What is a Quiet Millionaire?

0:00This week we're talking about the quiet millionaire formula for retirement. So what exactly is a quiet millionaire? Well, a quiet millionaire is someone with a net worth over a million dollars, sometimes well into the millions. And a lot of people don't really understand what even net worth means. So it's basically you add up all your assets. So you look at your big accounts, your investment account balances, 401k. You look at your house equity, and then what you do, any asset you have like that on that side of your balance sheet, then you subtract all your debts. So do you have a mortgage? You have car loan. What kind of debts do you have? And the assets minus your liabilities or debts is your network. A millionaire is someone obviously who has a net worth over a million dollars. But in today's terms, that is usually someone who has wealth in excess of that. So a million dollars doesn't go as far as it used to.

1:03So sometimes I'm talking about when I talk about quiet millionaires, I'm not just talking about someone just over a million. A lot of times this is people with a net worth in the one to five or even five to ten million dollar rage. But there's a certain set of characteristics that define the quiet millionaire from everybody else. And that is they live below their means. They avoid flashy displays of wealth, and they often go unnoticed. That's probably the key defining factor. They just go unnoticed. You don't really know how much money they have. You suspect that they might be doing okay financially, like they're not struggling, but for all you know, they could have five or ten million dollars in net worth, but you just don't know it. So in my experience as a financial advisor, many of my wealthiest clients, they're pretty ordinary. You would never guess their net worth based on their lifestyle and how they live.

2:05They're not trying to impress everyone. Instead, they're focused on financial security, maintaining flexibility, not just with how they spend their money, but how they spend their time as well. And maintaining their independence is very valuable for them. So quiet millionaires, they tend to live below their means. They avoid unnecessary debt. They invest consistently over long periods of time, decades. They really value privacy rather than showing off because there's danger in that. And they spend intentionally the key difference other than just kind of flying under the radar and going unnoticed is that they don't play the status game. They're not there to compete or they just don't even join the game. And their spending decisions are based on their values, not what they think other people will approve of or what other people expect of them. So those are the key defining factors of a quiet millionaire.

3:08It's a much more peaceful lifestyle. I will talk about that later in the week and some of the key benefits of being a quiet millionaire. Today, if that defines you, again, you're not looking for ways to insert status signals in a conversation or play this competitive sort of one-upsmanship type game. You just don't play at all. And it's very freeing to just not play the status game at all. All right. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Ashley Michike and tomorrow I'll share a story that illustrates how easy it is to mistake somebody's lifestyle for actual wealth... what they're just playing on the outside is often far different than what their actual net worth looks like. It is to mistake somebody's lifestyle for actual wealth... what they're displaying on the outside... is often far different... than what their actual net worth looks like.

4:08All right.