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As a child, Heidi Barley watched her family pay for groceries with food stamps. As a college student, she dropped out because she couldn’t afford tuition. In her twenties, already scraping by, she was forced to take a pay cut that shrunk her salary to just $34,000 a year.But this summer, the 41-year-old hit a milestone that long felt out of reach: She became a millionaire.A surging number of everyday Americans now boast a seven-figure net worth once the domain of celebrities and CEOs. But as the ranks of millionaires grow fatter, the significance of the status is shifting alongside perceptions of what it takes to be truly rich.“Millionaire used to sound like Rich Uncle Pennybags in a top hat,” says Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors, a wealth management firm in El Segundo, California. “It’s no longer a backstage pass to palatial estates and caviar bumps. It’s the new mass-affluent middleweight class, financially secure but two zeros short of private-jet territory.”Inflation, ballooning home values and a decades-long push into stock markets by average investors have lifted millions into millionairehood. A June report from Swiss bank UBS found about one-tenth of American adults are members of the seven-digit club, with 1,000 freshly minted millionaires added daily last year.Thirty years ago, the IRS counted 1.6 million Americans with a net worth of $1 million or more. UBS using data from the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and central banks of countries around the globe put the number at 23.8 million in the U.S. last year, a nearly 15-fold increase.The expanding ranks of millionaires come as the gulf between rich and poor widens. The richest 10% of Americans hold two-thirds of household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve, averaging $8.1 million each. The bottom 50% hold 3% of wealth, with an average of just $60,000 to their names.Federal Reserve data also shows there are differences by race. Asian people outpace white people in the U.S. in median wealth, while Black and Hispanic people trail in their net worth.Barley was working as a journalist when her newspaper ended its pension program and she got a lump-sum payout of about $5,000. A colleague convinced her to invest it in a retirement account, and ever since, she’s stashed away whatever she could. The investments dipped at first during the Great Recession but eventually started growing. In time, she came to find catharsis in amassing savings, going home and checking her account balances when she had a tough day at work.Last month, after one such day, she realized the moment had come.“Did you know that we’re millionaires?” she asked her husband.“Good job, honey,” Barley says he replied, unfazed.It brought no immediate change. Like many millionaires, much of her wealth is in long-term investments and her home, not easy-to-access cash. She still lives in her modest Orlando, Florida, house, socks away half her paycheck, fills the napkin holder with takeout napkins and lines trash cans with grocery bags.Still, Barley says it feels powerful to cross a threshold she never imagined reaching as a child.“But it’s not as glamorous as the ideas in your head,” she says.All wealth is relative. To thousandaires, $1 million is the stuff of dreams. To billionaires, it’s a rounding error. Either way, it takes twice as much cash today to match the buying power of 30 years ago.A net worth of $1 million in 1995 is equivalent to about $2.1 million today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.A seven-figure net worth is, to some, as outdated a yardstick as a six-figure salary. Nonetheless, “millionaire” is peppered in everything from politics to popular music as shorthand for rich.“It’s a nice round number but it’s a point in a longer journey,” says Dan Uden, a 41-year-old from Providence, Rhode Island, who works in information technology and who hit the million-dollar mark last month. “It definitely gives you some room to breathe.”No other country comes close to the U.S. in the sheer number of millionaires, though relative to population, UBS found Switzerland and Luxembourg had higher rates.Kenneth Carow, a finance professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, says commonalities emerge among today’s millionaires. The vast majority own stocks and a home. Most live below their means. They value education and teach financial responsibility to their children.“The dream of becoming a millionaire,” Carow says, “has become more obtainable.”Jim Wang, 45, a software engineer-turned finance blogger from Fulton, Maryland, says even if hitting $1 million was essentially “a non-event” for him and his wife, it still held weight for him as the son of immigrants who saved money by turning the heat off on winter nights.The private jets he envisioned as a kid may not have materialized at the million-dollar threshold, but he still sees it as a marker that brings a certain level of security.“It’s possible, even with a regular job,” he says. “You just have to be diligent and consistent.”The resilience of financial markets and the ease of investing in broad-based, low-fee index funds has fueled the balances of many millionaires who don’t earn massive salaries or inherit family fortunes.Among them is a burgeoning community of younger millionaires born out of the movement known as FIRE, for Financial Independence Retire Early.Jason Breck, 48, of Fishers, Indiana, embraced FIRE and reached the million-dollar mark nine years ago. He promptly quit his job in automotive marketing, where he generally earned around $60,000 a year but managed to stow away around 70% of his pay.Now, Breck and his wife spend several months a year traveling. Despite being retired, they continue to grow their balance by sticking to a tight budget and keeping expenses to $1,500 a month when they’re in the U.S and a few hundred dollars more when they travel.Hitting their goal hasn’t translated to luxury. There is no lawn crew to cut the grass, no Netflix or Amazon Prime, no Uber Eats. They fly economy. They drive a 2005 Toyota.“It’s not a golden ticket like it was in the past,” Breck says. “For us, a million dollars buys us freedom and peace of mind. We’re not yacht rich, but for us, we’re time rich.” Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky Matt Sedensky, AP National Writer
