What is Wealth?
Being truly wealthy is more than just having materialistic riches. A person can only be truly wealthy if they have a balance in all the areas of their lives.
Today when people refer to wealth they generally think about abundance of materialistic things such as money, valuable jewellery, property and other riches.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines household wealth (or net worth) as the value of all the assets owned by a household less the value of all its liabilities in it’s Household Income and Wealth, Australia 2017-18 Report released on 12 July 2019
However if you have an abundance of riches, are you truly wealthy?
Pitfalls of “Wealth”
So many famous people we read about in the media are simply not happy, divorces, public court cases of family feuds.
Look at Gina Rinehart, Australian mining magnate and heiress, reported by BBC in May 2012 to earn A$52m a day, A$1m every half hour or A$600 a second. Yet, her own children battled with her in court between 2011 and 2014.
Etymology of Wealth – the derivation of the word wealth
The etymology of the word wealth suggests it had more to do with well-being, with the Middle English wele or welthe meaning well-being and was analogous to the word health.
OECD Well-being Framework
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organisation working to build better policies for better lives, has conducted research on Well-being and have developed a framework to measure Well-Being and Progress as shown below. which was developed around current well-being, inequalities in well-being outcomes and available resources for future well-being
Source: OECD Website
Optimal Wealth – Best Kept Secrets to Wealth
To become wealthy, a good start is to ask, what is wealth to me?
Once you have answered that, then ask what are the optimal ways I increase my wealth and increase my happiness?
One of the best kept secrets to wealth is having an imagination. All children are naturally good at this, everything is possible and as children get older, and the more times the authority figures in their lives such as parents and teachers dismiss their ideas, laugh at them and even tell them it is ridiculous, the faster the child loses their ability to be truly wealthy and healthy.
Another well kept secret to wealth is the ability to believe in yourself and your ideas and to give it a go regardless of what others may think, do or say that is contrary to your ideas.
You are worth it.
Start your journey to optimal wealth, health and happiness today.
Wealth and health are closely related.
If you’re in Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has produced a fact sheet on Household Economic Wellbeing and you can see how the country is progressing from the statistics that have been collated.