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The book The Millionaire Next Door provided data to support "Seek wealth, not money or status". The book was written by finance professors who examined the cha

The book The Millionaire Next Door provided data to support "Seek wealth, not money or status". The book was written by finance professors who examined the characteristics of actual millionaires. They found a lot of people who appeared to be millionaires did not actually have a net worth over a million dollars. High status professional are expected to drive nice cars and live in a big house. It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. The authors were surprised to find that a lot of the Americans with a net worth over a million did not fit any of the "millionaire stereotypes" at all. They drive an old pickup truck and drink Bud Light. I like the Tweet thread, but prefer the Millionaire Next Door cause it's backed up by actual data. It also seems like the Tweet thread is focused on advice that'll get you a net worth in the top 0.1%. The central premise of the Millionaire Next Door is a lot of people have "regular jobs" and get rich (depending on your definition of rich). See the janitor that amassed an $8 million dollar fortune: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-8-million-fortune.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-...

throw0101a 5y ago
> The book The Millionaire Next Door provided data to support "Seek wealth, not money or status". […] I like the Tweet thread, but prefer the Millionaire Next Door cause it's backed up by actual data. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, most/more famous for Black Swan, pokes holes in the methodology used in TMND, specifically survivorship bias. Another observation from FbR: > I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553605-i-will-set-aside-the-point-that-i-see-no https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553605-i-will-set-aside-the...
- lukas099 5y ago
  Taleb should know that the benefit is having f*k you money. I suppose that once said money is obtained, there may be no greater advantage in accumulating more.
- shipman05 5y ago
  Personally, I find living well below my means leads to a great deal of happiness. I never have to stress about money. Never have to worry about losing my job (as long as it isn't a long term loss). I can make future career decisions based on quality of life a not raw salary. It's an opportunity cost like anything else, but I would argue having more wealth than you need is a tangible benefit all its own.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    I don't think Taleb was advocating living above one's means, but that aestheticism is not necessarily a high moral accomplishment. You can't take your wealth across the River Styx, and Charon only demands a single coin, so what's the point of amassing it?
    - MispelledToyota 5y ago
      asceticism. I think we can all agree aestheticism is the highest moral accomplishment of all.
- aj7 5y ago
  Warning. Taleb is a kind of performance art.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
It's very easy to be a millionaire if you bought a big house or a small house in a desirable area >5 years ago with the exception of 2006-2008. With the Fed pumping out money like candy - debt isn't exactly a bad thing. It's basically a free asset.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  I see this a lot on Reddit. People who bought homes a decade ago using mortgages are now sitting on a nice amount of equity.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    You normally discount your primary residence when you defining what a millionaire is.
estaseuropano 5y ago
There are various competing concepts that most of us conflate erroneously most of the time: * having much money in the bank * having much property/wealth on the balance sheet * earning much * having an important role() being able to afford all/most wants * living lavishly * being happy (*) Angela Merkel might be one of the most powerful world leaders but earns 'only' around 20k a year. Greta Thunberg moves mountains and earns little/nothing for it.
- pvitz 5y ago
  Per month...
- radiator 5y ago
  > Greta Thunberg moves mountains. I can only regard this as a joke, and not a very successful one, I am afraid.
  - rabuse 5y ago
    I'm with you there. Greta Thunberg has done what exactly?
    - lantry 5y ago
      She started the School Strike for Climate movement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate
      - DrFunke 5y ago
        Yes, but what has she done?
        splitstud 5y ago
        Served as a figurehead for powerful interests
        5y ago
paulpauper 5y ago
>High status professional are expected to drive nice cars and live in a big house. It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. houses and cars are assets. god why do people believe this crud masquerading as science >I like the Tweet thread, but prefer the Millionaire Next Door cause it's backed up by actual data. It also seems like the Tweet thread is focused on advice that'll get you a net worth in the top 0.1%. The central premise of the Millionaire Next Door is a lot of people have "regular jobs" and get rich (depending on your definition of rich). See the janitor that amassed an $8 million dollar fortune: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an- https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-... The only reason why the janitor story is newsworthy is because of how exceedingly rare it is, not because this is something that can be reproduced. no one publishes stories about lawyers, execs, doctors, coders, bankers, etc. donating millions. You have to donate tens of millions for Harvard to care.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  A new car loses a significant amount of value as soon as you drive it off the lot. If you finance it or lease it, then you don't even own the asset.
