Thanks to The Sun’s Financial Diary for posting this at this week’s carnival of personal finance.

Thomas Stanley’s “Millionaire Next Door” approach to building wealth is sane, simple, and basically foolproof if you’re consistent: Save, invest, and wait.

There’s another path that, as a self-employed person, I find more provocative.

Earlier this year, authors Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff published a book called “The Middle-Class Millionaire,” which examines the attitudes and habits of self-made millionaires whose net worth ranges from $1 million to $10 million. (There are, or were, anyway, 8.4 million households in this category.)

I can’t recommend this book highly enough for the way it ties together trends and the visceral stuff of our culture — the changes in work and career paths, the opportunities that (in theory, anyway) a greater ability to network brings, and the relentless (surely you’ve noticed this) emphasis on the power of positive thinking. (Nobody captures this better than Frances McDormand as Linda Litzke in the movie Burn After Reading when she howls, “My reality is so much bigger than you!” And *SPOILER ALERT* damn if she doesn’t get her surgeries in the end.)

To get back to the book: The authors found, first, that the middle class and middle-class millionaires both place a high value on becoming financially independent.

And fully 67 percent of the middle-class said that money is an important factor in happiness.

But middle-class millionaires pulled away by aligning their careers with those monetary goals.

Less than 44 percent of the middle class, on the other hand, considered their careers very important, and 66 percent assigned greater importance to their hobbies and interests.

The authors write, “with the growing pay-for-performance salary incentives, the winner-take-all effect in more white-collar fields, and the gradual loss of middle incomes among the middle class, it seems to us that placing a low value on your career is dangerously inconsistent with the goal of financial independence.”

Now, to be sure, the millionaires are mostly entrerepeneurs. But I’m going to be blogging more about what these authors found, and how it could change how any of us thinks. Or wants. Stay tuned.

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Tags:   career · financial independence · hobbies · Lewis Schiff · Russ Alan Prince · The Middle-Class Millionaire4 Comments