How wealth is built, measured, and passed on — beyond the headline income number.
Younger generations are routinely described as thinking about wealth differently than their parents did. Some of that is genuinely real. A good deal of it is more circumstantial than generational.
A single big financial win makes a better story than years of unremarkable consistency. It's rarely what actually built the wealth behind most genuine long-term financial success stories.
A high income gets treated as the marker of financial success. This is an editorial argument for why that's the wrong number to fixate on, and what a better one looks like.
