I knew it's a good book and has heard about it hundreds of times in financial podcasts, books, articles, and blog posts. However, I never expected it to be this good and eye-opening.

It confirmed several of my suppositions regarding building wealth, frugality, education for my future children, and growing a family. Speaking about money has been important for me over the past several years. I'm constantly learning about the power of money and how to do more good with it.

Thomas J. Stanley shares a book full of wisdom, data, and statistics to prove you don't need a luxury house, car, or trust funds to live a happy life. He also confirms that rich people that look rich aren't actually rich. If they have an expensive watch, luxury vacations, and last model cars - they actually have a much lower net worth than someone having a regular job and investing on a monthly basis.

Only read up to Page 53.
Here are some great pointers:
- Why are so many people interested in what we have to say? Because we have discovered who the wealthy really are and who they are not. And, most important, we have determined how ordinary people can become wealthy.
- Eighty percent of America's millionaires are first-generation rich.
- This is why America needs a constant flow of immigrants with the courage and tenacity of Victor. These immigrants and their immediate offspring are constantly needed to replace the Victors of America.
- As a consequence, our youth are told that buying expensive items is normal behavior for affluent people. They are led to believe that the wealthy have a high-consumption lifestyle. They learn that hyperspending is the main reward for becoming affluent in America.

I genuinely do not understand the hype around this book. As someone who makes it a routine practice to read a variety of personal finance books, this was on my list for a long time to read. It fell totally flat for me - examples were outdated and mostly just irrelevant. All of the examples of wealth were males, most (if not all) who were married with stay-at-home wives. The examples were incredibly homogenous and lacking in variety. It would’ve been marginally better if the examples were more diverse and also took into account wealth through a variety of different lived experiences. Save your time & skip this one. :)

Could barely finish this book. It’s outdated and condescending. It’s a book your out of touch, 50 year old coworker would recommend to you. It’s also unnecessarily long. They give 10 anecdotes per chapter to explain simple points. Spend less! Invest! Don’t care too much about looking wealthy, just be wealthy! See how easy that was? I didn’t need 50 stories of how John Doe grew up poor and now overcompensates and that’s why he isn’t wealthy despite making a ton of money at work. The book could’ve been condensed into a quarter of its actual size. Also, the authors were annoying. I almost want to spend money out of spite.

HORRIBLE!! for a "self-help" book this was SO judgmental and condescending. Plus, I realize that this book is slightly outdated (but really, late 1990s isn't THAT outdated) but it's full of ethnic, gender, and status biases. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!!

Lots of information that made me think differently. It also went in some direction that I wasn’t expecting. Very good.

Während des ersten Viertels musste ich mich mehrmals selbst dazu überreden, weiterzulesen, da fast ausschließlich die gängigen Weisheiten (Lebe unter deinen finanziellen Möglichkeiten, investiere statt zu konsumieren, gib weniger aus als du verdienst) beleuchtet wurden. Allerdings wurde es danach sehr viel detaillierter und es wurden unterschiedlichste Einflussfaktoren beleuchtet, wie und warum Menschen Millionäre werden. Vom Job der Eltern, über Bildung, Erziehung, Gewohnheiten, die Nachbarschaft, das berufliche Umfeld,… und das wiederum war dann sehr interessant zu lesen - daher vier Sterne.

Labai įdomi knyga nupiešianti tikrą milijonieriaus portretą. Tyrimas atliktas 1995-96 metais. Būtų labai įdomų paskaityti naujesnius duomenis.

To quote « ScienceofSuccess », spoiler alert: there are no secrets.

Whew, good thing this book exists to tell me « the right » kind of housewife to expect my daughters to become.

This is surely one of the most dull and least engaging books on wealth anywhere. Why was this so popular? It doesn’t count as « evergreen content » if it’s covered in mold.

Most millionaires live well within their means, which means they're able to accumulate wealth... and thus become millionaires. So millionaires don't look like how media portrays millionaires (Fancy cars, watches, and clothing... those people have credit card debt). In fact many people with expensive houses and cars have more debt than wealth. A wealthy person waits until they're already wealthy to buy the car/house of their dreams.

The first couple chapters just beat you over the head with the fact that you need to save money (be FRUGAL!) in order to become wealthy. In America it's easy to make money (have good offence) but hard to keep it (have good defence). I actually liked the fact that living in a cheaper neighbourhood not only saves you money on a house/mortgage but also makes you likely to spend less to keep up with the joneses. Living in a fancy neighbourhood, you'll see your neighbours nice car and RV every day and may want to join in.

