Books like the millionaire next door
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146)Įven I have trouble getting beyond the Neanderthal sexism implicit in this diagnosis. Mother has difficulty with the fact that her daughter married someone who is unable to earn a high income. The real problem is not with the public schools it is that her daughter’s family is in a situation of economic dependency. It is obvious to us that this grandmother is not completely at ease about providing economic outpatient care to her daughter’s family. (Did I mention the other day that the authors were professors of marketing at state schools?)Īnd their analysis of this obviously deranged old lady: Private school tuition is mentioned repeatedly in the same category as big houses, country club memberships, and, of course, luxury automobiles. The authors of Millionaire Next Door have different values. But where I come from, sending your grandchildren to private school is just about the most wholesome thing you could do with your money, short of anonymous donations to charity. Starting a statement claiming to be “indignant as hell” is not the way people, even affluent grandmothers, talk in my part of the country. Do you know about the problems with public school around here? I’m sending my grandchildren to private schools. What am I supposed to do with my money? My daughter’s family is having a rough time making ends meet. The authors describe sharing their research with an audience of “affluent grandmothers.” (Yes, really.) One takes them to task. This is the Scrooge McDuck school of wealth management. You save it because it’s the right thing to do. You save your money carefully throughout your life not so you can spend it on the finer things, nor even so you can spend it on the ones you love. And it is here that I stop being able to even relate to the message of the book. The other reason not to give your children money, besides it being good parenting, is that if you give it to them then you will not have it anymore. Unremarkably, they do not consider the possibility that maybe those children got money from their parents because they were poorer, not the other way around.
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The authors cite data that shows that adult children who get money from parents are in general poorer and argue that giving your kids money will have the opposite of the intended effect. They will amuse themselves by spending it and not learn to be frugal like you. Not only will it make you poorer, but it is bad for the kids. The core advice in the 70 pages on giving money to your children is that you shouldn’t give money to your children. There’s a big section on selecting financial advisors, but little on investing as such. There isn’t much of anything on buying houses. So, for example, 70 pages (of 245 in my paperback copy) are spent on giving money to your children. And the authors’ choices of topics, and how much ink to use on them, is peculiar, as if they just threw together the book from notes they happened to have had lying around.
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Large sections just dump information on the reader without drawing any conclusions or giving any advice. To start with, Millionaire Next Door is poorly written. (That’s the problem with leaving comments here, I just read what I want to.) I can’t bring myself to write a proper review of a 13 year–old title, but on the flimsy pretense that one person who comments must represent thousands of silent readers who feel the same way, let me share why I don’t like it. A commenter asked about it and actually followed up to say that he would love to hear my opinion on the book. I put a passing reference to The Millionaire Next Door in my post Wednesday on The Tragedy of Impulse Saving. What’s Wrong with The Millionaire Next Door