Stop Acting Rich: . . . And Start Living Like a Real Millionaire

Chapter 2. Everything You Think about Rich Is Wrong

	My goal ... you want to know about my number-one financial goal? It's to spend my last dollar the day I die. Nothing left over ... otherwise I would have deprived myself.
	--Fortune 50 corporation senior executive

You can act rich or actually become rich. Few of us will ever be able to do both, and we certainly won't get rich by acting the part before we have the financial resources with which to pay for la dolce vita.

We live in a time when it has never been easier to act rich than to actually become rich, even with the devastation of the financial crisis. At the end of the day, not only are we bad actors because it is simply impossible for us to keep up with the glittering rich (if we buy one expensive, prestige car, they buy 20), but we are terribly misguided and ill informed about how millionaires really spend and what they actually buy. Instead of focusing on millionaires generally, we are enamored with the few glitteringly rich people, but we miss that even though they spend like crazy and often ostentatiously, their spending is nonetheless well within their means—in fact, below their means. The Jay Gould family famously dropped tens of millions of dollars here and there, rarely even accounting for loans of $3 million on their books; their wealth was so vast that it was hardly missed. And this at the turn of the twentieth century when $3 million was really something. Even today most people will never attain that kind of wealth. ...