If you want to just consider net worth, the colonies held few people who were genuinely very rich. Although there were important families who were well-off, they were nowhere near as wealthy as the wealthiest English aristocrats.

But an immigrant without a large fortune likely stood a better chance of getting established and doing better in the colonies. Most all land in Europe and England had long been divided up and held, but in North America for much of the 18th c. , there were areas where it was possible to easily acquire a good parcel of arable acreage- like western Pennsylvania, or the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. There were other places that were open to settlement but more problematic: western North Carolina was somewhat lawless and ignored by the colony government, Vermont was in a tussle with New York over whether it could exist or not, western New York had the Iroquois confederacy resisting new encroachment. But , in any case, the chances of owning your own farm were much greater than in the old world, in England, Germany, Scotland. As this was a time when land was the basis of most wealth, an immigrant could count him or herself lucky in that regard. Likewise craftsmen: there were fewer of them, so competition was low and earnings and wages were higher. There were also no guilds to control who could practice a trade in a given town. So, someone like a milliner or cabinetmaker would have a much better chance of setting up his or her own shop.

But then there's the other side. It was a mostly rural world, sparsely populated. There would not be much competition for the cabinetmaker, but he would also have a hard time in someplace like Virginia, because there would be very few towns or markets- just miles and miles of plantations. And even in Williamsburg, which became something of a market town, a tradesman often would not be able to specialize: there would not be enough customers, so a blacksmith might also be a gunsmith, and also cast brass candlesticks, and also make knives.

And there would also be fewer amenities. Want to read a new book? Not that many of them about: Ben Franklin would start the first lending library in Philadelphia in 1734 There was a smaller , free one in Boston earlier in the 17th c., that had just 400 books. Theater? The Hallam Company was the first to arrive, in 1754, and went from Williamsburg to New York....but the colonists could be a pretty dreary bunch- Pennsylvania , Massachusetts and Rhode Island had laws against theater productions. Music ? Thomas Jefferson would whine constantly of lacking good musicians, good sheet music. Conversation? Although Rousseau would complain that civilized people were far too mannered and artificial, compared to Noble Savages, he had all the intellectual discussion he wanted, and constant correspondence with other minds. Voltaire would dispatch more than a dozen letters a day, and get just as many back, if not more. But a letter sent across the Atlantic from Philadelphia to London might take much of two months or longer to arrive, and then the answer would take that again. On the other hand, the lack of competition in the intellectual landscape gave freedom for lively people like Franklin, who was able to publish and write his own newspaper and make science experiments, or David Rittenhouse, who would be able to be scientific instrument maker, astronomer, clockmaker, mathematician, and surveyor.

Luxuries had to be imported. If you look at store ledgers from the period, you find a lot of imported cloth being sold, as well as imported rum and imported brandy. Jefferson would import musical instruments and wine for his cellar. Washington would have someone in England order him a nice shotgun, or pickup a repeater pocket watch. There were no good local watchmakers , and though Washington could almost certainly have gotten a perfectly good gun from an American gunsmith that gunsmith himself would have likely imported the lock. Because, really, the colonies were not supposed to manufacture their own goods- they were supposed to produce raw materials and trade them for English products, and there would be trade laws to suppress manufacturing there. So, prices for things were higher than in Europe, England.

So, really, apples and oranges. The London writer , critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson would have pined away, lacking work, libraries, literature and lively witty discussions with his friends ( and hating the use of slavery that he would see all around him). But a German farmer with a large family, looking to leave a poor tenant farm in the Palatinate and get something of his own, might have thrived.