While it makes sense that time is often a crucial ingredient to accruing savings and assets, the average age of millionaires in the US has been rising

Welcome to the age of geriatric millionaires

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2024-06-15 22:30:03

While it makes sense that time is often a crucial ingredient to accruing savings and assets, the average age of millionaires in the US has been rising faster than the average age of the overall population over the last three decades.

It's the age of geriatric millionaires, and it might point to overlapping issues: Younger workers can't amass wealth at the same rate they used to, and increasingly, the way to ascend to the ranks of the wealthy is to receive inheritances.

"Multi-generational wealth is doing fine, but first-generation people who are not on the wealth train are having a harder time getting on," Chuck Collins, the director of the program on inequality and co-editor of inequality.org at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, told Business Insider.

That's bad news for the American dream of hitting it big as a self-made entrepreneur. According to Forbes, a third of the people on its latest billionaire list inherited all or most of their wealth; in its 2001 ranking, just five out of the 490 ranked billionaires were listed as having inherited their wealth. And in many cases, those individuals are inheriting that wealth much later in life.