The authors also go through different ethnicity's affinity to being frugal. I have my Scottish mum to thank for my frugalness. Scots and people from Israel have high propensity to become millionaires due to wealth accumulation... so some stereotypes are true?

Most of the data from this book is dated, but the general concepts all hold up (and really the data is questionable anyways... perhaps only frugal millionaires are going to spend the time to fill out a survey).

Besides saving/frugalness another big factor of millionaires is being self-employed. Not just because they make more money, but being self-employed teaches you how to handle money (and handling your personal finances can happen during work hours... personal finance is just an aspect of your job whereas employed people have a strong separation between work and personal finance).

Anyways, this book is certainly worth a read.

People who accumulate personal wealth tend to have a need to achieve, to create wealth to become financially independent, to build something from scratch. Low accumulators more often tend to have a need to display a high-status lifestyle.

This book describes how millionaires in America achieve their financial success, through a frugal, disciplined life. There are 7 factors of sell-made millionaires, as clearly stated in the book:

"
- They live well below their means
- They allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
- They believe that financial independent is more important than displaying high social status.
- Their parents did not provide economic outpatient care.
- Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.
- They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
- They chose the right occupation.
"

Seven chapters in the book go deeper into explaining these seven findings, through statistics, surveys, and interviews of millionaires. The examples are quite illustrative, demonstrating the lessons very well.

I have several highlight notes from this book:

- The millionaires invest in business area of their expertise.
- To build wealth, minimize your realized (taxable) income and maximize your unrealized income (wealth/capital appreciation without a cash flow).
- Wealth equation: Expected net worth = 1/10 * age * income
- Most millionaires measure their success by their net worth, not by their realized income.
- To become financial independent, should sacrifice high consumption today for financial independence tomorrow. Every dollar you earn to spend is first discounted by the tax man.
- Rule: If you're not wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortage that is more than twice your household's total annual realized income.
- Everyone has finite time, energy, money, so need to use them wisely.
- Fact: Many European luxury automobiles depreciate in price rapidly during the first 3 years following their initial purchase, so buying a 3-year-old used car is a good strategy.
- Most people in this country are not entrepreneurial type. But this doesn't mean that they can't become millionaires.
- In general, the more dollars adult children receive, the fewer they accumulate, while those who are given fewer dollars accumulate more.
- Positive EOC: subsidizing children's education.
- Rule: No matter how wealthy you are, teach your children discipline and frugality. You should live the rules, and teach your children by examples.

To me, the first 5 chapters are amazing, but the final two chapters are quite short and not as persuasive as the previous part. Also, after finishing the book, I realized the book is lacking concrete steps of how the millionaire accumulated their estate through business or investment. Another thing is that this book was written in 1995, so it's quite dated.

Overall, this is still a classic and must-read for someone who is new to personal finance like me :) It emphasizes some good money behaviors, such as saving, budgeting, as well as educating children of these behaviors.

TL;DR: most millionaires get rich slow, save 20% every year, and watch their budgets like a hawk. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick primer, you will be disappointed. ;)

I, personally, found it an educational and inspiring read.

One of my major goals this year is to set a stronger financial foundation for myself and my family, so I've been poring over a number of books on the subject. This is a great book in the sense that it helps you understand, from a well-researched perspective, the habits of people that accumulate money. Possibly the most valuable insight is that the millionaire next door doesn't act like the stereotypical mass market version of a millionaire. They don't spend much, if any, money on displays of wealth, they save and budget assiduously, and their money is accumulated over a long period of time. In fact, the author states that most of the millionaires made under six figures in annual salary, and that it took them on average 20+ years to build a million dollars of wealth.

The other key is that millionaires don't save money so they can spend it on big-ticket purchases like yachts or luxury clothing. Their main goal is financial independence. This really struck a chord with me as I realized that many of these millionaires are ordinary people like you and me that decided to build their wealth so they could be safe and secure in their future. They made many sacrifices along the way and did not change their lifestyles once they reached their millionaire status.

Some parts of the book did rub me the wrong way. There was almost a deification of the blue collar entrepreneur. The author sounded breathless with his effusive praise of this particular brand of millionaire. I appreciate the hard work that went into their success, but I bristled at the author's implication that this was somehow the only or superior way to build wealth.

There was also a lengthy section where the author expressed his and other millionaires' disdain for paying taxes, and how important it was to millionaires to lower their tax burden as much as possible, particularly at their death. This I also found distasteful. It's one thing to try and minimize your taxes, and quite another to act as though you shouldn't have to pay them altogether.

All in all, a good book, just don't treat it as gospel.