Have you ever been in a meeting with a prospect or a client and after you’ve given them some great advice, they ask: “you know that sounds good; but why haven’t I ever heard of this before?”
One way to answer that is to help them understand where they fit in terms of the population, their income, and their issues compared to other folks. You can do that by playing the Income Game, which is one of the presentations in the Circle of Wealth®. Let me walk you through that conversation:
Hey, what income do you think it is per year that separates:
- The top 50% of households in the country from the bottom 50%? (Maybe $75,000 a year.)
- How about the top 25% of earners? (How about $150,000 a year.)
- Top 10%? It’s getting up there. (That’s probably $250,000 a year.)
- What about the Top 5%? (Maybe $500,000 a year.)
- And the top 1%? (Well, that’s got to be over $2 million a year to be in the top 1%.)
All right. Let’s look at the actual numbers. So, what separates:
- The top 50% from the bottom 50% is an annual gross income of $39,000 (that’s household income),
- The top 25% is separated by $79,000 a year,
- Top 10%–$138,000,
- Top 5%–$195,000, and,
- The top 1%–$480,000.
So, what’s the point of this and how does this answer the question, “Why I haven’t heard of this before?”
Well, most people that you’re going to be talking to might be in the income range of somewhere around $100,000 to $250,000 a year.
If that’s the case, in their mind they think they’re not average, but they think they’re just slightly above average.
But in fact, if you had somebody that was making $250,000 a year, you could see that they’re probably in the top 4% or 3% of all the households inside the country.
So, if we’re helping somebody in the top 1% to 5%, your advice is going to be different than what somebody might be hearing that’s in the top 50% or maybe 40%.
Why is that? The more money you make, the more tax issues you have, the more issues you have around liquidity, use, and control of your money, and the more issues you have around certain government benefits, in effect, being scaled back because you have other resources.
So, if you’re an advertiser and you’re trying to reach a lot of people who are reading about their finances, would you choose to advertise to the top 4%?
Or would you choose to advertise in financial advice that is made for and accepted by more than 50% of the country?
So, you can see that if you are an advertiser on the radio, in magazines or online, you’re likely going to want to reach a large audience and focus on advice that makes sense for people making $30,000 to $60,000 a year.
However, the fact that you are making substantially more than that means you have different issues. And your advice needs to be different.