We all may not be millionaires but there are plenty of financial and life-planning secrets we can learn from the well-heeled.
Most people know that wealth in the U.S. is in the hands of a small percentage of the total population. And, today, most of those folks with a net worth of $1 million or more have earned it themselves.
They’re mostly entrepreneurs who create everything from high-speed networks to garbage haulers. They dig ditches and build houses and grow corn and make jewelry. They deal stamps or coins or artwork and control pests and cut lawns. They also cure people and give them new teeth. Others will defend their neighbors or even feed them.
And they’re not big spenders. In fact, most of those with big bucks live well under their means — think about Warren Buffet still living in that modest Omaha home — and they put their money instead toward investments that help them stockpile more wealth.
“Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend,” according to Thomas Stanley and William Danko, the authors of the seminal tome on America’s wealthy “The Millionaire Next Door,” first published in 1996.
“It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes,” the authors wrote. “Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self discipline.”