  - shiftpgdn 5y ago
    This isn't really true anymore. I just sold a 2 year old car with 25k miles on it for just 10% less than I originally paid. Prior to that I sold a 1 year old car with 18k miles on it for 1% less than I paid. You can also lease new cars for a very low fixed rate which includes all maintenance, insurance, etc. There is a value in having a safe, new, reliable car.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      The last time I looked at used vehicle prices, they didn't seem like great deals. Also, I think with modern cars, the reality is that you can get the latest and greatest and, after 10+ years, they're still pretty darned reliable. The trick, especially in snow country, is to get rid of them before rust-related issues, among other things, become a problem. I have a 10 year old vehicle and will probably think about replacing over the next few years.
mtm7 5y ago
I'd heard about Millionaire Next Door for years and mistakenly wrote it off as one of those scammy "buy my program" books about visualization. Then it was gifted to me, and boy, was I wrong! Couldn't put it down. It's packed full of interesting tidbits and data. While I'd highly recommend reading the book yourself, I also wrote some notes on it here [0]. I'd love to see these same studies, but updated to 2021. [0]: https://mtm.dev/millionaire-next-door https://mtm.dev/millionaire-next-door
- muhgarvey 5y ago
  I've got good news for you! There was another book written 2 years ago called Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan that conducted a new study of millionaires. I think MND studied 100 millionaires, while EM studied 10000. https://www.ramseysolutions.com/store/books/everyday-millionaires-by-chris-hogan https://www.ramseysolutions.com/store/books/everyday-million...
question000 5y ago
I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? Rents were lower, wages were higher, safe investments like T-bills and CD had higher yields, homes exploded in value, education and health care were a fraction of the cost. If you worked at even a minimum wage job you were on track to being a millionaire just by putting money in the bank. I asked my parents about this recently and it turns out they actually are millionaires... I knew the were well off, but thought they had a third or a quarter of that, I literally had no idea.
- psyc 5y ago
  My parents were born in the 40s, but they’re roughly in the generation you’re talking about. They’re still poor. My mom didn’t work much. My dad didn’t make much. Neither were financially savvy. However, every last one of their 5 siblings is indeed a millionaire after leading relatively modest middle-middle class lifestyles. Maybe one of them you could call upper-middle, but even they traded thriftiness in most areas for the appearance of wealth in others.
  - bumby 5y ago
    I see a mix across that generation as well. It seems some of those that struggle kept the mentality that helped their parents flourish: an expectation that you find a stable job and work it for 40 years. They weren’t exactly in the mindset to constantly hustle and constantly learn new skills. When globalization started to pull the rug out from under them in the 1980s many had difficulty remaining relevant in the economy.
- losvedir 5y ago
  Similarly for milennials graduating around ~2008 like me. I had the good fortune to graduate right into the chasm of the financial collapse, so was happy with my little $28k/yr job. But with Boston not as crazy hot as it is now, and a roommate, rent was only $600/mo, with no need for a car. That meant I had plenty left over to put a bit in a low-cost index fund (VOO) every month, and damn, with the S&P 500 going from 800 then to 4,000 now... you can't help but end up with a good chunk of change in the bank! Graduates now are coming into a hot market, so on the one hand they probably can't expect such appreciation on their investments, but on the other you can get crazy high salaries right off the bat! I seriously think it's far easier to become a millionaire now than any other time in history.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
This also has something, if not, a lot to do with millionaire farmers, mostly funded by incredible and often corrupt subsidies from the government. So before subsidies and pork, they would have made a more modest wage, but the game can be abused pretty easily. If its not designed to be abused because what benefits big agriculture also benefits medium sized "family" farms. Family farms may actually be a series of a dozen or more farms where the owning family does no actual farming on their own, but still live a rural lifestyle (pickups, bud light). Secondly, its also skewed by government workers on fat pensions who can become millionaires pretty easily due to these collectively bargained benefits but also inflated salaries, especially overtime which is often abused in government jobs. Lastly, a lot of this is self-reporting. Some people like to put on a modest front for their own reasons. The author got to see their pickup truck and muddy workboots, but not their Florida vacation home or Wisconsin lake house. Or the Corvette under a cover in the 2nd garage. So some of the advice is hard to handle and not applicable to most. You can sort of FIRE your way into wealth and live like a miserable miser or hope you were born into a socio-economic culture where buying a lot of farmland is possible or getting a public sector union job is possible.
