We Asked 1,000 Millionaires How They Got Rich (2026 Edition)

What 1,000 Millionaires Revealed About Money (0:00)

Brian: You might think you know what the wealthy do with their money, but are you right?

Bo: Brian, I am so excited about this because our clients have literally spent decades building wealth and learning financial lessons along the way. And on today’s show, we get to show you just what it looks like to live like a millionaire.

Brian: I’m Brian, he’s Bo, and we’re financial advisors here to dive into what the wealthy actually do with their money, how they got there, and what you can learn on your way to building your great big beautiful tomorrow. With that, let’s jump right in.

Millionaire Net Worth and Income Statistics (0:37)

Bo: All right, Brian. So, let’s jump right in because every year we do this survey. We ask our clients all these questions. Let’s talk about what do they actually look like? Who are these folks? And so, just at a glance, let’s start with the very beginning because it’s one of the things we talk about all the time here. We want you to understand where you are and what your net worth is. You take everything that you own and subtract out everything that you owe, and that’s your net worth. When we look at our clients, the average net worth for our clients is just under $3.5 million, but the median is about $2.5 million. It’s not skewed by the higher and lower ends. Right in the middle, about a $2.5 million median net worth amongst our clients at Abound Wealth.

Brian: So, if you’re watching this and you’re wondering, well, what is my net worth? We would invite you, hey, you’ve got to start this journey somewhere. Start keeping score of what you own versus what you actually owe. And I would invite you, go to learn.moneyguy.com, and start tracking your net worth. Even if it’s negative. I don’t care if you just came out of school and you have a lot of student loan debt. I’m telling you, if you have a dashboard view of what’s going on every year, you’re going to be better for it, and you’re going to be able to manage your army of dollar bills that much better. And Brian, this is the actual tool that you and I both use every single year when we do our net worth. It’s not like this is something we built that we don’t use. This is what we like to see front and center.

Bo: So, if we’re talking about net worth, now let’s talk about one of the things that leads to net worth. It’s the size of the shovel. And when we look at the income, the average income for our Abound Wealth clients, the average income is just under $350,000. But if you remove the outliers and look at the median, it’s about $262,000. But look, I got to tell you, if I was outside looking in, I would say, of course these people have money. They hire financial advisors. I think that this is not telling the full story. I think about myself. When I graduated college, my starting salary was $28,500. That’s where a CPA graduating in the 90s was. So this isn’t where these people started out. Yes, they’ve created success and we’re going to get into education, careers, and other things, but I think you’re going to see that how your journey starts does not have to be where it ends. And don’t get thrown just because you see all the success. What I want you to do is use what we’re sharing, the income, the net worth, and start thinking about the behaviors that can impact your life.

Bo: I love what you just said. How your journey starts does not define how it ends. And so why we wanted to start with net worth and income is to kind of show you what it looks like beginning with the end in mind. So now let’s talk about what were the things that took place. What were the things that happened that allowed our clients to get to the place where they are?

Education, Student Loans, and Career Choices (3:35)

Bo: And the very first thing, I think this is really interesting, is we ask a question around education. Like, how were you trained? What sort of education did you receive? And I think the common thought is, well, okay, if you’re going to be wealthy, if you’re going to be successful, you must have gone to some prestigious school. You must have gone to the Ivy Leagues. You must have gone somewhere that allowed you to build a network. You’re that private school person and that put you in the position to be wealthy. But when we actually look at the numbers, that’s not the case.

Brian: Yeah. I love this because this is one of those things I found when I started reading books like The Millionaire Next Door and Everyday Millionaires. I love that we get to echo these things by even interviewing and surveying our own clients. You find out that what you perceive is often wrong. And education’s one of those things. If you look at this, 76% of our clients went K through 12 in public education. Even the college they went to, 61% were public universities. Now, there are some that went to private schools, but it’s not the vast majority. A lot of folks just went to the same education as a lot of you out there. That was what their upbringing was. They didn’t have to go out and get hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt going into some prestigious university to get some prestigious degree to be able to attain wealth. That was not the track that they went on. And we don’t think that that’s necessary for you. If you’re someone who’s sending your kids off to college, or if you’re someone who’s in college or thinking about pursuing higher education, we do not think it’s a necessity to go out and have some crazy expensive, debt-riddled education in order to be able to attain success. It’s why we talk about when you do go out to take out student loans, we want you to follow the first year financing rule. Meaning that whatever you accumulate in student loan debt, we don’t want you to have more than what you anticipate your first year’s salary can be. So if your first year salary coming out of school for an accountant in the 90s was $28,000, we would not want your total student loan debt to be more than $28,000.

