Six Smart Books: Tackling Money Issues

Stop Acting Rich – And Start Living Like a Real Millionaire

By Thomas J. Stanley

Reviewed by: Robert J. Hughes

If you think that having a 5,000-square-foot McMansion means you’ve arrived financially, think again. You may be fooling the neighbors. You may be fooling yourself. But you’re certainly not fooling Thomas J. Stanley, who aims to show readers the difference between how the really rich really spend and how wannabe millionaires jeopardize their financial security by focusing so much on the appearance of wealth.

Stanley, who has written before about the affluent in such books as "The Millionaire Next Door," and who runs a marketing and research firm geared toward the wealthy, outlines the differences between the haves and the almost-haves, the really wealthy and the merely wealthy and all of us others who make up the rest of the population.

What Stanley discovers (through a special survey he used to collect the information for "Stop Acting Rich") is that rich people in general are actually frugal, driving Toyotas instead of BMWs, owning only one home instead of several. They’re not cheap, but they’re also not concerned with showing off their wealth. That’s an attitude markedly different from that of the aspirational buyers in our spendthrift culture who fork over $60 for bottles of Grey Goose vodka, $3,000 for Chanel suits and $250 for haircuts. Most of these people are merely buying into a myth that looking the part will get them the gig, as Stanley observes.

How should those of us who don’t have a personal net investment worth of $1 million spend our money? In other words, how should we start living like real millionaires?

Mainly, Stanley has the good sense to suggest that, as millionaires do, we live below our means, that happiness isn’t found in having a wine cellar, or a walk-in closet or a Maserati (hard to believe, but apparently true). It seems like an all-too-easy prescription for our society of debt-addled consumers. But after reading through Stanley’s engaging anecdotes about how the other America actually lives, you may come to feel that perhaps you don’t need to impress the other guy so much. This in itself is no small thing. Your wallet will thank you. And you may end up happier.