I’ve posted some info on here before about the ongoing soap opera that is the Yellowstone Club World Blixseth couple, a man and wife that have led a boom and bust life more dramatic than any reality TV script Bravo could throw together. The latest news from the Wall Street Journal has a Mexico twist: wife Edra Blixseth is putting their Los Cabos home up for sale at a list price of $12.88 million.

If you’re interested, it’s a two-acre oceanfront estate with 10,000 square feet of living space inside (six bedrooms) and another 7,000 feet outside.

She was awarded the house as part of the couple’s knock-down, drag-out divorce proceedings, but she has since declared personal bankruptcy. This Los Cabos home pales in comparison to their one near Palm Springs, CA. That listing has “excess” written all over it. The Journal described “a fountain with jets whose sprays rise about 80 feet and a private, 19-hole golf course of about 240 acres. The roughly 25,000-square-foot main residence is decorated with several ceiling murals and has a prayer room and separate wings for guests and children.”

My personal background on all this is that several years ago I was reviewing the property called Yellowstone Club World Tamarindo that was part of their vacation club, located in the Costalegre area a couple hours south of Puerto Vallarta. The lackey general manager pointed to the Blixseth yacht moored off the shore and told me how rich the owner was, that he was a billionaire who traveled the world and was pouring money into the resort to make it the best in Mexico. If you’ve seen the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie, picture this guy as one of the Red Queen court helpers with pasted on large ears. I could tell then that something was not quite right, but the resort looked great so I moved on.

Thankfully the resort and excellent golf course were quickly bought by someone else and both are still great, as simply El Tamarindo, but there’s no Blixseth yacht in the harbor anymore…

If you put cash into the U.S. market or in European funds early in 2009, you had a very good year for that money.

But if you put cash to work in Latin America, you had an especially good reason to pop the bubbly on New Year’s Eve. According to this Wall Street Journal article, Latin America was the standout region of the world in 2009 for investors. “Mexico’s IPC index approached all-time highs in December and Argentina’s benchmark index more than doubled.”

As in the rest of the world, this didn’t come without a roller coaster ride though. The MSCI Latin America Index rose 98% on the year, which looks huge until you realize that it went down 53% the year before. So if you were in that market at the beginning of 2008, you are pretty much back to even unless you were actively moving the investments around.

Here’s how a few markets did in 2009:

Argentina +115%
Brazil +82.7%
Colombia +53.5%
Chile 50.7%
Mexico +43.5%
Canada +30.7%
USA (Dow) +18.8%

Have you ever wondered who is pulling out of the marina in those sleek yachts and buying those $5 million condos in Cabo San Lucas?

Apparently there are a good 47,000 people able to do that without breaking a sweat. A report out from the IRS earlier this week says the ranks of the ultrawealthy have grown 62 percent over the past decade.

The tax collection agency says 47,000 Americans had a net worth of $20 million or more in 2004, the latest year they have tabulated. (Really though, how bad is their computer system if it takes them four years to figure that out?!) Another 79,000 had a net worth of 10 to 20 million dollars, up from 51,000 in 1998.

Where are these people? The top two are states where the housing bubble has burst the most dramatically, so these figures may dip lower in years to come. Tops with a net worth of $1.5 million or more were California, Florida, New York, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

The super-rich definitely do not have all their money in real estate though. “Of the total income for the $20 million or more group, the biggest single asset category by far was publicly traded stock ($719.28 billion).”

A few weeks back, Robb Report launched a Luxury Travel Index to track the ups and downs of public companies peddling luxury goods. The goal is to have an index that shows the overall strength of this loosely defined industry, which doesn’t fit into one segment such as fashion, travel, real estate, or jewelry. So who qualifies?

“Global brand names among the index constituents are luxury houses such as LVMH, Richemont and PPR; fashion companies Hermes, Burberry, and Ralph Lauren; financial services providers UBS, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse; retailers Saks and Nordstrom; jewelers Tiffany & Co. and Harry Winston; airplane manufacturers Dassault and Embraer-Empresa; liquor companies Remy Cointreau and Pernod Ricard; auto companies Porsche, Daimler Chrysler and BMW; and lodging concerns Starwood and Mandarin Oriental.”

The index launched right before the worldwide wild stock market ride of the past few weeks, but it has been amazingly consistent so far. Trading under the symbol ROB on the NYSE, it has so far only ranged from 23.50 to 25.00 a share. It’s quite thinly traded right now though, so who knows if this trend will continue.

They say that once you’re a multi-multi-millionaire, the first thing you want is…to be a billionaire.

If so, there are now 946 people who got their wish, according to Forbes. The world’s population of billionaires climbed to 946 last year, a record. Bill Gates is still at the top, with some $56 billion to his name, while new entries include Howard Shultz of Starbucks and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The second one is a bit galling. How out of hand has corporate CEO pay gotten when you can build up a billion-dollar fortune in an office job? That seems too much like a something from the snap of a genie’s fingers.

Meanwhile, U.S. households with a net worth over $5 million, excluding the primary home, topped the one million mark in 2006, up from 250,000 in 1996. A rising tide may not lift all boats, but it looks like the American Dream is alive and well.