Dr. Stanley provides real market research into the attitudes of millionaires in America. The data show that your typical millionaire is not a hyerspender or hyperconsumer rather they are fiscally conservative individuals who get pleasure out of activities in life that don't require having money. It is their approach to life that makes them successful in all aspects, including financially. A must read for someone wanting to understand more about millionaires, their purchasing habits, and what makes the majority of rich Americans rich.

I enjoyed the author's book The Millionaire Next Door. This book continues with that theme. He reinforces his findings that many or even most millionaires don't act rich by displaying conspicuous consumption. Many millionaires live in average homes, drive average cars, and live rather frugally. Stanley finds that many people who spend lavishly are "aspirational" - people who make good incomes who aren't millionaires but want to look like they are. I found this book to be pretty repetitive - the author kept repeating the same points. Also, there was a lot of name dropping about brands that rich people buy, etc. I read the first few chapters and skimmed over most of the rest of the book.

If you have read "The Millionaire Next Door", then you can definitely skip this book. If you haven't, then you can just read the chapters 1 & 2 and the letter exchange presented on the last 5 pages of the book. Everything else is repetitive within the book and TMND.

I gave this book three stars despite only skimming it, because the author's basis thesis is quite valuable: that a majority of actual millionaires don't live a glittering lifestyle, but are very deliberate about living below their means. They become millionaires because they are not spending their assets on expensive clothes, cars, homes, boats, jewels and liquor. Instead, they are saving and investing, and enjoying peace of mind rather than huge debts and the stress of trying to keep up appearances.

Stanley makes a convincing case in the first chapter, and then spends the rest of the book diving into the specifics of which brands the actual rich buy compared to those bought by the "aspirational rich". I didn't care about those details, so I just flipped through the rest of the book.

I liked the concept and the major point of this book - my only problem is that the point was made in the first chapter. The rest of the book had a few interesting case studies and stories, but nothing that really added to the first chapter.

This is a decent update of the earlier books. It was published after the housing and stock markets started crashing and periodically touches on that as a warning. (Although it's pretty strange that a 2009 author would consider a cellphone a luxury item like he still does.) This edition probably wouldn't be very helpful by itself as it doesn't go back and repeat the basics in the original volume.

Like the first book, it does get redundant. But that's not such a bad thing in this context. The basic goal is to get people to reconsider their need for particular luxury items and everyone has a different trigger. So by having a chapter each for cars, watches, vodka, wine, etc., then everyone is covered. And you can just skim -- or even skip -- the chapters discussing items you don't overspend on. He does customize each product. You don't see the same argument against each luxury good. I did quibble with how he only looks at the relative performance of luxury cars and completely ignores the value of aesthetics.

His examples are still almost exclusively 50-65 year old men, but part of that is to explain how they got where they are so that younger people today can end up there too. Plenty of people who are wealthy in their 30s and 40s turn around and lose it all, so there are arguments against including them in the case studies. He has also written a book specifically about women and money, which I haven't read. But I wasn't impressed that one of his examples of how women are naturally more frugal than men (?!) was that they spend less on average per pair of shoes. Completely ignoring the angle of how *many* pairs they're buying relative to men.

It also bothered me a little that he regularly referred back to his original book and its success without ever mentioning his co-author on it, who was not involved in this one.