The first, and perhaps most surprising, insight from the data found that millionaires are happy but not extremely happy. It might seem ludicrous to hear that anyone from this pool of millionaires responded as lower than a “10 out of 10” on happiness. But the results showed that millionaires were around an 8 out of 10 on their self-reported happiness. The table below shows the average happiness (out of 10) for millionaires based on their wealth bracket. The interpretation here is that there is more to life than riches, and a million dollars (or even more than $10 million!) won’t automatically bring us to a “10 out of 10” on happiness.
The second insight from this research finds that multimillionaires are slightly happier than millionaires, but only at very high levels of wealth exceeding $10M. In other words, the super-rich are slightly happier at extreme levels of wealth.
The $1-$2 millionaires reported a 7.8 out of 10 happiness whereas the $10+ multimillionaires came in just above an 8.0 out of 10. Although this difference was statistically significant due to the large sample size of respondents, a 0.2 difference on a 10-point scale seems trivial compared to the ~$10M dollar difference in wealth between these groups.
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