The 401(k) millionaire is the new upper-middle-class safety line

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are quietly crossing the seven-figure mark and it's changing how they think about work, wealth, and retirement

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Christmas arrived early this year — at least for investors. Last week, a splashy Wall Street Journal article on “moderate millionaires” laid out some striking numbers:

As of the third quarter, the brokerage Fidelity reports 654,000 401(k) millionaires.

The benefits provider Alight now counts about 100,000 accounts worth more than $1 million (double the 2022 total).

And while T. Rowe Price $TROW doesn’t provide exact counts, roughly 2.6% of plan participants “had balances above $1 million” — again double the 2022 total.

Meanwhile, WSJ reports on UBS estimates that “the number of such millionaires around the world has quadrupled since 2000 to 52 million this year. There were around a thousand of these moderate millionaires added every single day in the U.S. last year.”

Chances are you know one of these millionaires — even if you aren’t one of them

The WSJ article jumped out to me, in fact, because a friend recently shared this exact milestone, texting to crow good-naturedly about her 401(k) balance breaking into seven figures for the first time. She’s a 40-something single mother with a steady corporate sales job who owns her home and has also put two kids through private schools. But she said that achieving that round figure in her 401(k) really made her feel — at last — like she’s arrived. Like she’s finally secure in a way she had never been before. 

How secure? Well, she told me she’s now thinking about how soon she can sell the suburban McMansion, rent an apartment in the city, and focus more on travel and exercise, especially now that her kids are leaving home. And that’s a........

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