I have long interested in discerning the contradictions between how the wealthy are portrayed in the popular culture and the mass media at large compared to their actual behaviors. This discrepancy has been most widely documented in the 1996 work of Dr. Thomas Stanley’s “The Millionaire Next Door”, who pointed the portrait of the typical American millionaire as a member of a two-member nuclear family that owns a small business or participates in a high-earning profession that drives a Toyota.
In my own observations of the behaviors of the wealthy, I have noticed the following behaviors:
The wealthy and fast-becoming wealthy have a ridiculously low spending to post-tax earnings ratio.
Most finance articles encourage Americans to save 10% to 20% of their annual income to retirement, speaking of the effort in an infantilizing manner as though you were telling a child to gin up and eat their spinach. The wealthy … Read the rest of this article!