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E-Commerce
Collaborative design software company Figma has increased the price target for its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). Shares are now expected to be priced between $30 and $32 each, up from the previously disclosed price target range of $25 and $28 each. The cloud-based interface design tool is aiming for a valuation of around $18.8 billion, dramatically higher than last week’s projection but still below the $20 billion that Adobe had planned to pay for the company a few years ago. Figma disclosed the expected price target increase on Monday in an amended registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The San Francisco-based company confidentially filed an initial S-1 form with the SEC in April. On July 1, Figma announced its registration statement was available to the public. IPO market is heating up this year Figma will trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker FIG. The listing, reportedly expected this week, could be among the year’s biggest. It comes as the market for tech-focused offerings has been roaring back to life. Circle Internet Group, Chime Financial, and Hinge Health are among the buzzy tech startups that have gone public this year. In addition to Figma, space tech company Firefly Aerospace is also expected to IPO soon. In September 2022, Adobe (NYSE: ADBE) had announced plans to buy Figma for $20 billion in cash and stock. But the merger was scrapped due to antitrust concerns raised by European and U.K. regulators. In December 2023, both companies announced that they had mutually agreed to terminate their merger agreement. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee. In its SEC paperwork, Figma reported $228.2 million in revenue for the first three months of 2025. The company reported $749 million in revenue in 2024, an increase of 48% year-over-year. The design software maker has 13 million monthly active users.
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E-Commerce
Boeing’s second-quarter loss narrowed and revenue improved as the aircraft manufacturer delivered more commercial planes in the period.Boeing Co. lost $611 million, or 92 cents per share, for the three months ended June 30. A year earlier it lost $1.44 billion, or $2.33 per share.Adjusting for one-time gains, Boeing lost $1.24 per share. This was better than the loss of $1.54 per share that analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research expected.Shares rose slightly before the market open on Tuesday.Revenue climbed to $22.75 billion from $16.87 billion, mostly due to 150 commercial deliveries compared with 92 deliveries in the prior-year period.The performance topped Wall Street’s estimate of $21.86 billion.“Our fundamental changes to strengthen safety and quality are producing improved results as we stabilize our operations and deliver higher quality airplanes, products and services to our customers,” CEO Kelly Ortberg said in a statement. “As we look to the second half of the year, we remain focused on restoring trust and making continued progress in our recovery while operating in a dynamic global environment.”Boeing has been dealing with a variety of issues over the past few years.On Sunday Boeing said that it expects more than 3,200 union workers at three St. Louis-area plants that produce U.S. fighter jets to strike after they rejected a proposed contract that included a 20% wage increase over four years.The International Machinists and Aerospace Workers union said the vote by District 837 members was overwhelmingly against the proposed contract. The existing contract was to expire at 11:59 p.m. Central time Sunday, but the union said that a “cooling off” period would keep a strike from beginning for another week, until Aug. 4.Last fall, Boeing offered a general wage increase of 38% over four years to end a 53-day strike by 33,000 aircraft workers producing passenger aircraft.In June the National Transportation Safety Board said that its 17-month long investigation found that lapses in Boeing’s manufacturing and safety oversight, combined with ineffective inspections and audits by the Federal Aviation Administration, led to a door plug panel flying off Alaska Airlines flight 1282, which was a Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft, last year.Boeing said in a statement at the time that it will review the NTSB report and will continue working on strengthening safety and quality across its operations.The Max version of Boeing’s bestselling 737 airplane has been the source of persistent troubles for the company since two of the jets crashed, one in Indonesia in 2018 and another in Ethiopia in 2019, killing a combined 346 people.In May the Justice Department reached a deal allowing Boeing to avoid criminal prosecution for allegedly misleading U.S. regulators about the Max before the two crashes.Boeing was also in the news last month when a 787 flown by Air India crashed shortly after takeoff and killed at least 270 people. Investigators have not determined what caused that crash, but so far they have not found any flaws with the model, which has a strong safety record. Michelle Chapman, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
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