vmception 5y ago
Its good insight but also recognize that all of these distinctions are arbitrary. The only usefulness in these observations is knowing that you can keep raising the rent and there will still be people willing to pay it. Too bad about the favela at the end of your driveway though, but the millionaire janitor’s children will still be able to make rent.
draw_down 5y ago
I think focusing on being a millionaire is not great, simply because a million bucks ain't what it used to be. Some places that will barely buy you a home. Top 0.1% doesn't sound so bad to me.
roughly 5y ago
> High status professional are expected to drive nice cars and live in a big house. It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. > The authors were surprised to find that a lot of the Americans with a net worth over a million did not fit any of the "millionaire stereotypes" at all. They drive an old pickup truck and drink Bud Light. So do you think people want the money, or do they want a big house and a fast car?
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  Exactly the reason I didn't like "The millionaire next door". For me it misses the point completely. This book assumes that people want to be "millionaire" in order to stare at a 7 digits number before they die.
  - lukas099 5y ago
    That's your prerogative, and there's nothing wrong with that. Others may prefer the freedom and stability afforded by a large amount of wealth-generating assets.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- walshemj 5y ago
  Or farmers that inherited land.
Balgair 5y ago
> It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. "When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they really mean is "I want to spend a million dollars," which is literally the opposite of being a millionaire." -Morgan Housel
- the_snooze 5y ago
  > It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. "Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks." -Bill Gates (fictionalized on The Simpsons)
xx789 5y ago
As someone with a 12 year old Nissan, and buys the cheapest beer beer I'm sympathetic. But what's the point of being a millionaire if you aren't spending? You can just do that on a regular low stress job.
- refurb 5y ago
  Security. Having a paid off house and enough cash in the bank so you don’t have to work can go far in reducing stress.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  To add to the argument about security, the average stock market return after inflation is around 7%. With investable assets of $1 million, that means you're being paid $70k/year, just for already being wealthy. I imagine that no matter how low stress a job can be, it can be even lower stress knowing that no matter what happens, even if you never work again, you would have sufficient income to live. (This glosses over the variability of the market, but that just adjusts the amount of wealth needed relative to the yearly expenditures in order to continue indefinitely, and the principle still holds.)
  - xx789 5y ago
    Yeah that 7% is likely an illusion. If we kept up 7% a year forever just about every professional could retire at 50. But its unlikely to continue, we've had a 50 year bull market that is long overdue to end.
- silverpepsi 5y ago
  Thank you for finding a simple way to describe why that book bothered me so much. The author offers no room for rational dissent. You are either with him, or you're a fool. In his value system, the additional security offered by millions is worth sacrificing every other potential want or desire in life for. I find that ridiculous, addition non-bullet proof security is just ONE of many things which must be evaluated for its relative worth based on ones own value system. I say non bullet proof because I feel the author completely disregards the possibility of war or the country collapsing making the "security net" the money could otherwise buy be nullified entirely. He also implicitly disregards mortality. The opportunity cost of every year spent with a focus on accumulation is one you can never get back. I guess in this case I'm thinking a lot about travel or living abroad at a reasonably young age where the impact is absolutely materially different from retirement in one's twilight years in Thailand.
Swannie 5y ago
But being a millionaire in today's world is not being rich or wealthy. Millionaire Next Door was published *25 years ago*. To be relevant today it should be titled "Multi-Millionaire* Next Door (* Net worth > 5M)". I'm sure for a lot of people 1M sounds like a lot, but when a majority of your wealth is tied up in your house - a much much larger % of a 1M dollars today than even 15 years ago - it's not working for you. (Though, I concede that today, you have the option of refinancing and putting that capital to work, as interest rates are low).

