Getting A Life

Ready to join the millionaires' club?

By Janean Chun

Odds are, you could already be a millionaire, without Ed McMahon even stepping foot near your door. The number of millionaires in the United States is growing--at a faster rate than that of the population in general, in fact. According to PSI, a Tampa, Florida-based market research and consulting firm, the millionaire population is growing by 7.5 percent a year, an especially impressive rate when compared with the overall population growth of only 1 percent annually.

Is the United States experiencing a millionaire boom? "Absolutely,' says John J. DeMarco, senior vice president at PSI, who also notes that the number of U.S. households with investable assets of $1 million or more has more than doubled in the past four years to a total of 2.7 million. As DeMarco sees it, the principal reason for this flow of cash is the rise in entrepreneurship. "Entrepreneurship has always been a key route to wealth in America,' he says. "And now everybody's talking about it and [starting businesses] in record numbers.'

Apparently, money does beget money--DeMarco anticipates this level of growth to continue until at least 2010, when 7.4 million U.S. households will have made it into the million-dollar club.

This article was originally published in the September 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Getting A Life.