Bo: And I think this is where a lot of people, because those first two slides, the net worth and the income, it’s going to be somewhat polarizing. Whereas I love that we’re going to kind of build this thing up from the foundation now of education and show, no, these people are a lot more like us than you probably realize. And the first is on student loans, because a lot of people are going to say, well, these are all silver spoons. They must have just had it given to them. No, we found out that 52% of our clients actually had to use student loans to get through college. So yes, they’re just like us. They’re having to go get student loans to make it through college. But that raises the question: did they follow the Money Guy rules before the Money Guy rules even existed? Because a lot of these people are now the age where this was just good instincts. And yes, we found out that 74% of our clients actually followed the first year financing rule. If they had student loans, they made sure they kept them below the balance of what their first year salary was going to be.

Brian: I think it’s the idea that they intuitively recognized, man, I don’t want to be carrying this debt load into my career. I don’t want to drag this education along with me for years or even decades into the future. So, not only were they forward-looking, they were also beginning with the end in mind. We asked them this question: for the job that you have now or for the vocation that you pursued, does it align with your field of study, the degree that you went out and got? And when we asked our clients, we found out that 76% of our clients, three out of four of them, actually work in a field related to their field of study. Meaning the degree that they got in college matches up with what they do for a living.

Bo: Well, now this is where, look, this one breaks my heart because I love education. I’ve often felt like it was holding the ladder of opportunity to make you a better version of yourself. And our clients are the best version of that, showing that 76% of them are actually working in their field of study. Unfortunately, if you look at the general public, only 27% of the typical American works in their field of study. So that means a lot of people, something that should be a benefit to you and make you a better version of yourself, for a lot of you it’s creating a trap. You’re ending up with all of the bad stuff, the student loans, the high interest rates, and then you’re just not getting the benefit if you’re not even working in your field of study. Guys, this is why we’ve got to tell you, if you’re going to make sure education is going to be an amplifier of your wealth building journey, be a good allocator of resources. I want you to make sure, and by the way, a lot of you may be parents. Think about this for your kids. Think about this for your relatives. Think about this for your neighbors down the street. Pay this knowledge forward. Don’t go to college unless you know what you’re going to do and where you’re going to end up, because it’s that expensive now that you’ve got to be very deliberate with what the purpose and the why is on your cost of education.

Brian: Now, I love what you said. You said that education is the ladder that you can crawl up to change the circumstances that you’re in. And it’s a wonderful tool, but it’s not a necessity. In the same way we talked about the average income for our clients, a big shovel is a wonderful tool, but it’s not a necessity in order to build wealth. But I’m going to argue this next one is a necessity. This is something because it is more behavioral, and this is something you can control no matter where you came from, no matter what your shovel looks like.

The Savings Rates That Build Wealth (9:06)

Brian: And that’s your savings rate. How much you were willing to lean into the first ingredient of wealth creation. How much you’re willing to exercise discipline and defer gratification will have a direct implication on how wealthy you are able to become and how healthy your savings rate is. Now, for my very detail-oriented people, when we say savings we’re using that interchangeably with investing to a large degree. So this means this is your army of dollars that you’re putting to work so that you don’t have to work so hard in the future with your brain, your back, or your hands. And I’m happy to report, if you look at the data of our millionaire clients, 71% of our working Abound clients save greater than 20%.

