Welcome
Welcome to “The Affluentialist,” The official ‘blog for our
upcoming book, The Middle-Class
Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Transforming America (Random
House/Doubleday, January 2008) (Official web site for book)
The idea for this book came from a conversation Russ Prince and I had during lunch at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s excellent restaurant on the third floor of the Time Warner Center in New York back in April 2005. Neither Russ nor I have been back to Per Se since then—and we won’t go back until we’re ready for our celebratory book launch lunch in January 2008.
Over lunch, Russ shared with me some of the results of the research he was doing on “the new rich” for his private research clients. It was totally fascinating to me and we spent the rest of our time talking about its possible applications to a wider audience. What struck me about the research was that Russ seemed to have stumbled upon a huge group of Americans who came out of the middle-class but were accumulating wealth at a rapid clip.
As we dug deeper, it became apparent that these emerging affluent had a pretty consistent set of wealth-creating behaviors and attitudes that they seemed to have developed on their own but which elude the rest of the middle-class. Further, the sheer size of this group was stunning: in 2005, more than 8 million American households had a net worth of more than $1 million, with literally hundreds of thousands having upwards of $5 million and $10 million.
At that scale, the Middle-Class Millionaire—as we would come to call them—was truly a force to be reckoned with. But who were they? Were they “the millionaire next door” pinching their pennies to wealth and driving ten year old cars? Were they the nouveau riche with too much money and too little taste? In fact, what would become obvious over the course of this project is that the middle-class millionaire seems to live in two worlds: the middle-class world they came from and the wealthy world they inhabited now. That’s why, even though there are millions of them, it had been difficult to identify them.
Until now. The Middle-Class Millionaire attempts to provide a three dimensional portrait of this growing demographic. Russ’ crack research squad surveyed 3,600 households, creating a framework for understanding what makes the Middle-Class Millionaire different from the middle-class as well as from the ultra-wealthy. Then we worked together over 18 months interviewing real-life Middle-Class Millionaires, digging deeper into the numbers, and adding tissue and muscle to the skeletal framework of Russ’ research.
We’re very excited about introducing this important demographic group to all of you. For those of you who are Middle-Class Millionaires, you’ll be surprised to find out that there’s an entire nation-within-a-nation of Middle-Class Millionaires, leading and changing your communities and shaping middle-class values for the 21st Century.
For those of you who aspire to be Middle-Class Millionaires, you will find a recipe—a specific set of behaviors that millions of households have used to create substantial wealth for themselves and the kind of financial independence many of us desire.
Watch this space. We’ll be sharing details of the book’s progress here and bringing you evidence of the Middle-Class-Millionaire phenomenon and the substantial affect it’s having on our communities, the business world, healthcare, education, politics and more.