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If you child gets a serious disease, can you take a year off from work to comfort him/her and give the best possible assistance in recovery? Can you take your child to private facilities that have individual rooms and private tutoring so they don't miss out on education? If the best possible treatment with a high success rate and a low-impact recovery is in Sweden, can you arrange medical transport on a plane to get your child there?

Insurance is just to cover not dying. Being rich makes it a comfortable experience.

The rich think of their wealth as a strong defense; they imagine it to be a high wall of safety.

>Assuming that "rich" means "don't need to work at all, for the rest of your life, to keep a roof over your head and food on your table," none of what you listed require being rich.

Yup, I believe that's their point. If you realize the reason you want to be rich can be had for less cost than actually becoming rich, you can save yourself a lot of time and stress.

Anecdotally, I cut my salary by 60% this year to directly pursue what I wanted, instead of saving to do it years later. I suppose I may regret it some day, but at this point I'm confident it was the right choice.

Are you willing to share what you are pursuing? I'm curious. I'm feeling a bit hamsterwheely myself right now and am constantly looking at the horizon for an alternative approach that could work for me.

> This is so esoteric it's hard to even know what you're trying to say here. I'm sure you could find plenty of people with $10+ million net worths who feel beholden to act a certain way in the interests of certain people.

I think with OP is trying to say is that more money means more leverage – not in the credit sense – to only feel beholden to people that have interests that align with yours (family, peers, mentors) and less with those that don’t (boss, managers or people who know how to manipulate your behaviour by using lack of money as a tool).

> because I had good insurance through my employer

However, you only get this peace of mind without being rich thanks to Obamacare (whose days may be numbered...). Before, you had to be rich to self-insure against the following events:

- What if you lose your job? It could take you longer to find one again than whatever Cobra covers, or a pre-existing condition could make individual insurance unaffordable.

- What if your insurance is not as good as you thought, and you hit a lifetime cap?

- What if the insurance company managed to conjure up a pre-existing condition to escape their obligations?

> However, you only get this peace of mind without being rich thanks to Obamacare

Well that's really weird since this was in 2009.

Sure you had good insurance then, but you could have easily lost it by losing your job. And before Obamacare the only way to be absolutely safe from the negative outcomes I listed was to be rich.

> I can only speak to the US but this is much more an insurance issue than a wealth issue. When I made $30k a year I had a ~$75k surgery and it cost me about $1200 all in, including follow-up copays with the surgeon, because I had good insurance through my employer. I probably had $15k in credit card debt at the time and rented a $400/mo room in someone else's house - certainly not rich by any stretch.

This isn't rich. Rich is the ability to direct people to research life extension and disease prevention. It's to be able to have access to the newest techniques and best doctor, regardless of world location.

It's the ability to have a sick child with 24/7 doctors and only worry about the child.

Rich is the ability to buy an island and create a clone army of yourself, using that army to construct the largest ai supercomputer the world has ever seen, then solving aging and disease ultimately merging with the machine, redefining and extending what it means to be human.

Err sorry wrong thread.