The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth

I read the original “Millionaire Next Door” when it came out, and I found it one of the most affirming books I’ve read. This book described how I thought about money, and let me know that that way of thinking, as a “prodigious accumulator of wealth,” is how “balance sheet” millionaires (as opposed to the “income statement” millionaires that make a lot but don’t save at a high rate) think and live. Low key, not flashy. I ended up reading all of Dr. Stanley’s books, and I looked forward to this one when I saw what I thought was his update. <br /><br />But it isn’t. This is a book written by Dr. Stanley’s daughter, who explains in the introduction that her father was killed by a drunk driver years before. His contribution to the book are a number of blog entries written about the topics he enjoyed writing about. Stanley’s daughter arranged the book loosely in the same kind of organization as the first “Millionaire Next Door”, covering about the same topics. But her father’s contributions to the book are disjointed. While interesting, you still know you are reading loosely organized blog posts, sometimes not very related to the rest of the book, and often setting a different tone. I did not like the way this book was written. I found it a bit of a mess in terms of voice of the author and organization. The author seems to drop in the concept of FIRE (representing financial independence and early retirement) in random places, sometimes where it makes sense, sometimes not, seemingly pandering to this audience. The author is also a statistician, gathering data through research and survey, and focused on the kinds of people profiled in this book. While certainly appropriate for this book, the tone I felt was one of self-promotion. I can live with a little of that – this went a bit over what I was comfortable with. I also found the writing just difficult to read, and found it hard to maintain interest.<br /><br />To the good, I found the update of research on the practices of millionaires marginally interesting, though for the most part the research showed that nothing has changed. I think this book provides an update to the original, but the original still has this one beat based on readability and impact. While I really wanted to (and expected to) like this one, I would recommend the earlier "Millionaire Next Door" for those interested in this topic.<br />

Chris Reining -- who is a favorite FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) blogger -- puts this book's original version at #1 on his list of the five personal finance books everyone should read. I'm working through that list, saw that this updated version was just released, and decided to read it instead. What's the use, I figured, of reading something outdated? But I found this update difficult to slog through, as it constantly referenced the original book and related writings, such that it was constantly jumping around, peppering the reader with little factoids and anecdotes, at the expense of providing meaningful synthesis or conclusions. That's perhaps understandable given this book's preparation and release in the wake of the lead author's tragic untimely death (killed by a drunk driver); at times, this reads like a tribute. And that's not to focus on the negative: I did pick up some useful ideas (e.g., distinguishing between income and wealth, and the importance of transforming the former into the latter) and was reminded of many others (e.g., the value of living below your means, being contrarian, exploring entrepreneurship, etc.). But overall, the value here is sharing personal finance best practices, timeless advice that won't change with the latest update, and thus, if I could do it again, I'd read the original.

Basically an overly-long (since much of the material is repeated 4-10 times or more) advertisement for the original book. Since--as the book points out several times--time is a non-renewable resource, save your time and read that one instead. There isn't enough new material here to be worth the time, and there certainly isn't a book's worth of new material.<br /><br />The intent was to revisit the old book and "bring it up to date". If you want to save yourself several hours, here's a spoiler alert: nothing has really changed in the intervening two decades except that the rise of the Internet in the meantime has made investing and/or starting your own business much easier and almost free, so it's just as possible to become a millionaire next door now as it was then and possibly even easier. Find a dozen different ways to say that in order to pad it out to a few hundred pages and you have the book in a nutshell.

Quite dry, full of many charts which are difficult to understand and often do not add much to the text. The tone is very defensive as Fallaw spends more time responding to critics than presenting any new or updated information. The best parts of the book were the many insertions written by Stanley before his untimely death. This title was also more discouraging to people who choose to remain employed in lower income positions rather than starting their own business than I remember the original book being, and basically dismissed any making such a choice as never amounting to anything. <br />There is still good information here, but there are many other places where this information is far more easily obtained, and more pleasurable to read.

The 1996 The Millionaire Next Door was an eye opening mindset shift. <br />The Next Millionaire Next Door is a compilation of insights and behavior over the past 20 years. Daughter, Sarah Stanley Fallaw, of Thomas J Stanley does a great job of organizing and sharing the information gathered by Dr. Stanley before he was killed by a drunk driver in 2015. The behaviors and mindsets of wealth builders is mostly unchanged, but the rise in technology opportunities available today give a wider opportunity for wealth builders to control their savings and investing strategies. Informative, encouraging and enlightening.