throw0101a 5y ago

> The book The Millionaire Next Door provided data to support "Seek wealth, not money or status". […] I like the Tweet thread, but prefer the Millionaire Next Door cause it's backed up by actual data. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, most/more famous for Black Swan, pokes holes in the methodology used in TMND, specifically survivorship bias. Another observation from FbR: > I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553605-i-will-set-aside-the-point-that-i-see-no https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/553605-i-will-set-aside-the...

lukas099 5y ago
Taleb should know that the benefit is having f*k you money. I suppose that once said money is obtained, there may be no greater advantage in accumulating more.
shipman05 5y ago
Personally, I find living well below my means leads to a great deal of happiness. I never have to stress about money. Never have to worry about losing my job (as long as it isn't a long term loss). I can make future career decisions based on quality of life a not raw salary. It's an opportunity cost like anything else, but I would argue having more wealth than you need is a tangible benefit all its own.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  I don't think Taleb was advocating living above one's means, but that aestheticism is not necessarily a high moral accomplishment. You can't take your wealth across the River Styx, and Charon only demands a single coin, so what's the point of amassing it?
  - MispelledToyota 5y ago
    asceticism. I think we can all agree aestheticism is the highest moral accomplishment of all.
aj7 5y ago
Warning. Taleb is a kind of performance art.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

It's very easy to be a millionaire if you bought a big house or a small house in a desirable area >5 years ago with the exception of 2006-2008. With the Fed pumping out money like candy - debt isn't exactly a bad thing. It's basically a free asset.

paulpauper 5y ago
I see this a lot on Reddit. People who bought homes a decade ago using mortgages are now sitting on a nice amount of equity.
- walshemj 5y ago
  You normally discount your primary residence when you defining what a millionaire is.

estaseuropano 5y ago

There are various competing concepts that most of us conflate erroneously most of the time: * having much money in the bank * having much property/wealth on the balance sheet * earning much * having an important role() being able to afford all/most wants * living lavishly * being happy (*) Angela Merkel might be one of the most powerful world leaders but earns 'only' around 20k a year. Greta Thunberg moves mountains and earns little/nothing for it.

pvitz 5y ago
Per month...
radiator 5y ago
> Greta Thunberg moves mountains. I can only regard this as a joke, and not a very successful one, I am afraid.
- rabuse 5y ago
  I'm with you there. Greta Thunberg has done what exactly?
  - lantry 5y ago
    She started the School Strike for Climate movement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate
    - DrFunke 5y ago
      Yes, but what has she done?
      - splitstud 5y ago
        Served as a figurehead for powerful interests
      - 5y ago

paulpauper 5y ago

>High status professional are expected to drive nice cars and live in a big house. It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. houses and cars are assets. god why do people believe this crud masquerading as science >I like the Tweet thread, but prefer the Millionaire Next Door cause it's backed up by actual data. It also seems like the Tweet thread is focused on advice that'll get you a net worth in the top 0.1%. The central premise of the Millionaire Next Door is a lot of people have "regular jobs" and get rich (depending on your definition of rich). See the janitor that amassed an $8 million dollar fortune: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an- https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-... The only reason why the janitor story is newsworthy is because of how exceedingly rare it is, not because this is something that can be reproduced. no one publishes stories about lawyers, execs, doctors, coders, bankers, etc. donating millions. You have to donate tens of millions for Harvard to care.

