It’s important to not turn this into a rich versus poor debate, because it can give people on either side of that divide the false impression that they’re naturally better at managing money due to their background. The truth is that wealth management is a learned skill that often comes separately from one’s career or upbringing. And the point of the book is that looking wealthy and being wealthy aren’t as tightly coupled as we believe.
"If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are."
Very fair and great point, so I hope it's clear my next statement is not intended to refute this at all!
However, you could also say that if become or remain wealthy, you never forget how awesome Toyota corollas are.
That was really my point: it's ok to not go buy a condo in Aspen the second you can afford it. The original poster was saying he knows he's being overly frugal. OK, fine. My counter-example of TMND was don't feel you need to move to a flashy conspicuous consumption lifestyle either.
People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords. This book just assumes the end goal is the number on a bank account.
To be fair, I believe that motivation comes from the reader, not the author.
>People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords.
Again to be fair I believe you're projecting: you may want to be a millionaire for the lifestyle it affords, whatever that means to you. The book is a recipe on ways to retain wealth and anecdotes on how people accumulated their own. It's not a self-help guide to motivate people to become millionaires. I think it's assumed if they're reading they book they're already motivated and need to know how, not why.
The value would be discussing why you want to spend it, why you should reconsider because it wouldn't affect happiness, something like that.
Some do. Others do not.
My boss makes ~300k a year base. He drives a ten year old Golf, carries zero debt, and plans his (very infrequent) meals out around "which restaurant is running a 'kids eat free' special today?"
His goal is to build up a sizeable savings, retire and live off interest, and provide generational wealth for each of his children.
One of his peers makes ~300k a year base and enjoys driving a Ferrari that costs more than my house. Different strokes for different folks :)
Currently it basically tells you that if you spend the least possible, you accumulate wealth faster. Well, wasn't that obvious.
One reason is that if one accumulates that wealth, and puts that wealth to work itself making money (i.e., investing it) then one obtains an income stream that is separate and apart from the number of hours per day one can spend "working".
Accumulate enough money that is itself making money, and one can live comfortably without having to spend 40+hrs/week "working" for one's income.
I don't plan on retiring, but i'd feel so, so good if i hit $X tomorrow.
The economy could still go down, but as long as society doesn't collapse retirement-amounts can bring massive QOL, even if you don't live like you're rich.
This a million times. I ended up in a small private university (which was awesome and I still love it) that initially gave me a lot of scholarship money, but didn’t even try to get into top tier. While good at educating, the network and the name recognition were not there at all. Can’t remember how this came up, but at one point I compared notes with someone who attended top 10 university and their grades/scores were slightly worse than mine - live and learn :)
For any one "millionaire next door" who made it by being frugal, many more starve no matter how frugally they live. Many will rise and fall, many more will never even rise above poverty.
I'd like to see the statistics on lifetime well-being between frugality and financial risk-taking†. I'll bet the disparity is shallower than we'd like to believe.
These discussions always interest me, but I'm disappointed by the amount of puritan dogma that usually gets treated as some kind of natural truth. If being poor taught me anything, it's that there is no dogma you can lean on.
† Caveat: the risks being made with a goal to "level-up" (read: escape poverty), rather than blind self-indulgence. Ex—do you max out your credit card (/whatever available leverage) to acquire the tool you need to perform a job in the manner of quality you know can be accomplished with said tool, or do you buy the tool you can "afford" and gradually, over time, work your way up to the "right tool" in this case. In the past, more of the latter may have been possible. These days, I think you're at an even more immense disadvantage by taking that path. Admittedly, my outlook might be too coloured by my own experience. Had I not taken the chances (sometimes enormously painful), I would probably still be trying to squirrel-away $5 bills at a time while working 11 hour warehouse shifts.
In short, you're not alone and as long as you're not making yourself or people in your life miserable well maybe you're not too far off from where you need to be.
https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Stanley-Thomas/...
I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.