Bo: Yeah. What I love about this is that to be a client of Abound Wealth, you have to have already attained a certain level of investable assets. Well, even though our clients have had financial success and reached financial success, they did not arrive at the conclusion, okay, well, I’m done, I’m finished, I can put that aside. No, those that are working are still committed to deferring gratification and building towards a great big beautiful tomorrow. And I bet if you were to ask them individually, while they might not have started as early or as young as they wanted to, what they would tell you is, “I started and I never stopped. I started and I consistently got better at deferring gratification into the future. And I figured out for myself, okay, I need to save this much money. If I save this much money, then I’ll be able to get to the level of wealth I’m trying to achieve.”

Brian: Well, a lot of you might be exactly like I was when I graduated college, ambitious and trying to maximize every dollar earned, but just not knowing what I didn’t know and not knowing what I should be doing. So, I would encourage you, go out to moneyguy.com/resources. And if you’re curious how much you should save and invest for the future, we’ve created a resource where you actually say here’s what your current age is and when you think you want to retire and build financial independence. We’ll tell you your savings and investment rate to shoot for based upon actual math that we’ve done on the back end so you don’t have to spend all those calories of mental horsepower. We’ve done the homework for you. Take us up on that offer.

Bo: So savings rate is this affirmative action that you take. I’m going to actually put effort into doing this thing. And yet most Americans fall short on that. But then there’s another action that sometimes we have to think about when it comes to wealth building: the consumption decisions that make our millionaire clients look different from their peers.

Cars, Homes, and Major Purchase Decisions (11:52)

Bo: And for most folks, the two most expensive things you’re ever going to spend money on are automobiles and homes. And so we want to ask, when we think about how our clients pursue those huge purchases, how did they do it and how did they think about it? We found that 63% of our clients said that for their most recent car, they were able to pay cash. So over half of our clients are in the financial situation where they can pay cash for a car today. But that wasn’t always the case.

Brian: Yeah, but I think, look, I want to give the context of the person on the street. 81% of new cars are purchased or financed, and we know that most of those cars are financed for 70 plus months at least. I mean, it’s crazy. So, a lot of Americans are taking these big purchases, especially the automobile, as their first step in rewarding themselves. I think about a lot of college kids. I was even talking to somebody about the behaviors, and like you sacrifice, sacrifice, you go to school and you get out and you’re like, I’m going to reward myself with a new car.

Bo: Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of people do. I’ve seen so many peers that think this is what I’m going to do to show my peers that I’m good and I’m successful and I’ve made it. I’m going to go buy a car. And I’m here to tell you this thing is napalm. Instead of you building wealth, you’re going to drive your wealth, and that’s not successful. Now I understand if 63% of our clients paid cash, that’s after they’ve probably had a pot of money behind them. I know when I needed to in the beginning of my journey trade my time for wages to build, I needed reliable transportation. So, how many of our clients on their first car were just like the general public? If 81% of the general public is financing their cars, how many of our clients financed their first car?

Brian: Yes. 71% of our clients said that when it came time to buy their first car, they could not pay for it in cash. They had to borrow money. They had to finance it. So, we want people to understand it’s okay if you have to use debt to get yourself going to your job, but you better have some foundational rules because just as quickly as you truly can afford it, we want you paying cash for your vehicles. Cash is always the best way to pay for things that are rapidly depreciating. But if you’re in that situation where you need reliable transportation, follow the 20/3/8 rule. And if you’ve never heard of 20/3/8, let us explain it to you. It’s 20% down. That way, you make sure you actually own a little bit of equity into this car that you’re purchasing. You make sure that you don’t finance it longer than 3 years. Look, the dealership, they’re going to want to take you out 84 months. Don’t let them do that. They’ll say, “You can afford anything, just a few hundred a month.” No. 3 years. That will keep your back pocket and your purse honest. And make sure that your payments don’t exceed 8% of your gross income. This will keep you safe.

Bo: Now, it’s not just how you buy the car that matters. It’s how you use the car, how you actually consume that purchase. So, we asked our clients this question: when you purchase a new car, how long do you drive it? And we found that 83%, the vast majority of our clients, when they buy a car, they drive it for greater than seven years. They’re not the people that are changing out and replacing a brand new car every 2 to 3 years. Do you see though? This is why we use the term Financial Mutant, because you’re going to find out that our millionaire clients just process the world a little differently.

