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How to Join the Top 1% of Net Worth
73 Plays12 days ago
The biggest myth about wealth in America is that becoming a millionaire means you’re financially free. In 2026, that’s not even close. In this video, I break down what it actually takes to reach the top 10%, 5%, and 1% of net worth using real data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, and I’ll show you the pattern most people miss: why “saving and investing” only gets you so far, and why the top 1% builds wealth differently (hint: business ownership). I also share where I personally sit on the wealth ladder, the exact path I took from employee → entrepreneur → investor, and the counterintuitive lesson I learned after wasting millions by reinvesting in the wrong place. If you want a clear, data-backed roadmap to climb the wealth ladder—and build real freedom without the delusion—this is the video.
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Transcript
Rethinking Financial Freedom: The Myth of Millionaire Status
00:00:00
Speaker
The biggest myth about wealth in America is that once you become a millionaire, you're financially free. That might have been true 40 years ago, but today you're barely in the top 10%. In this video, I'm going to show you what it takes to make it in the top 10%, 5%, and 1% of net worth in 2026. I'm also going to share where I personally stand in that.
00:00:20
Speaker
More importantly, I'm going to show you how to get higher up the wealth ladder based on real data so you eventually get into the top 1% of wealth in the United States.
Meet Matt Clark: Entrepreneurial Success and Experience
00:00:30
Speaker
Now, I'm Matt Clark, co-founder of two companies with over $100 million dollars in sales each, Amazing.com and Life Boost Coffee.
00:00:37
Speaker
I've been helping people build businesses since 2012. Those people we estimate have generated over $10 billion dollars in sales so far. And I'm here to give you all of my best strategies and lessons learned over the past 16 years for
Understanding Net Worth: Income and Wealth Building
00:00:51
Speaker
free. First, let's talk about what we're going to cover today. We're going to focus on net worth. The reason is is we could also talk about income, but this video would just be longer and I don't think would really add anything. Because there is an important lesson. I think once you learn this lesson, you'll understand why we focus on net worth because it's really comes from income in most of the cases. So I recently read a book called The Wealth Ladder. And the biggest point that came out of that book for me was that
00:01:15
Speaker
In most cases, net worth is determined by income. Somebody either has to get a job or build a business that generates a lot of cash flow, or they build a company that goes public and they sell stock, which will eventually show up in their income as well through capital gains. And so one quote from that book that I think will bring this point home is he said, your income today... is the foundation of your wealth tomorrow, which is why investors like Warren Buffett have focused on businesses that actually generate cashflow and don't just keep pushing that off till a later date, they may never come. So we're gonna focus on net worth, but it very much is related to the income that you generate either through investments or through the businesses that you build. So let's see what wealth looks like at each of
Wealth Distribution: Federal Reserve Insights
00:01:58
Speaker
these levels. Now this data is from the Federal Reserve Triennial Survey of Consumer Finances. So let's talk about the top 50% or the 50th percentile.
00:02:06
Speaker
They have around $192,000 net worth. They probably have an okay job. They're trapped in the situation in which income rises more slowly than wealth. And they never really are able to escape that. Bump that up into the top 10%, the net worth is around $1.9 million. dollars Now they look wealthy on paper. They have almost $2 million. dollars They're multimillionaires, but most of their assets are trapped in the house that they live in and in retirement accounts. These are people who have either been working for a long time at some sort of six-figure job, or maybe they've been working at a job that pays a little bit more, but they've been working a few less years. These people are asset rich, but freedom poor. Now the top 5%, the average net worth is around $3.8 million. dollars Now they earn well and invest well.
00:02:50
Speaker
But they're still playing the same game as the top 10%, just with bigger numbers. In most cases, these people are just older. They've been having a longer time working at a job, earning a six-figure income, saving up, putting money in their retirement accounts, into their 401k, and now they're in the top 5%, with maybe only a few decades left to live.
The Top 1%: Business Ownership and Financial Independence
00:03:08
Speaker
Now the top 1%. The median net worth $13.6 million. $13.6 million.
00:03:13
Speaker
Now, they break away from the pack. As you see, there's a bigger and bigger jump each level of wealth that we go up. They're no longer relying on retirement accounts, jobs, and their home to build their wealth.
00:03:24
Speaker
They're 11 times more likely to own a business than the bottom 50%. This is why a lot of times people talk about how do you get in the top 1% because this is where you're not just somebody who saved up a bunch of money. You found a way to separate how much you earn and your net worth away from what your job is. Now, just for fun, what does it take to make it in the top 0.1%? About $50 million net worth And so what I'd like you to do right now is comment below with which level you'd like to reach. So what's the pattern here?
