I know this sounds like a stretch, but one thing to think about is that two working adults in strong industries (IT, Finance, Banking, etc.) could have a 1% household income but no real wealth accumulated. I think the term is HENRY...High Earner, Not Rich Yet.
Corpus and San Antonio maybe, but Fort Worth is getting to be like a mini-Dallas and it's too close to it, and El Paso I have no idea about. I looked at that Charles Schwab survey the other night and some of the response totals were kind of surprising to me, but others were more like "yup... I remember thinking like that when I was young". lol. It's like everything else - your perspectives on life and living change as you get older. Hell, I was trying to decide between working at Enron in Houston, Worldcom in Tulsa or moving to the DFW area to be a part of a booming job market. If you ask me now, I wouldn't want to live in any of those cities no matter the company. Well, I hear Tulsa is actually better than most people think, but I think I'd still pass.
Didn't know that about FW, that's a bummer. Is Grapevine still a tolerable place? El Paso is pretty, clean, safe and close to fun times in New Mexico/Arizona Tulsa is a totally underrated city, I'm sure it's not for everyone, and I haven't been there in about 5 years, but there's lots of good things about it.
I lived in Fort Worth for a bit back in the late aughts/early teens. I was there two weeks ago, walked around downtown and hung out with a bunch of locals, still has that FW vibe, people are nice, even the high-falutin' monied ranchers/C&W old folks, and absolutely not like Dallas IMO.
Well, I should say I'm speaking from the perspective that I hate big cities and anything where there's mass traffic, tons of people doing nothing but "shopping", and uppity people. lol. There are probably havens in Fort Worth that are still better than Dallas, but the traffic around there is still nutty and there's a reason it's called "DFW". Also the influx of out-of-staters, Dallasites, etc. there as property values shot up hasn't helped, and it just isn't what it was 10-20 years ago. That being said, they probably get a lot of Odessa/Midland/gas/oil industry traffic from out west, and a lot of it is probably like it used to be, but the suburbs exploded and is still exploding out that way. About Tulsa, I was told that by an old dude I used to work with. He was a broker who seemed to know "everybody". He used to talk about how people think Tulsa is some backwoods hick place, but its arts scene (I think he said arts) was really underrated. Hell, even Bill Burr said it was among his top underrated cities once.
Yes, absolutely. Can confirm. And some people like entrepreneurs are in that situation and also have a lot of unrealized wealth "on paper" (sometimes from owning shares in more than one company) which may or may not materialize as cash in an exit, eventually.
You're not rich unless you can live like you want to live off of your interest while still growing your accounts. You're not wealthy unless you can build at least 1,800 public and academic libraries across the US.
