Thanks to this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance at Budgets are $exy for pointing to this post. Have a minute? Check out the roundup there. I hope to highlight at least one post I loved later this week.

Hemispheres, the United in-flight magazine, just published a short piece I wrote last spring about saving to become wealthy called Hey, Big Spender.

It includes a quote from Thomas Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door. At the time I wrote it, the idea of being frugal still seemed quite out of step with the culture, but Stanley says it’s a habit that never goes out of style for those who hold onto their wealth.

These days, I think he’s gonna find a lot more true believers.

Here are some outtakes from our conversation, and what inspired Stanley to do the research for his next book, which he says will be called Acting Rich in America:

On What He Calls the Glutton Economy

“I was a marketing professor for 23 years, and we have the greatest (marketing) machine in the world. It’s almost like war time, with everything thrown onto the battlefield, and many people are just not an intellectual match for it.”

On Wondering About Trouble Ahead

“I did not foresee problems in the economy and the housing crisis when I started working on (the latest book) three years ago. I started with the assumption that there were a lot of people acting rich who were not. I interviewed one guy who said, ‘Money is the most renewable resource,’ and he spends that way.”

On Getting the ‘Nobody’ Treatment

“My wife and I bumped into a guy in a tux on our way out the door to the same wedding reception. I said, ‘I can take my car,’ which was my wife’s Chevrolet. He had a Mercedes. He said, ‘We’ll take my car.’ We didn’t know each other, so he went through this whole thing of, ‘Do you play golf? Do you belong to the country club?’ It was just dead in the car for the last ten minutes when he figured out he had no interest in talking to me.”

You can guess what happens next.

At the wedding, Mr. Mercedes learns from the groom that Stanley is a well-known author of books about wealth.

“He came flying over to us and said, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize who you were.’”

Well, yeah, Stanley says.

“I was in a nondescript blue suit. I didn’t do any of the things he associated with wealth, and he judges people based on those types of symbols. The thing is, most people with real wealth don’t think all those things are terribly important.”

Stay tuned for more, and thanks to Mr. Stanley for consent to blog away.

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Tags:   Glutton Economy · Hemispheres · Hey big spender · The Millionaire Next Door · The Nobody Treatment · Thomas Stanley4 Comments