Brian: I bet you’re watching a personal finance show right now because you process the world differently. So, it’s not going to surprise you that 65% of Americans drive cars for 5 years or less. You heard me say these cars depreciate like a rock. I mean, they go down in value very rapidly. So, you’re actually rewarded if you drive cars for seven plus years because that means you have less depreciation. You’re not making more bad decisions. You’re actually just driving these depreciating vehicles longer. There’s a lot of success built in that deferred gratification and that consistency of how you use vehicles.

Bo: All right, so that’s cars. Now, let’s talk about homes. For most folks, this is often the largest purchase you will ever make in your life. And we know that right now in this country, as we’ve seen home prices run up and increase, the median home value in the US according to the Federal Reserve is about $430,000. So the question becomes, okay, if that’s the median, how do our clients stack up? What do their houses look like? We’ve already shared with you that the average net worth of our clients is around $3.5 million. The median net worth is about $2.5 million. But when it comes to homes, when it comes to their main residence, the median home value for our clients is about $700,000. The average home price of our clients at current market value is right at about $850,000.

Brian: This is one of those weird distortions coming from just what’s happened in the housing market in the last 5 years. I think a $700,000 median house probably 5 years ago was what, $450,000, maybe even less than that. And it also depends upon the market you live in. We do have clients that live in high cost of living areas where these houses can go well beyond a million or $2 million. But I think overall the important thing is to understand, hey, don’t let a house just be shelter. You need to be careful how you structure it because it can be such a big expense category in your financial house.

Bo: Well, and I think a lot of people are under this impression that, okay, well, houses have gotten so expensive and I know I’ve got to put 20% down and the house keeps running away. I’m never going to be able to own a home. It’s just not realistic in the world in which we live. And so, we said, okay, let’s ask our clients: when you bought your house, when it came time for you to buy your first home and you’re finally crossing into the homeownership category, what was your down payment? How much did you save? How much did you put down? And we found that 79% of our clients, almost 80% of our clients, put down less than 20% on their first home. Brian, did you put down 20% on your first house?

Brian: Yeah, I did not put down 20% on my first house. And we believe that when you go to buy your first home, you do not have to put 20% down to be able to come into homeownership.

Bo: Yeah. I think that hopefully this liberates some of you who might be sitting on the sidelines. For life purposes, it makes sense for you to buy this house for your growing family. And you hear this because you had so many talking heads telling you 20 plus percent forever. And then here you are, you find out that the majority of people who are really good with money put down a lot less than 20%. I think I put down 5% on my first house.

Brian: I think I was three and a half on mine. So it is one of those things. But also, look, we live in a unique time and we’ve done shows on is it better to buy versus rent in this current marketplace? And in a lot of cities, it’s better to rent. That’s one of those things. That’s why I would encourage you, don’t feel like you have to get pressured into this. I want you to go out to moneyguy.com/resources. We have a home buying calculator. We also have a home buying checklist. So, you can go through the decision matrix and figure out: does this even make sense based upon how often I’m moving for my job or my lifestyle? Go use these tools and resources to know that you’re living your best life and not forcing the decision.

The Financial Order of Operations in Real Life (19:34)

Bo: All right, Brian. So, we’ve talked about their net worth. We’ve talked about our clients’ income. We’ve talked about how they were educated. We talked about their large major purchases, but now let’s talk a little about their mindset and their plan. Because you guys know, if you’ve listened to us for any amount of time, we’ve come up with a Financial Order of Operations. It is our nine-step process to help you understand what to do with your next dollar. And the way that we were able to develop the Financial Order of Operations was both through our personal experiences building our own wealth as well as our professional experiences interacting with clients who’ve been able to build wealth. And so we said, okay, let’s put this to the test. How do our clients perceive and how did they actually realistically live through the Financial Order of Operations? Because wealthy folks who’ve been able to build wealth understand the value of what you’re doing with your dollars and what you’re not doing with your dollars.

