The 5 Types of Wealth

The 5 Types of Wealth

*Sahil Bloom*

In the spring of 2021, Sahil Bloom was sitting in his San Francisco apartment doing a calculation that had nothing to do with any of the financial models he had spent the last seven years building at Altamont Capital Partners. He was not pricing a deal. He was not projecting EBITDA. He was counting Christmases.

His parents lived on the East Coast. He was in California. He saw them, maybe, once a year. He grabbed a piece of paper and worked through the math. His parents were in their sixties. If he was lucky, he had twenty or thirty more years with them. If he saw them once a year, he had twenty or thirty more visits. But if he was honest with himself -- if he counted the real visits, the ones that lasted more than a long weekend -- the number was much smaller. Fifteen. Maybe fewer.

Fifteen times left to sit at the same table as his parents. Fifteen times to hear his mother's laugh from the kitchen. Fifteen mornings to have coffee with his father before the day pulled everyone in different directions. He had spent a decade optimizing his financial life while this other clock had been ticking silently in the background, never appearing on any spreadsheet.

He moved his parents to California within the year.

That calculation -- brutal in its simplicity, clarifying in its finality -- became the seed of what would eventually become The 5 Types of Wealth, published in February 2025 by Portfolio/Penguin, a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller. Bloom's argument is not that money is bad or that ambition is misguided. His argument is that most of us are playing the wrong game. We have spent decades learning to optimize for one thing while four other things quietly deteriorated. And by the time we notice, we have the account balance and the empty room.