RE: Nice not all gains have gone2 Sep 2021 00:48
Yuri
Its all relative
Real, proper millionaires, who could spend a million tomorrow? A fraction of 1%.
Around 3.5 million households have total net household wealth of over £1m, including property, pensions, physical assets, and financial assets.
However, if you want to know how many individual people have £1m+ in financial assets, i.e. they could buy a £1m house for cash without selling their own home(s), cashing in the pension, or flogging the jewellery, that is a bit harder to find out.
Data from 2016 from the ONS[1] tells us that the number is far below 1%.
The richest 1% of households has, from that data, a mean financial wealth of £1.75m, but a median financial wealth of £588,000, so the £1m line is probably somewhere around the top 0.25% of households. That is 65,000 households. There will be a few more from households below the top percentile who are heavy in financial assets, so round up to 80,000.
On average, those households are going to have more than 1 person who would have a direct claim on that wealth (typically husband and wife), and it isn’t reasonable to say they are both millionaires if they have £1m in financial assets between them (but they are if they have £2m), so let’s estimate the number of genuine, financial assets on hand, individual millionaires to be around 60,000.
That is a bit less than 0.1% of the UK population.
Footnotes
[1] A breakdown of the components of total household wealth by percentile points, Great Britain, July 2014 to June 2016