00:03:54
Speaker
Lower wealth groups, if you look at how their assets are made up, most of their wealth is just in cash, cars, and sort of their primary residence, the house that they live in. The middle wealth groups, a lot of their wealth is in retirement accounts and primary residence. They have a bigger house, a bigger retirement account, but that's still where most of their money comes from. As you get into the higher wealth groups, the top 1%, for example, most of their money is in business interest, either private companies or public companies that they own a significant amount of stock in, probably beyond just their 401. This is, they've either started a business that has gone public, they've invested heavily in bigger companies, Or maybe they invested in somebody else's business that took their company public. Either way, these are more close business interests, either companies they personally own or they own as part of
From Employee to Entrepreneur: Clark's Journey
00:04:42
Speaker
another group.
00:04:43
Speaker
That's the biggest difference. Rather than just having money in houses and cars and retirement accounts, they own business interests that have made them extremely wealthy. I experienced this path myself from high earner or what would have been a high earner if I lasted longer to business owner. And that's what really built my wealth. When I was in college, say around 2007 or so, that's when I was reading about these hedge fund managers that were making, you know, a billion dollars in income in a year, not just business appreciation, like actual income in a single year. So I was like, that sounds like a fantastic business to be in. I was going to join an investment bank, work there for, you know, five years or so, and then start my own thing in that industry. So i actually went to Citigroup and worked in their energy trading department right out of college. I was making $60,000 a year. I got a $10,000 signing bonus, which is pretty good straight out of college, you know, over a decade ago.
00:05:29
Speaker
But there was just one problem. I was just miserable being an employee. I was just not built for it i had two parents that were entrepreneurs. I was not gonna make it, you know, five years sort of looking up to these people and doing whatever they say, working in that sort of environment. So I quit to go start my own business.
The Power of Business Ownership in Wealth Creation
00:05:43
Speaker
Now I ended up building an e-commerce business only a few months later. I went from earning $60,000 a year to about $3,000 a month with my first business. Then had to hire an employee and was basically earning nothing. And at the time I was kind of, what the hell did I do? Because I knew the friends that I had that were still at the investment bank, another year, they'd be earning a hundred grand plus, plus bonuses on top of that. That's the whole reason why you work in that industry. But fortunately, things worked out for me. As I built my businesses, I was able to make my first million by 25 and just kept growing from there. And plus, I had a heck of a lot more freedom.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I used my money that I made from those businesses to invest in public companies, private businesses, kind of like a mini Warren Buffett model. So today, the main sources of my net worth are the cash flow from companies that I've built over the past 16 years or so.
00:06:31
Speaker
And so, for example, our business, amazing.com, we sold $100 million dollars of our amazing selling machine training program alone outside of everything else we had going on in the business. So sure, we had affiliates. We had to give basically half of that too, because we had a 50% affiliate commission. I had a business partner who we were splitting it with. And then also we had employees and operating costs, et cetera, cetera, but still was able to generate a good amount of cash, millions of dollars in cash from that to actually put in my own investment account and let compound over time.
Investment Strategies: Beyond Reinvestment in Business
00:06:59
Speaker
And I invested that money into public and private businesses. So that's been a big source. Another one has been building another company from the ground up.
00:07:06
Speaker
I was actually doing about 200 grand a year before I joined, but I partnered up with my friend Charles and I said, hey, if I can scale this thing, which is really my specialty is scaling businesses really quickly, especially e-commerce businesses. And I was like, if I can help you scale this thing, I want 40%. If we can't, the business is yours. So we made a deal. We blew through all of our numbers. And today my ownership in that business alone is probably worth somewhere between 25 and $60 million. dollars So that's been ah another big source of net worth, but also cashflow, especially over the last couple of years.
00:07:35
Speaker
Then I also own just personal stuff. But like, you know, people as you start getting up higher and higher in the wealth categories, that stuff matters less and less. I have a couple of cars, we have a couple of houses, but that's less of a factor in this whole picture. So the core message here is to build wealth, increase your income, and use that to gain interest in other businesses, either businesses that you personally own, businesses that you buy, or public companies that you invest in. The more you do that, the more your wealth is gonna compound like the top 1%. There's just one problem if you do all this through a job. An investment banker to get to a million dollars in annual salary takes around 10 to 15 years, and a very small percentage of people actually ever get there, most quit along the way. To be a doctor that gets to a million dollars a year in income takes 15 to 25 years, including schooling. That's why that path was not going to work for me. I was miserable working for somebody else. it. to go out there and build a business and because as a business owner it's all up to you i started a business from nothing then made a few grand a month and kind of went from there all the way up to building quite a bit of wealth and so that's the path that i chose you may choose to keep working at a job and do that but in all likelihood because you're watching this video you're probably going to want to go out there and build your own business and that's going to be the real source of wealth for you and to give you one bonus tip this may be a source of a whole and nother video in the future is if you build a business that's successful You don't always wanna reinvest all your money in that business. What I found out with my company, amazing.com, at one point we had like $12 million dollars in the bank that was basically free and clear.
