June 25, 2026 — What's your wealth level?

I'm currently a Level 3, with a few grand available, and some illiquid assets and debts to repay.

I've been in this zone before - most of my life in the 1 - 3 range, with a few brief periods as a Level 4.

At age 31 I entered Level 5, with zero debt (that was great), and then around age 37 made it all the way to Level 6.

I thought I was on Track to make it Level 7, but my top priority was to fix a specific problem about the world, and that effort went haywire, and here I am, back to the low levels.

I defined the levels by looking up the richest person in the world and then making levels from zero to him.

Every 10x increase in wealth is a new level. The top wealth level right now is 12, which is a trillion dollars, 1,000,000,000,000, or a 1 followed by twelve zeroes.

It's not meant to be perfectly exact, it's a fuzzy scale.

But I think it's simple and useful.

I think this is a great system for objectively looking at wealth inequality.

How many levels should there be?

Is there too many or too few, and why?

One could argue that 12 is around the optimal number. If you divide all humans into groups of 10, and have each group elect their best capital allocator, and then everyone in that group gives that allocator half their coins, and then they go to a conference of allocators, and again organize into groups of 10, and so on, until you have 1 person at the top, you'd get a number of levels similar to our current one.

But perhaps it's too deep.

Imagine you picked the best capital allocator out of groups of 100, or groups of 1,000, you would get a much more squished group of wealth levels, with 6 or 3 tiers.

I'm not sure what is best, I just think this is a useful manner to look at things.

How do you move up to higher wealth levels?

There are a number of strategies.

Minimizing expenses is important.

I think it's best practice to always have an incoming producing job that covers your expenses, so your living expenses never need influence your capital decisions.

Patience is important.

Making above average capital bets is important.

I think a lot of people get levels 5-7 by serving clients 2 or more levels above them. These people don't have to create much value themselves, if they can merely help some high net worth person protect their wealth 2% better, then it makes economic sense for their employer to help them get to that level.

Some people are phenomenal capital allocators. They hop wealth levels faster than most, because not only are they good at allocating their own capital, they are so good that smart money has them also allocate other people's capital.

You definitely need to hold assets that at some point go up exponentially. Those almost always take a long time before the curve verticalizes. You've got to have patience, and not sell too soon when that vertical hits.

How do you move down wealth levels?

Ouch! This hurts. But it's not the end of the world.

Betrayal and divorce and sabotage are pretty devastating. I don't know if you can prepare for that.

Overconfidence can hurt. Blaming your jumps on skill when they were really more luck can precede falls. It might be good to try and split your wealth into 2 classes - skill gains and luck gains - and not mix the two.

And often times capital bets can take a lot longer to actualize than you forecast. Or conditions can change so that what was once a strong bet gets blindsided by something unexpected.

How fast can you move levels?

It certainly seems easy to drop levels fast. You can drop 3 levels in a matter of months, all on your own.

Meanwhile, it takes decent decisions, plus very good and rare market conditions to go up 3 levels in a year.

You can't force fast jumps, but you can force fast falls.

So it seems like the strategy is to develop strong habits to avoid any fast drops, while positioning yourself for good long term gains when favorable winds come.

Do the levels get easier or harder to climb?

For me it was very hard to get to Level 5, but getting to Level 6 just required a single good bet.

I had also placed good bets and could have gotten to Level 7 had I just held and not sold things too early.

It would be interesting to see statistics on trajectories.

It could be just as hard to go from Level 3 to 6 as it is from 6 to 9.

I think it is very hard to get to Level 10, not so much because going from Level 9 to 10 is harder than from 4 to 5, but because each jump is just as hard as the last, and takes the same amount of time on average, so the person on Level 10 on average competed longer than people on earlier levels (in addition to getting good market timing).

How important is wealth level?

It can be fun to be on higher levels. You have more time and resources to go to more places, and it's easier to live a healthy lifestyle.

You can quickly have a lot of very interesting experiences when you are on high levels, though the best experiences in my life were level adjacent.

I can tell you some people, and many institutions, will treat you far worse when you are on the low levels. Institutions treat you so much better when you are on higher levels.

Right now I just want to get back to higher levels in order to stop certain absolutely cruel things from continuing to happen.

But other than that, it's not the most important thing by a long shot.

I like my post from over 15 years ago - Happiness is in Mediocristan - which stands the test of time.

I think the games that matter more are: did you have good times with your family and friends; did you make your community better; did you live with courage; did you pursue truth and knowledge and understanding of this world? It's far less important what wealth level you reached.

What are higher wealth levels good for?

I thought Level 5 was awesome. I didn't worry about money and traveled a lot and had a lot of fun with friends and family.

But during Covid 19 society began acting so dishonestly and I felt so powerless to do anything about it. When I hit Level 6 I felt a responsibility to really go full throttle on fixing some specific problems.

I guess I don't play the Levels game correctly. I don't care so much about my coin capture level - how much a share of the pie I have - but care more about making the pie bigger for all.

There's another game going on, that is not represented here, that I really want an equally accurate map of.

That's the game I'm more concerned about doing well on. (But it would be nice to improve my capital allocator talents and also get to Level 6 - 8 on the scale talked about here).

What is the ideal level to stop at?

If you don't like the capital allocation game, but would like to play it well enough to get to a level of freedom of coin concerns, Level 7 seems to be where a binary threshold is crossed.

At Level 7 you can be Living Off The Interest - earning multiple times the median income at the risk free rate of return.

I think this is my new favorite way to look at wealth as a set number of Levels. It's simple and concrete and I think it accurately maps the whole territory.

I think it's a strong core that can be further built on.