If you want to rub shoulders with the wealthy, you need to know the places to hang out and make an impression.
A new survey has profiled the world’s richest people to try to work out how they tick and has come up with some interesting revelations.
The average wealthy individual is aged 58 years old and more likely to be a man (84%) than a woman.
Most are self-made millionaires and billionaires, with only 4.5% inheriting their wealth, says the Wealth-X High Net Worth Handbook.
The majority – 90% of the world’s 22.4 million millionaires – have a personal fortune of between $1 million and $5 million.
Where millionaires hang out
The US has more high net worth individuals (HNWI) than any other country – 8.7 million, with 985,000 living in New York.
Other favoured US cities for the wealthy are Los Angeles, with a millionaire population of 580,000, Chicago (356,000), San Francisco (315,000), Washington DC (305,330) and Dallas (297,000).
Outside the US, the cities with the largest numbers of HNWIS are Tokyo (593,000), Hong Kong (391,000), London (372,000) and Paris (345,000).
“The top 10 countries accounted for 75.2% of the global HNWI population and 73.8% of the total HNWI wealth in 2018. In absolute terms, the top 10 countries added more than 387,000 HNWI individuals – up 2.4% compared with 2017, with combined net worth in the countries rising by an annual $1.0 trillion,” says the report.
In their free time, HNWIs like pop music and photography. One in four play golf and one in eight go skiing.
Education heads charity giving
Due to a possible bias of the number of HNWIs in the US, American Football is also popular with HNWIs.
Many HNWIs give money to good causes.
Top of the giving list is education (28%), followed by social services (16%) and the arts and health care (12% each). Some money also goes to youth and children’s charities (7%) and the environment (7%).
If you prefer an up-and-coming millionaire scene rather than the established US one, Nigeria is the place with the fastest growing HNWI population, with a surge of 16% last year.
Other countries with double-digit increases are Egypt (12.5%), Bangladesh (11.4%), Vietnam (11.4%) and Poland (10% ).