aidenn0 5y ago
A new car loses a significant amount of value as soon as you drive it off the lot. If you finance it or lease it, then you don't even own the asset.
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  This isn't really true anymore. I just sold a 2 year old car with 25k miles on it for just 10% less than I originally paid. Prior to that I sold a 1 year old car with 18k miles on it for 1% less than I paid. You can also lease new cars for a very low fixed rate which includes all maintenance, insurance, etc. There is a value in having a safe, new, reliable car.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The last time I looked at used vehicle prices, they didn't seem like great deals. Also, I think with modern cars, the reality is that you can get the latest and greatest and, after 10+ years, they're still pretty darned reliable. The trick, especially in snow country, is to get rid of them before rust-related issues, among other things, become a problem. I have a 10 year old vehicle and will probably think about replacing over the next few years.

mtm7 5y ago

I'd heard about Millionaire Next Door for years and mistakenly wrote it off as one of those scammy "buy my program" books about visualization. Then it was gifted to me, and boy, was I wrong! Couldn't put it down. It's packed full of interesting tidbits and data. While I'd highly recommend reading the book yourself, I also wrote some notes on it here [0]. I'd love to see these same studies, but updated to 2021. [0]: https://mtm.dev/millionaire-next-door https://mtm.dev/millionaire-next-door

muhgarvey 5y ago
I've got good news for you! There was another book written 2 years ago called Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan that conducted a new study of millionaires. I think MND studied 100 millionaires, while EM studied 10000. https://www.ramseysolutions.com/store/books/everyday-millionaires-by-chris-hogan https://www.ramseysolutions.com/store/books/everyday-million...

question000 5y ago

I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? Rents were lower, wages were higher, safe investments like T-bills and CD had higher yields, homes exploded in value, education and health care were a fraction of the cost. If you worked at even a minimum wage job you were on track to being a millionaire just by putting money in the bank. I asked my parents about this recently and it turns out they actually are millionaires... I knew the were well off, but thought they had a third or a quarter of that, I literally had no idea.

psyc 5y ago
My parents were born in the 40s, but they’re roughly in the generation you’re talking about. They’re still poor. My mom didn’t work much. My dad didn’t make much. Neither were financially savvy. However, every last one of their 5 siblings is indeed a millionaire after leading relatively modest middle-middle class lifestyles. Maybe one of them you could call upper-middle, but even they traded thriftiness in most areas for the appearance of wealth in others.
- bumby 5y ago
  I see a mix across that generation as well. It seems some of those that struggle kept the mentality that helped their parents flourish: an expectation that you find a stable job and work it for 40 years. They weren’t exactly in the mindset to constantly hustle and constantly learn new skills. When globalization started to pull the rug out from under them in the 1980s many had difficulty remaining relevant in the economy.
losvedir 5y ago
Similarly for milennials graduating around ~2008 like me. I had the good fortune to graduate right into the chasm of the financial collapse, so was happy with my little $28k/yr job. But with Boston not as crazy hot as it is now, and a roommate, rent was only $600/mo, with no need for a car. That meant I had plenty left over to put a bit in a low-cost index fund (VOO) every month, and damn, with the S&P 500 going from 800 then to 4,000 now... you can't help but end up with a good chunk of change in the bank! Graduates now are coming into a hot market, so on the one hand they probably can't expect such appreciation on their investments, but on the other you can get crazy high salaries right off the bat! I seriously think it's far easier to become a millionaire now than any other time in history.

drzaiusapelord 5y ago

This also has something, if not, a lot to do with millionaire farmers, mostly funded by incredible and often corrupt subsidies from the government. So before subsidies and pork, they would have made a more modest wage, but the game can be abused pretty easily. If its not designed to be abused because what benefits big agriculture also benefits medium sized "family" farms. Family farms may actually be a series of a dozen or more farms where the owning family does no actual farming on their own, but still live a rural lifestyle (pickups, bud light). Secondly, its also skewed by government workers on fat pensions who can become millionaires pretty easily due to these collectively bargained benefits but also inflated salaries, especially overtime which is often abused in government jobs. Lastly, a lot of this is self-reporting. Some people like to put on a modest front for their own reasons. The author got to see their pickup truck and muddy workboots, but not their Florida vacation home or Wisconsin lake house. Or the Corvette under a cover in the 2nd garage. So some of the advice is hard to handle and not applicable to most. You can sort of FIRE your way into wealth and live like a miserable miser or hope you were born into a socio-economic culture where buying a lot of farmland is possible or getting a public sector union job is possible.

