America’s richest cities dwarf Canada’s

It’s not surprising that American cities have more millionaires than the Great White North. What’s interesting is how we stack up.

It’s not surprising that American cities have more millionaires than the Great White North. What’s interesting is how we stack up. 

America’s three wealthiest cities by total numbers are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. New York, in the number one position, has 468,930 households with investable assets of more than $1 million. That’s 6.4 percent of New York’s population.

A Toronto Star article from 2013 based on research from WealthInsight, a UK wealth consultancy, suggests that Toronto has 118,000 millionaires, the most in Canada. While the article doesn’t specify whether the consultants used the same definition (investable assets of more than $1 million) as the numbers in the previous paragraph, it’s safe to assume this is the case.

Toronto has 2.8 million people which means millionaires account for 4.2 percent of the city’s population. If you use the figure for the greater Toronto area (GTA) that percentage drops by half. However, the same can be said for New York whose greater metropolitan area (GMA) runs around 20 million.

So, which country’s wealthier?

The World Wealth Report from Capgemini suggests that there are 320,000 Canadians with investable assets of $1 million; their wealth totals US$979 billion. In the U.S. there are four million high net worth individuals with total wealth of US$13.9 trillion. Using the latest population statistics for both countries, Canada’s high net worth individuals represent 0.9% of the population; in the U.S. it’s slightly higher at 1.2%.

The numbers indicate (not entirely surprising) that the U.S. has more wealthy individuals than Canada.

Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal article about the U.S. stats suggests that the New Mexican town of Los Alamos has the greatest percentage of high net worth individuals (11.6 percent) of any metropolitan area in America.

Canadian advisors thinking of relocating to the U.S. might start there. 

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