This is an updated version of one of my favorite books ever, The Millionaire Next Door, twenty years later. The original books premise was to dissect who the wealthy really are in America and the character traits and spending habits of the millionaires. It highlights frugality, deliberate planning, and self-discipline as characteristics that lead one to become a millionaire, rather than typical assumptions of luck, lottery winnings, or inheritances. This updated version is written by both Thomas Stanley, the original author, and Sarah Stanley, his daughter and twenty years later, many of the characteristics still remain the same. There is a lot of commentary about the psychology of wealth-accumulators such as remaining free from the influences of lifestyle creep and such but many of the points remained the same. The same principles that lead to wealth accumulation are still constant now, despite changing economic and political circumstances. There are amazing case studies within this book that highlight individuals with average (eg. $60k/yr) incomes that become millionaires or individuals who did not succeed in school but ended up becoming wealthy which are undoubtably inspiring. These books really resound with me not simply due to finance, but rather due to the discussion about character values and allows one to focus on what is important. There are some redundancies in the book and of note the heavy leaning on psychology may be due to the daughter having an educational background there, rather than a business background. A solid read for anyone.

I live by the original Millionaire Next Door book. It shaped my views on money, work and life. I was beyond thrilled to read the sequel, written by the author's daughter, two decades later.<br /><br />Unsurprisingly, the time-tested principles of Millionaire Next Door remain true for today. Her findings are largely the same for those who are PAWs (prodigious accumulators of wealth, aka millionaires who have high net worth) but some data points did fluctuate for UAWs (under accumulators of wealth, aka high income earners with low net worth). UAWs are now more influenced than ever, with social media and increasing definitions of status signaling. They are getting richer by income but staying just as broke as they did in the 90s.<br /><br />The research and findings in the book are largely the same as the original book in the 90s, except Sarah Stanley has a distinct political point of view, whereas her father does not. It did not escape me that the political leanings of UAWs were liberal, whereas the PAW world view are the foundations of conservative values (personal responsibility, tradition, etc). I love how she writes "The American Dream is alive and well" and provides a plethora of research about how people with average incomes achieve high wealth through conservative values: frugality, hard work, discipline and a dogged belief in your ability to change your circumstances. I loved her myths section, dispelling the most popular and political myth about millionaires: that they inherited their wealth. She's armed with her research's most simple finding: that more than 80% of American millionaires are self-made within the same their lifetime. <br /><br />I also appreciated her section on survivorship bias. I have heard this argument from my friends who work in academia/government, who are very progressive and/or live beyond their means. I thought she presented a very thorough argument. Honestly, if anyone is saying "survivorship bias!" about self-made millionaires, they are probably 1) low-achieving 2) full of excuses and 3) pretty broke.<br /><br />I marked up this hardcover with exclamations, stars and highlights. There is a ton of good stuff in here, if you're willing to do the hard work. So happy that Millionaire Next Door lives on!

DNF. What an absolute joke of a book. <br /><br />I literally don't know where to begin with this one. Although this is a follow-up to the original Millionaire Next Door, The Next Millionaire Next Door spent a majority of the time regurgitating and alluding to stats from the original without going into exactly what was said assuming we all had the previous book memorized... and that wasn't even the worst part.<br /><br />What REALLY blew my mind is how poorly this book aged and the laughable things that were written in it. The author tells a story about a man who loved his job as a park ranger, but due to changes his role was restructured to become more of a parking lot manager and he was deeply unhappy. However, Fallow says it is clear this man didn't REALLY care about his job and gave up all of his opportunities for success because he didn't want to go back to college to qualify for a better job and that he didn't dress "nice enough" for success. Ultimately, blame was shifted on the individual for not wanting to take out loans or wear a suit to work. <br /><br />Situations like this were abundant and, you know, the fact that Fallow was saying things like millionaires DESERVE to pay lower taxes because of their "charitable donations." <br /><br />My final straw was when the author had the audacity to include a section about millionaire myths and note that (and I'm not making this up) NOT ALL MILLIONAIRES ARE EVIL, THAT UNFAIR DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE RICH IS REAL IN THE UNITED STATES, AND THAT IT SHOULD BE TAUGHT ABOUT IN OUR SCHOOLS. <br /><br />ABSOLUTELY LAUGHABLE. I literally couldn't read this book for one more second.

Good update to the original, but re-hashed a lot of the original concepts. It was interesting to see an update and how the behavioral trends have changed over time, but generally what worked in 1996 works today. Worth a read, but you just have to look past the constant references to "My Father", which would have better been stated as the name of the original author. Good overall and worth the read if you've read the original The Millionaire Next Door.

Yikes! This content may have had some nuggets but it was all but impossible to find them within the train wreck. It is all but unreadable. Needed a serious editor. Or two! The information was dry, repetitive, and disjointed. I think it was sweet that they were trying to include info from their late father but the random excerpts were so disruptive it just added the air of chaos.