I’ve spent more than twenty years sitting across from people while they talk about their money. Some are worth a few million, some a few hundred million. The thing that has surprised me most, and that almost nobody believes until they see it up close, is how little a person’s net worth tells you about how well they’re actually living.
I’ve met people near the top of the wealth scale who are anxious, isolated, and quietly unhappy. I’ve met others with a fraction as much who are among the most content people I know. That isn’t a sentimental observation — it’s a practical one, and it has real consequences for how you go about building wealth in the first place.
This piece is about what wealth actually is, once you look past the number. It’s the companion to our more practical guide on how to build financial freedom: that one is about the path and the maths, and this one is about what the whole exercise is for.
Key Definitions
Wealth
In its fullest sense, the resources — financial and otherwise — that allow you to live a life of meaning and choice. Money is one component, and an important one, but it isn’t the whole of it.
Net worth
What you own minus what you owe: the standard snapshot of financial wealth. A useful number for planning, and a poor proxy for how well a life is actually going.
“Enough”
The level of wealth that funds the life you actually want. Knowing your “enough” is what separates people moving toward a destination from people chasing a figure that keeps receding.
The income–happiness threshold
The well-documented idea that more income improves wellbeing up to the point where basic security and comfort are met, after which the effect flattens sharply. Where that point sits depends heavily on where, and how, you live.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Net Worth
We measure financial wealth by net worth — assets minus liabilities — because it’s tidy and you can put it on a page. It’s genuinely useful for planning. The problem comes when people quietly start treating it as a scoreboard for their lives.
Research has long suggested that income lifts wellbeing up to a point — enough to cover shelter, food, healthcare, and a measure of security — and that beyond that point the effect flattens out. The exact figure is endlessly debated, and in a country like South Africa, with the inequality we have, it’s almost impossible to pin down: maybe it’s R300,000 a year, maybe R500,000. The number matters less than the shape of the finding. Past the level that buys genuine security and comfort, more money does surprisingly little for how good your life feels.
I see this directly. We work with clients across an enormous range of net worth, from comfortable to seriously wealthy. What I can tell you with real confidence, after two decades, is that where someone sits on that scale tells you almost nothing about how content, well, or fulfilled they are. The correlation people assume is there simply isn’t.
When the Number Is Tied Up in Things You Can’t Use
There’s a more practical problem with treating net worth as wealth, too. A large balance sheet is often a misleading one. Plenty of people who look wealthy on paper have most of their net worth locked into things that don’t actually do much for them: a primary home, an illiquid business stake, a portfolio of properties that’s hard to sell and harder to live off.
It looks impressive in a summary. It doesn’t pay for a year off, fund a child’s education, or generate the income to stop working. Wealth that can’t be converted into the life you want, when you want it, is wealth in name more than in substance. This is why we spend so much time with clients on the unglamorous question of whether their assets are actually arranged to support their life, rather than just to look large in a statement.
What Wealth Is Actually Made Of
Say “wealth is about more than money” and you risk a wall of platitudes, so let me be specific about what I mean, because it isn’t vague.
The things that most reliably make a life feel rich are health, close relationships, autonomy over your time, and a sense of purpose or progress. None of these appears on a balance sheet. Money interacts with all of them, but only indirectly, and the relationship is easy to get backwards. Money can buy back your time — or consume it entirely in the chasing of more. It can ease the strain that wrecks relationships — or become the thing you sacrifice them for. It can fund the experiences and security that support good health — or it can cost you your health to accumulate.
That’s the real point, and it’s not soft. The financial and the non-financial aren’t separate accounts to be balanced. Money is the instrument; the rich life is the thing it’s meant to play. A plan that grows the instrument while neglecting what it’s for has missed the entire purpose.
The Trap of “More” Without “Enough”
Most of the financial unhappiness I see, at the wealthier end, comes from one thing: chasing “more” without ever having defined “enough.” There’s always a bigger number, a wealthier peer, a more impressive house. Without a deliberate sense of what’s enough for the life you actually want, you’re on a treadmill that has no finish line by design.
It helps to remember how relative all of this is. A net worth of R10 million puts you comfortably in the top 1% in South Africa; by European or American standards it reads very differently. “Rich” is a moving target that depends entirely on who you’re standing next to, which is exactly why it makes such a poor goal. Chasing an abstract figure to satisfy the ego is a guarantee of never arriving.
The alternative is to work the other way around. Decide on the life you want, then size the wealth to support it — not the reverse. That’s a genuinely freeing shift, and it’s the heart of our companion guide on building financial freedom, which walks through how to put an actual number on your version of “enough” and a plan to reach it.
Money Is a Tool, Not a Score
If there’s a single idea this whole firm is built on, it’s this: money should be a tool to help you live life on your terms. Not a scoreboard, not a source of status, not an end in itself. A tool.
That belief changes the work. It’s why we start by understanding someone’s life and what they want from it before we talk about products or portfolios, and why we think the mechanics — the investing, the tax structuring, the foundations of compounding and cash flow — only matter in service of something larger. Done well, money buys you choices, security, and time. Those are worth a great deal. They’re just not the same as the bank balance that funds them, and confusing the two is the most common and most expensive mistake I see.
Being good with money, in the end, isn’t about accumulating the most of it. It’s about arranging it so it quietly supports the life you actually want to live, and then getting on with living it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it really mean to be wealthy?
True wealth is having the resources — financial and otherwise — to live a life of meaning and choice. Money is an important part of that, but health, close relationships, control over your time, and a sense of purpose matter at least as much, and none of them shows up on a balance sheet.
Is net worth a good measure of wealth?
It's a useful planning number and a poor measure of a life. A high net worth can be tied up in illiquid assets that don't improve your day-to-day living, and in practice where someone sits on the wealth scale tells you very little about how content or fulfilled they are.
How much money do you need to be happy?
Research suggests income improves wellbeing up to the point where security and comfort are met, then the effect flattens. That threshold is hard to pin down and depends heavily on where you live — but the lesson holds: beyond "enough," more money does surprisingly little for how good your life feels.
Can you be wealthy without being rich?
Absolutely. Someone with modest assets but good health, strong relationships, and control over their time is wealthy in the ways that most affect a life. Equally, considerable financial means can coexist with real poverty of time, health, or connection. The two ideas overlap, but they aren't the same.
How do I figure out how much wealth is "enough" for me?
Start with the life you want rather than an abstract figure, then size the wealth needed to support it. Our guide to building financial freedom works through how to turn that life into a real number and a plan, which is a far more useful goal than chasing "more" indefinitely.
What It’s All For
Defining wealth is personal, and it’s worth doing deliberately rather than by default. If you take one thing from this, let it be that the number was never the point. It’s an instrument — important, worth building carefully, but only ever in service of the life it’s meant to support.
Decide what a rich life looks like for you. Build the wealth to support that, not to impress anyone or to win a comparison that has no end. And once it’s arranged to do its job, let it — and get on with the living, which was always the point.
If you’d like help turning that into something concrete, our guide to building financial freedom covers the practical path, and our wider financial planning fundamentals show how the pieces fit together.
We start every client relationship with the same question: what do you actually want this money to do for your life? If that’s the conversation you’d like to have, we’re a fee-only, flat-fee firm — so it’s genuinely about you, not a product.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Henceforward (Pty) Limited is an authorised representative of Graviton Wealth Management (FSP 8772). References to market events and historical performance are for illustrative purposes only and are not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making any financial decisions.
Carl-Peter has been in the financial services industry since 2003 and launched Henceforward with Steven Hall in 2021. He holds the CFP® designation, has over 20 years of industry experience, and likes talking to his clients about wealth and what it means to them.