Stop Acting Rich: And Start Living Like a Real Millionaire

by Thomas J. Stanley, Fred Stella (narrator)

With the current financial crisis, high unemployment, and tight credit, you may be saying to "Who is acting rich these days? We're barely making ends meet." The reality is that the recession may have caused us to take a breather, but every indication is that we will pick up right where we left off when gentler economic winds blow again. Before you spend another dime, listen to this audiobook and understand how to become rich instead of acting rich. It all starts with where you live. Live in a prestige neighborhood and you will spend more on everything from your car to your watch. Real millionaires understand that living in communities where their neighbors have less net worth than they do naturally leads to spending less. It's easier to be rich when keeping up with the Joneses hardly costs anything. Life satisfaction comes not from cruising down the highway in a chunk of your net worth, but from having the financial resources to choose - to spend time with family and friends, to volunteer, to pursue interests.

Best-selling author of The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind and leading authority on the wealthy, Dr. Thomas Stanley uncovers the truth that few people become rich by way of a high income, and even fewer high-income people are truly rich. The good news is that almost anyone can become wealthy - even without a super high income. Just stop acting...and instead start living like a rich person.

Audible Audio

Published September 28, 2009

About the author

Thomas J. Stanley was an American writer and business theorist. He was the author and co-author of several award-winning books on America's wealthy, including the New York Times’ best sellers The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind. He served as chief advisor to Data Points, a company founded based on his research and data. He received a doctorate in business administration from the University of Georgia. He was on the faculty of the University at Albany, State University of New York. He taught marketing at the University of Tennessee, University of Georgia and Georgia State University (where he was named Omicron Delta Kappa's Outstanding Professor).
Thomas Stanley was born in the Bronx in 1944. His father worked as a subway car driver, while his mother was a homemaker and secretary. He attended college in Connecticut, doing graduate work at the University of Tennessee. He earned a doctorate at the University of Georgia, and eventually moved to the Atlanta area to teach at Georgia State University. Stanley spent most of his career studying how the financially successful Americans in a wide range of professions and with a varying level of income acquired their wealth on their own. In 2015 he was killed by a drunk driver at the age of 71. During his last days, he was working on a book with his daughter, an industrial psychologist, who later finished it. The book is called The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth, and attributes authorship to Thomas J. Stanley and his daughter, Sarah Stanley Fallaw.

Reviews

[Dave Applegate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. At a high level, he walks through the purchasing habits of the "fake rich" the "really really rich" and the "normal rich" and how they differ.

1) Stanley did a great job picking the biggest fallacies. E.x., Clothes, Wine, Cars, Houses
2) Stanley did a great job explaining the differences between these classes, especially with the "really really rich" and the "fake rich".
3) This book made me really think of my current purchasing habits and which ones were based on faulty assumptions of how rich I really am.