Me and the Rich 200 List

The SMH has a summary of the latest BRW "Rich 200" Australians List. Aside from the sad, sad news that the number of Australian billionaires has dropped from 38 last year to only 28 this year, my main interest in this story was to see how the GFC had affected the "cut off" to get on the list of 200 wealthiest Australians. Last year the cut off was A$200 million, whereas this year it had dropped to "only" A$150 million. A plot of my personal net worth vs. 1% of the Rich 200 cut off shows a remarkable correlation between my net worth and the amount of wealth required to make the BRW's list of the 200 Australians.

If anything, my NW was slowly creeping up on 1% of the "cut off" level (one of my long term targets) up until the onset of the GFC. Since then my NW may have dropped back relative to the cut off - although it's hard to be sure until next year's figures come out (the cut off figure is a bit rubbery and probably doesn't correspond exactly to 31 Dec each year). As a relatively large part of my annual net worth increase comes from saving a large proportion of my salary income, I suspect that my ROI is lower than the increase in the Rich 200 cut off. That's probably due to my asset allocation being overweight residential real estate compared to the asset allocation of the richest 200 Australians.

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