Thomas J. Stanley : Millionaire Next Door Author; Researcher; Expert

Some questions are asked so often that they deserve their own blog.   One such question has to do with career choice framed in the context of "the need to become wealthy."  Early in my teaching career a distinguished senior professor and colleague once gathered all of the young faculty members together.  He told us that in life often just one single decision can be the difference between a stellar career and an average one.  His research findings were absolutely correct.   His wisdom applied to career building in general and also to building wealth.   He became very wealthy via his number one...

by Sarah S. Fallaw, Ph.D., Director of Research, AMI Research Many successful people report having moments of clarity or EUREKA! experiences when it comes to business opportunities. In fact, 29% of millionaires reported stumbling across a great business opportunity as part of their career path, and 39% reported using intuition for business ideas (see The Millionaire Mind, Chapter 5). For some, intuition and opportunity can lead to lucrative and exciting work. For example, in The Millionaire Mind, Jim lost it all in real estate, only to discover that he was highly successful at...

A recent Wall Street Journal article indicated that a variety of developers of expensive vacation homes are responding strategically to the meltdown in their market.  In short, they are providing vacation home opportunities of the downsized variety.  ". . .building smaller less expensive homes in resort communities. . . this pitch may sound a little funny: 'affordable housing for the affluent.'" The terms affordable and affluent have a variety of connotations.  To marketers "affordable" implies that those who can afford one also have a demand for a vacation home, for example.  Most millionaires can afford to purchase and maintain a vacation home.  Yet, as I mentioned...

In a recent article, The New York Times profiled those people who have defaulted on unpaid mortgages of $1 million or more.  The author contends that "the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population. . . more than 1 in 7 homeowners with loans in excess of $1 million is seriously delinquent. . . about 1 in 12 mortgages below the million dollar mark is delinquent. . . data suggests that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties."  The implication is that it is the cold, calculating...

Most of the millionaires whom I have interviewed understate their true wealth. They get little satisfaction from displaying expensive artifacts which are suppose to define success in America.  But there is another important reason for not conspicuously broadcasting one's net worth.  It has to do with issues of safety and security.  Take for example the comments made by one of the members of a focus group interview that I conducted.  Immediately following the interview, one of the respondents, a movie producer, told me, "I wrote on your screener [preliminary questionnaire] that my net worth is barely in the seven figures.  I'm worth a lot...