vmception 5y ago

Its good insight but also recognize that all of these distinctions are arbitrary. The only usefulness in these observations is knowing that you can keep raising the rent and there will still be people willing to pay it. Too bad about the favela at the end of your driveway though, but the millionaire janitor’s children will still be able to make rent.

draw_down 5y ago

I think focusing on being a millionaire is not great, simply because a million bucks ain't what it used to be. Some places that will barely buy you a home. Top 0.1% doesn't sound so bad to me.

roughly 5y ago

> High status professional are expected to drive nice cars and live in a big house. It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. > The authors were surprised to find that a lot of the Americans with a net worth over a million did not fit any of the "millionaire stereotypes" at all. They drive an old pickup truck and drink Bud Light. So do you think people want the money, or do they want a big house and a fast car?

benhurmarcel 5y ago
Exactly the reason I didn't like "The millionaire next door". For me it misses the point completely. This book assumes that people want to be "millionaire" in order to stare at a 7 digits number before they die.
- lukas099 5y ago
  That's your prerogative, and there's nothing wrong with that. Others may prefer the freedom and stability afforded by a large amount of wealth-generating assets.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
walshemj 5y ago
Or farmers that inherited land.

Balgair 5y ago

> It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. "When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they really mean is "I want to spend a million dollars," which is literally the opposite of being a millionaire." -Morgan Housel

the_snooze 5y ago
> It's harder to be a millionaire if you're spending a lot of money. "Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks." -Bill Gates (fictionalized on The Simpsons)

xx789 5y ago

As someone with a 12 year old Nissan, and buys the cheapest beer beer I'm sympathetic. But what's the point of being a millionaire if you aren't spending? You can just do that on a regular low stress job.

refurb 5y ago
Security. Having a paid off house and enough cash in the bank so you don’t have to work can go far in reducing stress.
MereInterest 5y ago
To add to the argument about security, the average stock market return after inflation is around 7%. With investable assets of $1 million, that means you're being paid $70k/year, just for already being wealthy. I imagine that no matter how low stress a job can be, it can be even lower stress knowing that no matter what happens, even if you never work again, you would have sufficient income to live. (This glosses over the variability of the market, but that just adjusts the amount of wealth needed relative to the yearly expenditures in order to continue indefinitely, and the principle still holds.)
- xx789 5y ago
  Yeah that 7% is likely an illusion. If we kept up 7% a year forever just about every professional could retire at 50. But its unlikely to continue, we've had a 50 year bull market that is long overdue to end.
silverpepsi 5y ago
Thank you for finding a simple way to describe why that book bothered me so much. The author offers no room for rational dissent. You are either with him, or you're a fool. In his value system, the additional security offered by millions is worth sacrificing every other potential want or desire in life for. I find that ridiculous, addition non-bullet proof security is just ONE of many things which must be evaluated for its relative worth based on ones own value system. I say non bullet proof because I feel the author completely disregards the possibility of war or the country collapsing making the "security net" the money could otherwise buy be nullified entirely. He also implicitly disregards mortality. The opportunity cost of every year spent with a focus on accumulation is one you can never get back. I guess in this case I'm thinking a lot about travel or living abroad at a reasonably young age where the impact is absolutely materially different from retirement in one's twilight years in Thailand.

Swannie 5y ago

But being a millionaire in today's world is not being rich or wealthy. Millionaire Next Door was published *25 years ago*. To be relevant today it should be titled "Multi-Millionaire* Next Door (* Net worth > 5M)". I'm sure for a lot of people 1M sounds like a lot, but when a majority of your wealth is tied up in your house - a much much larger % of a 1M dollars today than even 15 years ago - it's not working for you. (Though, I concede that today, you have the option of refinancing and putting that capital to work, as interest rates are low).