Everything changes.
Fidelity decides that you're much more respectable when your account hits seven figures, so their highly respectable staff gives you a special phone number and shorter wait times. They also realize that you're a brilliant investor so they only charge you $8/trade, presumably because they're also profiting by following your coattails. (That's how I see it.) And when your assets exceed $500K they decide to let you buy the IPOs that they can't sell to anyone else.
As others have mentioned, you can self-insure with higher deductibles. If your cars are older you can drop the collision/comprehensive. You'll need to maintain umbrella liability for your gross worth, not your net worth (the court won't consider your mortgage when they assess your liability!).
If your income is your reason for your $1M net worth, then you'd best be thinking about disability insurance.
At $1M you also enter decision territory for long-term care expenses. You can probably pay for your own and your spouse's without additional coverage. Probably.
If news of your status becomes public, your friends will be amazed that you can handle large sums of money while simultaneously griping about picking up the lunch check.
You become an "accredited investor". You can read about enhanced investing techniques and be invited to join many different hedge funds & other unique opportunities requiring all of your high net worth. The odd thing is that you've become stupid-- you're no longer assumed to be capable of understanding it or of doing it by yourself and you're expected to hand over at least 1%/year to have people show you how to do it. (For as long as your money lasts, anyway.)
Women approach you in the street and-- no, wait, that's a different fantasy.
As you can see, I've studied the club's facilities quite extensively. Now all I have to do is wait for the membership invitation... if you want a closer look at the thinking that goes on behind high net worth investing, read Bloomberg's
Wealth magazine.
As for becoming more conservative, why would your strategy stop working? If it got you there and you can sleep with it, then it's probably worth staying the course. It always concerns me to think about drifting to the slow lane on the investing highway, only to get run over by the inflation 18-wheeler. And if large equipment leasing wasn't such a hot idea when you had a $10K net worth, then it's not such a hot idea now-- otherwise Vanguard would have sliced it up into a mutual fund with a 0.05% ER.
$1M will be enough for us. We'll let our kid take care of the rest.
