I wanted to share a story from early in my marriage that came to mind recently. One evening over dinner, my husband asked me if we were poor. I was a bit befuddled and told him I didn’t think so, but when he asked again several weeks later, I asked him what he meant. He explained that “we never have meat.” When I pointed out that there was chicken in his stir-fry, he clarified that we never had “big hunks of meat.” I asked him to explain why that was significant to him, and he told me that as a child, they rarely had meat at home. On the rare occasions his father brought home a paycheck, his mother would buy steak. I knew he had grown up in a difficult and often dysfunctional household, but I hadn’t realized the impact until then. To him, meat was the ultimate symbol of being rich.
What does it mean to “be rich?” Perhaps everyone has their own definition based on their experiences and feelings about money. Most personal finance experts equate wealth with financial freedom, meaning that you don’t have a lot of debt and you have enough income to do what you want. How do you define rich or wealthy?