The biggest thing is being able to let your assets grow.

We can all do that to a smaller or larger extent. For example, I have about $140,000 in stocks that I do not have sell because they aren’t in retirement accounts and we earn enough right now from Social Security and retirement funds to meet our needs.

That may not be true forever, but it has been so for several decades while those stocks just sat and grew.

Those stocks will never make me rich because it’s a relatively small amount. But if I needed to borrow money, I could use that as collateral and get a great rate. If some terrible financial emergency hit, selling or borrowing against them might keep us housed and safe.

If I had been able to buy more during my working years, I’d have more now and it would grow larger. Even just the dividends might be more than you need.

My dividends now would barely pay a winter utiliy bill.

That is the real advantage of wealth.

And there are a disgusting numbers of people who have that. I once did some database work for a Boston firm that manages trust funds. I had to run test reports against that database and holy crap it went on and on and on — thousands, tens of thousands, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands people with multi-million dollar trust funds. The paper printouts they did were quite thick!

And that is just ONE firm in one town!