A few days ago Roxanne Genier contributed a column based on her tenure working aboard superyachts, and she gave several examples of spending she observed. The Washington Post similarly did a study of families living in affluent suburbs of New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles finding with a Household Income of $250,000, depending on your location you would be as much as $30,000 short of what’s needed. And in case you thought the families profiled by The Washington Post were spending frivolously, there were no luxury cars or designer fashion in the budget.

With that in mind, I thought I would contrast budget items from the Superyacht Lifestyle to that of the Affluent family of four.

Annual Gas Bill for two non-luxury cars:  $5,700 to $7,000

Fuel bill for five weeks on your superyacht:  $800,000

Annual budget for all gifts and celebrations:  $3,000

Rainy day shopping in St. Maarten:  $200,000 necklace

Annual vacation budget, including airfare, family of four:  $4,000

Typical tip for crew ($2,000 p/p x 15 crew) for full week charter:  $30,000

Annual budget for eating out:  $2,400

Feeling confined with life on a 175-feet yacht; rent out villa:  $25,000

Also, check out this article about $40,000 catering bills for private jets.

For luxury marketers, I think the message is clear:  If you want to truly tap into high-spending luxury consumers, $250,000 Household Income is not nearly enough. My advice is you need to set at least a $1 million Household Income and $10-$20 million Net Worth as the point of entry when looking at the audience you are marketing to.  Needless to say, these consumers are already large contributors with the Top 0.1 Percent spending $214 billion on luxury products and services in 2013.