Brian: So, we said, okay, let’s figure out right off the bat, one of the very early steps of the Financial Order of Operations is high interest debt. It’s step number three. And a lot of Americans fall into this trap. I think the average credit card balance carried from month to month right now is right around $6,000 carried over where you’re paying punitive interest rates. So, we asked our wealthy clients: do you use credit cards? Some people out there would suggest don’t ever use credit cards. You just don’t get them, you don’t use them. We don’t fall into that camp. And we found that over 97% of our clients, almost all of them said, “Yeah, we use credit cards. We get points. We get cash back. We use them as a tool in our financial tool belt.” But 99% say, because remember we always say credit card use: okay. Credit card debt, meaning we’re not paying it off every month: no way. We do not want to have that. Look, I’ll be honest. When I saw this one, I was like, who in the world at Abound Wealth is carrying credit card debt? I don’t know why this number is not 100%. But if you get enough people in a population, you’re always going to have the crazy outlier. So, I guess I’ll take 99%. But that number should be 100%. That’s not me. That’s not you. That’s not anybody hopefully who’s here on staff. I want you to aspire to be 100% debt-free on credit card debt.

Bo: So, one of the questions is, okay, well, why are they able to, why don’t your clients have credit card debt? Why don’t they get themselves into that pickle where they have to swipe the card to cover some cost they could not afford? And the answer is because they understand the Financial Order of Operations. They know that in step four, one of the again early stages, is to have a fully funded emergency reserve. That thing that prevents you from being derailed by life’s unknown unknowns. We found that 93% of our clients, 93% of our clients, have a fully funded emergency fund. They know that no matter what comes their way, they have enough liquid capital to be able to bridge the gap between what’s going on today and what they hope to be going on in the future when they get through that hiccup.

Brian: And remember, emergency reserves are so important in the Financial Order of Operations. It’s not just one step. It’s step one and it’s step four. So don’t sleep on that. That’s what’s going to protect you from making desperate decisions. That’s what’s going to keep you grounded and give you peace of mind so you don’t even mess up stuff that’s going on in your investments later in time, because you know, hey, even if I lost my job, I’m going to be okay and I’m not going to have to do crazy things with either my portfolio or having to rely on credit card debt or do anything that’s going to get me in a bad financial situation. And look, we keep referencing it. If you want to know more about the Financial Order of Operations, go to moneyguy.com/resources and you can download your very own free copy. It can even be your laminated copy if you laminate it. So, we want you to understand that there is a better way to do money. We’ve helped build the plan for what that should look like. And our clients, they’ve figured that out. They’ve actually lived that in reality.

When Millionaires Got Serious About Money (23:52)

Bo: So we said, okay, now let’s focus a little bit on their mindset. We know what they did tactically. We know how they approach handling their money, but who are they when you get inside of their minds and you think about when they figured out how personal finance works? And so we just asked this question: at what age did personal finance become serious for you? At what age did you start figuring out how money works and how you should interact with it? And we found that 58% of our clients got serious about their personal finances before age 30.

Brian: Yeah, remember I’ve already kind of talked about that our clients see the financial world differently. We see the world differently. You’re watching personal finance content. So you also see the world differently. These are all indicators that you might be a Financial Mutant. And I love it when people discover the power of compounding growth, and early and often is your best friend. And that’s why we often talk about what’s called the Wealth Multiplier. And this is kind of the thing, y’all know my journey on becoming wealthy was being the poor kid sitting in my economics class in high school. And Mr. Morrow told me if I could save $100 a month, he told the whole class, $100 a month, y’all would all be millionaires. And I was working fast food. And I was like, holy cow, I can do this. What seemed impossible now is sitting right before me. You too can build wealth beyond your wildest imagination if you understand that your money can actually work harder than you can. What I think people would be shocked to find out is that when you reach actual financial independence, if you put your army of dollars to work early and often, between 77 to 95% of your total account value at retirement is probably going to be the growth of those assets. I would encourage you, go to moneyguy.com/resources. We have calculators. We have resources like this. You can actually put in what you have, you can put in what your age is, and see how powerful every dollar you have can be for your future.

