Book Review: The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley

Fan’s of the Thomas Stanley’s modern classic The Millionaire Next Door will find a lot to love about Stanley’s follow-up, The Millionaire Mind. But while a lot of the central concepts of The Millionaire Next Door are mentioned again here, this is no rehash of the same material. Where his earlier work focuses on the frugal living and blue-collar, middle-class origins of America’s modern millionaire, The Millionaire Mind delves into the psychology and and common successful characteristics (besides being frugal), America’s wealthy all possess.

It’s not so much a self-help or how-to-get-rich book so much as a scholarly study of the average American millionaire, how they spend their time, what they believe, and the behaviours that helped them become that way.

Portrait Of The American Millionaire

According to Stanley’s research, the American millionaires tend to share the following characteristics

• About 50 years old and male
• Married to the same spouse for more than two decades
• Have an average household net worth of approximately $9.2 million
• Live a relatively frugal lifestyle more congruent with their middle-class origins than their upper-class status
• Over half (61%) never inherited a dime while fewer than 8% of all American millionaires inherited the majority of their wealth.
• Has a college degree, although few were “A” students or graduated from Ivy league schools
• Are not workaholics and enjoy spending time with family and friends

America’s millionaires don’t consider themselves a lucky bunch, however. “Luck” ranked low on the list factors most millionaires claim account for their success. The most important success factors, according to them, are

• Integrity
• Discipline
• Hard Work
• Working well with others

In The Millionaire Mind, Thomas Stanley distills the characteristics, attitudes, habits, and work ethic that allowed a group of self-described non-intellectual, non-lucky individuals to become among the most economically-productive citizens in the world. Stanley’s haphazard, slightly unorganized writing style does occassionally get in the way, forcing you to reread certain passages twice to understand what he’s trying to say, but the information contained in this book is invaluable. If you absorb it and attempt to adopt some of the habits of the wealthy, your net worth is sure to benefit. Specifically, I think the lesson regarding paying more attention to life-time cost rather than just initial cost and mixing business with pleasure have the potential to prove particularly profitable. Because I like this book so much, I’m declaring this week to be “The Millionaire Mind” week. Each day, I’ll write about a particular lesson I learned from the book. Check back every day this week for more on America’s millionaires and the lessons I’ve learned about them.

Buy The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley from Amazon.