Welcome to The New Elite blog! Each week, we’ll be exploring the latest trends among today’s affluent and wealthy.
The three of us – Jim Taylor, Doug Harrison, and Stephen Kraus – are market researchers by profession (read our bios here). We’ve spent the last half decade interviewing over 6,000 members of The New Elite – roughly defined as those in the top 1 percent of the American economic spectrum. We’re talking much more than “the millionaire next door” (although that was an excellent book) – we’re talking about folks with roughly $5 million in liquid assets, and/or with $500,000 annually in discretionary income. We have also conducted broader studies of those with $100,000 or more in discretionary income, which corresponds to approximately the top 10% of the American economy (11.8 million households).
We’ve summarized much of this research in our book, The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy. But for our first blog posting, we want to share some research we conducted since our book came out.
Given the economic climate, the question is: are today’s affluent and wealthy feeling it? The answer is clearly yes. Optimism among America’s affluent and wealthy continues to decline, extending a longer-term trend we have observed over the past several years. Fifty-five percent of our respondents are optimistic about their own future, down from 93 percent in 2005. Only one-quarter of respondents are now upbeat about the future of America (60 percent were in 2005). Seventy-five percent of America’s affluent and wealthy consumers agree America is in a recession, and 60 percent feel that the recession will last at least another year.
Jim was widely quoted in the media summarizing the implications of this: “What makes this loss in optimism most worrying is that this top 10 percent represents over 50 percent in all retail spending. They are the business leaders in America, making all the capital purchases decisions for their companies… It is this group of affluent consumers who traditionally keep the economy afloat.”
