How much money is enough?

"I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." - Barack Obama

It is easy to look at billionaires and say those guys have made enough. How about millionaires? Nowadays, you better have $1 million if you plan on retiring. With health care costs rising, and healthcare insurance, including Medicare, covering less and less, or coming with higher deductibles, retiring with less than $1 million is risky. If you get some kind of bad medical condition, death might be your only option.

There is also the Federal Reserve to consider. Our economy is built on a foundation of rising sand, where inflation is built into how the Federal Reserve operates. During times of economic distress, the Fed prints obscene amounts of money. The only saving grace is the too-big-to-fail banks and the ultra wealthy suck up most of this money like Hoovers. We are so lucky to have the rich to save us from hyperinflation! Unfortunately, one of these days, the wealthy may decide to buy stuff. We're screwed then!

Anyone who has been on this Earth long enough will have a story to tell you about how they used to pay 0.XX cents for something, that now costs $X. This is the slow economic death by a thousand cuts, that makes retirement planning difficult. If it costs you $20,000 a year to live today, that same price could be $25,000 in 5-10 years with roughly 5% inflation. I mean REAL inflation, not the fake numbers the government puts out so they don't have to pay people more money in Social Security, which is another aspect that makes retirement planning difficult.

Speaking of inflation, I can remember a time when being a millionaire meant something, and there were only a handful of billionaires. Nowadays, you have to reach the billions to be "significant".

So it is probably safe to say that somewhere between millionaire and billionaire is the "made enough money" point. Unless we have hyperinflation, in which case all bets (aka "investments") are off.

This is where it gets tricky. As long as our economy is built on the "shifting sands of inflation" model, otherwise known as "Keynesian", there is no way to know when you have made enough money...until you die. Then you have made enough.