Author
Thomas J. Stanley
The marketing professor who went looking for the rich and found them in ordinary houses driving used cars.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Thomas J. Stanley taught marketing at Georgia State University and spent the 1970s and 1980s studying affluent American households, first for corporate clients who wanted to sell to them, publishing Marketing to the Affluent in 1988.
The research produced a surprise: the people who had actually built wealth rarely lived where the marketers were looking. With William Danko he turned the finding into The Millionaire Next Door in 1996, which became an unexpected bestseller, and followed it with The Millionaire Mind in 2000 and Stop Acting Rich in 2009.
He died in a car accident in 2015. His daughter, Sarah Stanley Fallaw, completed the research he had begun for The Next Millionaire Next Door, published in 2018.
The signature
Stanley's signature is the survey: tables of what wealthy households actually spend on cars, watches and houses, and the arithmetic test of age times income divided by ten. He writes as a researcher rather than a coach, and his lasting phrase, big hat, no cattle, is a finding before it is advice.