We’re in the money.
One in 25 New Yorkers is a millionaire, according to an analysis performed by the consulting firm WealthInsight and Spear’s, a magazine that caters to the “ultra high net worth community.”
NYC was the only American metropolis to crack the top 17 millionaire-dense cities, with 4.63% of the population judged to have a personal worth running seven figures or more.
Ranked fourth in fat cat prevalence, the Big Apple follows Monaco — where a stunning 29.21% of the population are millionaires — Zurich (27.34%) and Geneva (17.92%).
WealthInsight defined millionaires as individuals with net assets of more than $1 million, excluding their primary residence, said Spear’s. That means that long-rooted New Yorkers who have recently found themselves “real estate rich” but without portfolios to match, were not even counted.
“There are a lot of genuinely rich people in New York,” who have both brought their fortunes here and made them here, said Philip Kasinitz, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Most of the wealth is Wall Street-generated, he said.
“New York has a high concentration of people in the financial sector,” just like the other European banking centers that ranked highly in the survey, Kasinitz noted.
“In finance, your compensation is often dependent on the market,” which has almost pneumatically inflated of late, Kasinitz explained.
Many older people who began investing decades ago have seen their portfolios swell, bumping them, too, into the millionaires circle. The only other American cities on the list were Houston (2.09% millionaires) and San Francisco (2.07% millionaires).
