How Do Millionaires Actually Live?

This page covers what the research says about how millionaires spend, live, and use their time, and which popular claims hold up. One caution runs through all of it: these are patterns among people who already became wealthy. Some of these habits helped build the wealth. Others may simply be what wealth makes possible. Every source is on the research page.

How they spend

In Ramsey Solutions’ National Study of Millionaires, a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. millionaires:

• 94% said they live on less than they make.
• About three in four have never carried a credit card balance.
• 85% use a grocery list, and 93% use coupons at least some of the time.
• Most report spending $200 or less a month at restaurants.

Thomas Stanley found the same pattern decades earlier. In his surveys, many high earners spent heavily on looking rich, while the people who built wealth kept their spending well below their income. Evidence: moderate. The pattern is consistent across studies, but the figures are self-reported.

What cars do millionaires drive?

Mostly ordinary ones. Toyota and Honda were the two most popular makes in the Ramsey survey. In Stanley’s 2009 research, Toyota was the most popular brand among millionaires, and the median price they paid for their most recent car was about $31,000.

One common claim needs correcting: millionaires don’t all buy used. Stanley found more millionaires buying new cars than used ones. What they share is modest prices and keeping cars for years. Evidence: moderate for the pattern; the dollar figures are dated.

What kind of homes do they live in?

Usually not mansions. Stanley found about three times as many millionaires living in homes worth $300,000 or less as in homes worth $1 million or more. Most had never owned a second home. Many stay put for a decade or longer.

His most useful finding may be this: where you live shapes what you spend on almost everything else. A more expensive neighborhood tends to raise spending on cars, clothes, and more. His suggested limit was a mortgage no more than twice your household’s annual income. Evidence: moderate, and the figures come from older surveys.

Clothes and watches

In Stanley’s original research, half of the millionaires surveyed had never paid more than about $400 for a suit, $140 for shoes, or $235 for a watch. In his later work, Seiko was the most popular watch brand among millionaires. Those are 1990s and 2000s prices, so read them as a pattern, not a budget. Evidence: moderate, dated.

How millionaires spend their time

A peer-reviewed study of Dutch millionaires found they spend their time much like everyone else, including about the same hours at work. The difference was in their free time:

• About 19 more minutes a day exercising
• About 16 fewer minutes a day watching TV, and 16 fewer relaxing or doing nothing
• More time volunteering
• More control over what they do at work

Active free time was linked to higher life satisfaction for everyone in the study, wealthy or not. For comparison, TV takes up about half of the average American’s leisure time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Evidence: moderate. It’s one country and one point in time, and wealth may make active free time easier.

A related finding has stronger evidence. Across four countries, people who spent money to save time, such as paying for chores they dislike, reported higher life satisfaction. A field experiment supported the effect. That’s a finding about happiness, not about building wealth. Evidence: high, for well-being.

Learning and education

In the Ramsey survey, 88% of millionaires had a college degree and 52% had a master’s or doctorate, compared with 38% and 13% of the general population. Most attended public universities rather than elite private schools. Evidence: moderate. This supports the first of the four habits: build a paid skill.

Health habits

Wealthier people tend to smoke less, exercise more, and are less likely to be obese. They also tend to drink more often, though less heavily. But this is where cause and effect is hardest to untangle: money makes healthy living easier, and poor health can reduce income. Evidence: high for the pattern; weak for the idea that these habits build wealth.

Personality and mindset

Research on wealthy Germans found they score higher on conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, extraversion, and tolerance for risk. Self-made millionaires scored even higher on risk tolerance and openness than people who inherited. Across studies, conscientiousness is the trait most consistently linked to income and wealth, but the effects are modest. Evidence: moderate.

The famous marshmallow test deserves a correction. A larger follow-up study found that a child’s ability to wait for a treat predicted much less than the original research suggested. Most of the link disappeared once background and early ability were taken into account. Patience is still useful. It just isn’t destiny. Evidence: high, for the correction.

Giving

Most wealthy households give to charity. In Bank of America’s research, 81% of affluent households gave in 2024, compared with 47% of the general population in 2020, and affluent donors gave far larger amounts. Giving is linked to happiness, though that effect is smaller than early studies claimed. Evidence: high for giving rates; moderate for the happiness link.

Millionaire myths, checked

• “Millionaires have seven streams of income, according to the IRS.” Unsupported. No such IRS statistic exists. Many wealthy people do have more than one income source, but the number and the source are made up.
• “Millionaires wake up at 5 a.m.” Weakly supported. Many business founders wake early, but plenty of well-known wealthy people don’t, and sleep matters too.
• “88% of millionaires read 30 minutes a day.” Weakly supported. The figure comes from one author’s small, self-run study. The education data points the same direction, but the exact number isn’t reliable.
• “Millionaires all buy used cars.” Not quite. They buy modestly and keep cars for years, and many buy new.
• “Copy a millionaire’s routine and you’ll get rich.” Unsupported. These studies describe people who already succeeded. They can’t show that copying a lifestyle creates wealth.

What it adds up to

The lifestyle research lines up with the money habits. Millionaires spend well below their income, avoid carrying debt, keep learning, and spend their free time deliberately. Those patterns support the four habits behind self-made wealth: build a paid skill, keep your lifestyle below your income, invest automatically, and own a stake.

What the research can’t do is promise that living this way will make you a millionaire. It shows what the people who got there tend to do. What a self-made millionaire is, and what the data shows →