Bo: Yeah. I want to pause real quick because maybe you’re out there listening to this and maybe you’re not younger than 30. I mean, we all understand conceptually that the earlier we save, the better. And that the absolute best time to start investing and saving would have been yesterday, which makes today by default the second best time. But I want you to hear these numbers. We said that a vast majority, 58% of our clients figured out before 30. But listen to this. Even for clients that work with us today, 20% of them figured out personal finance in their early 30s, 12% in their late 30s, and there was still another 7% that didn’t figure it out until their 40s. So maybe this is the first time you’re seeing this. Maybe this is the first time that you’re interacting with this content. It’s okay. Even if you’re that 40-year-old, every dollar that you save has the potential to turn into $7 by the time that you retire. But you have to start today. If you’ve delayed, if you haven’t caught the bug yet, make sure that you catch it. And your future self will thank you for beginning to take it seriously.

Self-Made Millionaires, Inheritance, and Wealth Mindset (27:00)

Brian: I want to bring it back to something that was said at the beginning: how your story begins does not define how it ends. And I think for a lot of you, I grew up in a household where I was told constantly, you know, the way you get wealthy is you have to be born into it. That the system’s kind of stacked against those that don’t come from money. And I remember when I had the Mr. Morrow moment where he told me $100 a month. That’s where I understood compounding growth. But it wasn’t until I read The Millionaire Next Door by Dr. Stanley and Danko that I quickly learned that 80% of millionaires are first generation. And then once you know that, we fast forward the 30 years into my career and we’re interviewing our own clients and we find out that just like the 80% that Dr. Stanley shared back in the mid-90s, we find out 74% of our clients also are first generation, meaning they didn’t inherit this money. It came from them doing the hard work of deferred gratification, being disciplined, saving a little bit today to build your great big beautiful tomorrow. You can do this too.

Bo: If you even just think about the math, we said that the median net worth of our clients is about $2.5 million. That means that if 74% of our folks received an inheritance of less than $25,000, that inheritance likely represents less than 1% of their total wealth. These are folks who understand how money works. And they have a mindset that just because I’m in a situation today does not mean that I’m going to have to be in that situation tomorrow. That I get to take a part in controlling what my future looks like. And we believe, and we’ve always kind of anecdotally believed this, that our clients and the folks we interact with generally think that opportunity is going to be on their side, that tomorrow will likely look better than today, that they have the ability to impact their future positively.

Why Optimism Matters for Building Wealth (28:56)

Bo: So we asked our clients, hey, when you think about your mindset and the way that you view the world and the way that you think about opportunities, would you describe yourself as an optimist who always sees the glass half full, or as a pessimist who always sees the glass half empty? And we found that 82% of our clients, from a mindset perspective, would consider themselves and identify themselves as being optimists versus being pessimists.

Brian: And that once again is a separation from the general public, because unfortunately there are a lot of people out in the general public that classify themselves as pessimistic. And I get it. Look, if you watch the nightly news, I even put it in the book Millionaire Mission when I wrote it: if it bleeds, it leads. It seems like the news media has discovered that if we create something that makes you feel on edge or scared or that there’s a catastrophic thing coming your way, they’ll keep your eyes and ears that much more peeled. It is so hard to work against that current. But I’m here to tell you guys, these are exciting times. There’s going to be lots of opportunity for you to build wealth, to let your money work harder than you can. You just kind of have to see through the noise. And that’s what we’ve tried to create: a safe space for you to come get the best education out there in the marketplace. And our goal is to help you really maximize the abundance cycle.

The Abundance Cycle and Final Takeaways (30:22)

Brian: And what is the abundance cycle? Bo and I have literally created an entire platform for you to learn our concepts, grow through them, and then apply them. And once you create so much success that your simple life, that seemed like all you had to do was know your right savings rate and put that money to work, all of a sudden your life becomes complex. You’re thinking about taxes. You’re thinking about retirement planning. You’re thinking about education planning. You’re thinking about insurance and all the things you just don’t know what you don’t know. We’re going to leave the porch light on for you. And I want you to consider maximizing the abundance cycle to the next level by becoming a client of the firm. We do work with clients all across the country and we’d love for you to give us a chance to show you why we’re that special. I’m your host Brian, joined by Mr. Bo. You too can be part of our next millionaire study. Money Guy, out!