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In Morgan Housel's most recent book, he defines "wealth" as everything you have minus everything you want.

If I were to ask any engineer what "wealth" means to them, they would give me an exact dollar figure.

This is all to say that the meaning of "wealth" is subjective.

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For the purposes of this column, we're going to use the figure of $3 million , because if you have that and a large share is tax-deferred, failing to get ahead with your tax planning can increase the risk of running into the "tax torpedo."

When we run tax projections,…