Disclaimer : This is a thought exercise that is done purely for fun. All data used is from publicly available research and sources. Extrapolations and inferences are stated when made.
It is commonly quoted that Singapore has the most millionaires per capita in the world. Depending on which report we use, there are about 160,000 households who have USD$1M in investible assets or more. This is net of debt and excludes the primary residence. In total, there are 1.16M or so households resident in Singapore. These millionaire households have about US$860B in assets. Now the above information is nothing new. Dig deeper and the fun begins.
We see that even among this top 17% of households, there is a huge gulf between the various levels. At the top most end, Singapore has about 13-14 billionaires resident here. Move down a little, and there are about 3870 households with above US$30M in net assets. Move down a little more, and there are about 10,000 households who are worth above US$10M in Singapore. I estimate this using USA ratios and applying to Singapore. And assuming some distribution and averages, the top 10% of the top 17% of the wealthy in Singapore probably account for 450B or about 50% of the total millionaire wealth!
Enough with the rich guys, lets look at the broader end of the pyramid. We see that the average net worth of a Singapore household is about USD$750,000 (estimated from 2008 Stats number of S$900K). Excluding primary residence, net investible assets of the average Singapore resident household is probably closer to US$300,000. That sounds like a lot of people. But this is the average. In Singapore, the average household income is about S$7800 per month skewed by higher income earners. About 60% of the households earn below the mean. So, it is reasonable estimate to say that about 23% of households or about 267,000 have investible assets between US$300K to US$1M.
Moving further to the base of the pyramid, it becomes difficult to correlate household income to wealth. But as a guesstimate, I believe there are about 10% or about 116,000 households who have little investible assets for whatever reasons. They can be new families, or low income families or old couples who have used up their savings. That leaves the remainder 50% or about 580,000 households who have net investible assets of between US$10,000 to US$300,000.
