WHO WANTS TO be a millionaire? You might, I might – but those who actually own a million euro don’t feel rich.

According to a new survey of 1,000 millionaires, two out of five of those who have tipped over the magic seven numbers in their income don’t actually feel wealthy until they have at least $7.5m (€5.4m) in assets. And that’s not counting their pension funds or home.

The good news is that even these insecure millionaires are feeling better about the state of the global and US economy than they were when they were surveyed two years ago by Fidelity Investments. The Chicago Sun-Times and Bloomberg carry the study today, with the Sun-Times saying that 42 per cent of those surveyed cited the $7.5m wealth target. Around four out of ten surveyed also said that they were concerned about their ability to fund their current lifestyle into their retirement years.

Sanjiv Mirchandani, president of National Financial, a subsidiary of Fidelty, said:

Wealth is relative, and to some extent the more you have the more you realise how much more you need.

He noted that the 58 per cent of respondents who said they felt wealthy were, on average, younger than those millionaires who didn’t feel rich.

Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services executive vice-president Gail Graham says this trend ties in with people’s fears about getting close to retirement age, when they will theoretically earn less money. She said:

Many of the respondents are baby boomers, who are supporting their parents and children.

It’s not about ‘Do I have enough money?’ It’s also reflective of an older population facing retirement. The best way I can put it is that when you’re older and you make a mistake, you don’t have 10 years to make it up.

The connection between wealth and happiness has been a source of facination for sociologists and psychologists for decade.

In the 1970s, an American economist called Richard Easterlin published a study that claimed wealth did not necessarily make a person happiness, and that after a certain income level had been reached, a person’s happiness plateaued rather than increased with additional wealth. The study instead claimed that the satisfaction caused by having money or material goods was actually relative to whether they made you equal or more well-off than your neighbour/peers.

However, the Easterlin paradox, as it was termed, has been frequently queried over the intervening decades. Three years ago, two academics from the University of Pennsylvania (where Easterlin had lectured), published a paper “Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox”. In it, they claimed that absolute income – rather than relative income – was what counted towards a person’s happiness. They wrote:

Examining the relationship between changes in subjective well-being and income over time within countries, we find economic growth associated with rising happiness.

Non-millionaires can take heart: Dr Anne B Ryan of NUI Maynooth has written two books, Balancing Your Life and Enough is Plenty, which seek to reassure that people can have satisfying and full lives without living on massive incomes. She says:

Enough is about optimum, having exactly the right amount and using it gracefully.