I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.
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).
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.
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.
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.).
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.
