Knowingo
The cover of The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy

Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko, 1996

Stanley and Danko show how ordinary Americans built wealth through restrained spending, planning, and family habits. Their 1990s research separates accumulated assets from visible affluence.

Get the app Read on the web

11 parts, about 19 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Use a rule of thumb, age times pretax income divided by ten minus inheritance, to judge what your net worth should be
  • See how prodigious accumulators of wealth differ from under accumulators in budgeting, investing time, car buying and spending below their means
  • Understand economic outpatient care and why steady cash gifts to adult children tend to leave them with less wealth

Who it is for

  • High earners puzzled that their savings stay small
  • Parents deciding how much money to give adult children
  • Would be business owners looking for a niche serving the affluent

What the summary covers

  1. A Later Preface, by Thomas Stanley1 min
  2. Introduction1 min
  3. Meet the Millionaire Next Door2 min
  4. Frugal Frugal Frugal2 min
  5. Time, Energy, and Money2 min
  6. You Aren't What You Drive2 min
  7. Economic Outpatient Care3 min
  8. Affirmative Action, Family Style2 min
  9. Find Your Niche1 min
  10. Jobs: Millionaires versus Heirs2 min
  11. How We Found the Millionaires We Surveyed1 min

Recommended by

  • Dave RamseyHost of The Ramsey Show and CEO of Ramsey Solutions

About the authors

  • Thomas J. StanleyLate author who studied America's wealthy and wrote The Millionaire Next Door
    • He was born in the Bronx in 1944, the son of a subway car driver.
    • He earned his doctorate in business administration at the University of Georgia in 1974.
    • He taught marketing at the State University of New York at Albany, then from 1976 at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
    • He spent most of his career studying how financially successful Americans in many professions built their wealth on their own.
    • He surveyed hundreds of quiet millionaires and found that income explained only about 30 percent of the variation in wealth; lifestyle explained most of the rest.
    • The Millionaire Next Door spent more than 170 weeks combined on The New York Times Best Seller list and has sold over 4 million copies worldwide.
    • He was killed by a drunk driver in 2015 while working on The Next Millionaire Next Door with his daughter Sarah Stanley Fallaw, who finished it.
  • William D. DankoFormer University at Albany marketing professor who coauthored The Millionaire Next Door
    • As a student at SUNY Albany he took a consumer behavior course from the young assistant professor Tom Stanley, who invited him to work on his first study of the affluent market.
    • Stanley became his mentor and research partner, and together they published The Millionaire Next Door.
    • He received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1983 and joined the University at Albany School of Business faculty.
    • In 1996 he coauthored The Millionaire Next Door, a personal finance guide that landed on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
    • He lost his father, a World War II Navy veteran, to multiple sclerosis when he was five, and his mother raised four young children.
    • He gave up a tenured faculty position in 2007 to care full time for his brother Tony, who was quadriplegic from multiple sclerosis.
    • In 2017 he published Richer than a Millionaire: A Pathway to True Prosperity with Richard Van Ness.

Read it alongside

  • Pushes backDie with Zero

    Stanley and Danko find that adult children who receive more money from affluent parents generally accumulate less, and that cash for lifestyle dampens their initiative. Perkins urges parents to decide their children's share and give it while alive, suggesting ages 26 to 35, when money can go to homes and families

More books like this