more than $1m and under $50m), you are likely unable to access good advice so this is really the sweet spot for doing it yourself (if you prefer simple financial products, financial advice largely exists as a service in this bracket because people choose to invest in extremely complex products that are designed to give financial advisors something to charge money for...if you have a DC pension and are investing in ETFs, 99% of financial advisors cannot do anything for you).
> At medium levels of wealth (more than $1m and under $50m), you are likely unable to access good advice
What the actual f...
According to the "Global Wealth Databook 2021" by Credit Suisse, page 129, there are in the US:
- $1-5M : 19.5M people (<6%)
- $5-10M : 3.2M people (<1%)
- $10-50M : 1.5M people (0.4%)
And that is from one of the richest country in the world, with a very steep exponential wealth distribution.
$1-50M is _far_ from "medium wealth" by any stretch of the imagination.
>$1M (liquid) is enough to be denoted "high net worth" HNW and access private banking, with a dedicated wealth manager, from most major investment banks.
It isn't. Maybe Morgan Stanley do $1m liquid, but they are aimed at the general public. The big investment banks usually start somewhere around $5-10m, and to actually get good advice you need to be somewhere above this level.
>$1-50M is _far_ from "medium wealth" by any stretch of the imagination.
There are 2 ways to interpret "at medium levels of wealth":
* A medium amount of money among the general population. This is the interpetation you're thinking of.
* A medium amount of money among wealthy people. So wealthy might mean $500k+, with the low end of wealthy meaning $500k-1M, and medium level of wealthy meaning $1M-5M. Below wealthy would be middle class. This may be the interpretation skippyboxedhero was thinking of.
So, then, who are the right people for the kind of financial questions that require experience but don't need an ongoing relationship? (For example, someone who has an existing IRA but would like to convert it as to later take advantage of backdoor Roth conversions - it's a complex modeling exercise that's probably simple for an expert but hard to get right for someone who will need to do it precisely once in their life.
That is the problem. Everyone wants single-time advice but it isn't possible to actually distribute that product profitably in the current structure of the market.
Regulatory costs are very high, this means insurance costs are high, etc. Marketing costs are extremely high in financial services too. If you are going mass market, you are paying hundreds of dollars for leads...how do you make that work if you can't charge much and need to acquire your whole customer base every week?
This is why most of the market is underserved, why rich people end up owning all the high-yield assets, and why the only real solution is having very large institutional pools of capital for most retail savings (i.e. like Australia's superannuation funds, which produced a level of wealth for the average consumer vastly in excess of the US with lower levels of GDP per capita, relatively poor penetration of financial markets, etc.).
For me personally, half the benefit of handling your finances correctly is that with the knowledge of one thing often comes learning about something else that might tweak your financial strategy or at the very least increase your options in life. For something like a backdoor roth strategy or when it might make sense to utilize isn't something I personally would want handled for me. I would want to understand the decisions I make and potentially learn something important along the way.
Financial literacy doesn't seem optional for the wealthy from my perspective. There's too much to gain by having it and too much to lose by neglecting it.
So if I have an extra $5 dollars, I can manage that "Wealth", and I should not get hung up on a term that the ignorant masses associate with a "Social Class".
There are no social hierarchies, we are all wealthy on a sliding scale, from 5$ to $5MIL to $50BIL.
money is a particular type of wealth that is used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a short-term store of value. qualities that make something money-like include divisibility, fungibility, portability, liquidity, easy transferability, wide social acceptance.
wealth can take many forms including human capital, social capital, future earning power, you can be wealthy in some way and yet cash-poor
Do I have to list every asset type and their relationships, to make a point about a word?
I don't think it is surprising that the word "wealth" is used by a lot of people in different ways.
I was accused of using the word incorrectly as in "Wealth" means only "Rich" people. I was wrong because a lot of "non-Rich" can also manage their "Wealth". Someone in the comments even considered having 5Mil of assets to be NOT Rich, NOT wealthy.
It seemed like in the comments there was push back that just because they are managing their "Wealth" that they are NOT Wealthy, and so don't lump them into that category.
Instead of "Wealth" meaning, long list of asset types.
I think maybe that is the point. If you have enough 'assets' and free time to ponder the concept of "wealth" as units of exchange and the nature of money and future earning power, then you are probably "Rich" to many people.
So if you are needing a software tool to manage your "Wealth" then you probably have more "Money/Assets/Fungible Stuff" than most, like >5% of worlds population, so you could be considered "Rich". Then because you are "Rich", "Wealthy", "Have lot of Money", yes, you can be grouped with "Rich" and people can have opinions on the group of "Rich" people.
So I think it is ok to assume if someone needs tools to manage their "Wealth", that I can assume they are "Wealthy".
I've tried a number of tools that promise to "automatically" pull all of my transactions and assets in and create a dashboard for me, but I always end up back with a group of spreadsheets. My current setup is:
1. Overview spreadsheet that shows my current net worth (fed from my other spreadsheets), a monthly snapshot of spending, income, and assets, and number of months until FIRE based on my trailing 12 month spend and income.
2. Spreadsheet tracking stocks I own + their current value
3. Spreadsheet tracking my crypto transactions (that I run a script against to get the cost basis and current value to plug into spreasheet 1)
4. Lunchmoney.app - website that I use to track and categorize spend. This data fees into my overview spreadsheet.
Sounds like you'd like Tiller. It's what I use. Pulls all your transactions and balances into speadsheets and then you can use their templates or your own from there. I have wealth dashboard, spending, etc...
For example, you add all your accounts/investments and have the software calculate how much you need to save so that by age 65 (retirement) you have $X which you will need so that by the time you reach life expectancy (say 90 y/o) you have > 0$ left.
There is other stuff you can add in, like "I would like Y$ saved by 20XX so that I can purchase a house. How will that affect the amount I need to save now and how much will that affect my savings at retirement."
> Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.
It is probably a good idea to have a financial advisor do this for you since they have the know-how (and certification depending where you live) and will know about regional benefits you can apply which can increase your "wealth". However, if you want to do this yourself because you know the space then there is software like this, or Wealth Simple for example.