Why it was said

Thomas Stanley and William Danko open The Millionaire Next Door with this distinction, drawn from their surveys of American households: the people with high incomes and the people with high net worth were largely different people.

What it actually means

Income is what arrives; wealth is what stays. The doctor with the leased car and the large mortgage has the first and not the second, and the tradesman who spent two decades under his means has the second without much of the first. The sentence is the foundation of the book's finding that most millionaires are invisible, and of the Money road's insistence on the gap between earning and keeping as the number that matters.

How to use it

1. 1Write your net worth, assets minus debts, beside your income, and notice which one you have been managing.
2. 2Judge a financial year by what stayed, not by what came in.