00:09:04
Speaker
We ended up taking that money because we thought we had to grow that business, had to reinvest and took all of that money and hired employees, built a mobile app that cost 500 grand that we didn't do anything with, invested a million dollars in a radio show advertising that produced nothing, but another half a million dollars in a community platform we threw away.
00:09:22
Speaker
Had a team in Ireland, full development team over there, in addition to our 60 plus employees in the US, did all these things. We were just trying to force this thing to grow. Had we taken that $12 million dollars and the whole business at the time was just teaching people how to sell on Amazon. So if we would have taken that $12 million dollars and just put it in Amazon stock and done nothing, literally sat on a beach for the next decade, today that would be worth about $80 million dollars from doing absolutely nothing.
00:09:46
Speaker
and so the big lesson here is like, sure, if we would have invested Bitcoin a long time ago, there's all these weird appreciation sort of examples we can come up with. But to me, the big lesson is not like, oh man, I'm so sorry I missed that because we're always going to miss stuff like that. It's that your business may not always be the best place to reinvest. So as your business succeeds, as it makes money, think about Will those incremental dollars be most productive, reinvested in your business, or reinvested somewhere else? An easy option is to reinvest them in the greatest companies in the world, assuming stock prices are relatively reasonable. There's these businesses out there that are a lot better than all of our companies. That's why they're so big and huge. Google, Amazon, Facebook,
00:10:24
Speaker
Netflix, all of these kinds of companies, there's a Berkshire Hathaway. So that's always another option is to just put money into them and let them do all the work for you, manage all the employees, do all the meetings, do all the ah HR, do all that sort of stuff, create products, market, do finance, all those sort of things. That's always an option. Or you can invest in other smaller businesses or start new businesses. So big tip for you is always be looking at the opportunity cost of investing more money and anywhere, especially your business. Is this the best use of this money or is there a higher use of this money that can still allow me to keep compounding capital and eventually reach that top
The Relationship Between Wealth and Happiness
00:10:59
Speaker
1%? Everyone says money doesn't matter for happiness. I've read all the studies, I've read all the books, maybe there's some criteria, maybe it's 75 grand, maybe money keeps incrementally making us happier up to multiple millions of dollars, I've heard heard it all. What I've seen though, very anecdotal, is how much money do you need to feel wealthy?
00:11:18
Speaker
I know a lot of people that have made hundreds of millions of dollars. I know people that don't have any money. i know people that have made millions of dollars. I know all across the board, based on my experience, talking with a lot of these people, being friends with a lot of these people, is the amount of money that I think it takes for somebody to feel wealthy is around three to five million dollars. It's specifically three to $5 million dollars that's not tied up in a single business.
00:11:40
Speaker
If you own a business that's worth $5 million dollars and that's 100% of your net worth, maybe a couple hundred grand in savings, you're not gonna feel that wealthy because you know that that business could crumble at any moment. the valuation is not 100% tangible. So if you have $3 to $5 million dollars that's not tied up into a business, meaning you've sold a business or you've accumulated that, it's invested in index funds or real estate or whatever that's fairly secure and conservative, that's where I believe people feel wealthy because they know that at like 5%, a very conservative interest rate they can earn per year on that, that's $150,000 to $250,000 year
00:12:13
Speaker
basically automatically and so that's pretty much guaranteed. So that means most of your reasonable lifestyle expenses are completely covered. and You don't literally have to work anymore. Now, most of the people I know keep working and they keep building, but they feel comfortable. They can do what they want. They can live the life they want. And they don't really have to earn anything else unless they just want to make more money and do bigger things, but they don't have to. So it's at that level, you may set a target to achieve so that you feel that level of comfort and wealth. Now, everyone's all over the place. Some people, you know, they're never going to be happy with how much money they have. Some people are happy a way less, but that gives you a good rule of thumb to shoot for other than these, you know, top 1%, 5%, and 10% that we've talked about. And really at that point, once you have enough money where you don't have to work, You should start thinking about what do you want your bigger purpose to be? What is your calling?
00:13:00
Speaker
Don't just make money to make more money. And don't think also that I'm going to make you a few million dollars and then go sit on a beach all day. I've seen both cases. I've done both cases. And either way, you're going to be miserable and unfulfilled.
00:13:10
Speaker
Make enough money to feel comfortable. Then think about what good you can do in the world. Now, that might still involve building businesses like me, and you'll be doing it with a different focus and different purpose, though.
00:13:21
Speaker
So thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video.