You wrote “As a personal finance book, The Millionaire Next Door is a better choice. As an all-around read, though, The Millionaire Mind does hold its own and is potentially more palatable to some specific audiences.” And I agree with you in your assessment.

GREAT job! Leo.

I agrre with you.

Overall, I believe you presented a very unbiased and fair review. And you have to be commended for that.

Your review should be very helpful to many undecided minds. You did a very good job!!! Congratulations.

Leo..

All the “millionaire” authors present is the upside – along with a bunch of stuff that is probably extraneous. They are writing about extreme-estan but describing it as if it is normal-estan.

Like Jim implies, they forgot to poll people who aren’t millionaires. The results of the survey are practically useless as a guideline to becoming a millionaire, since others who followed those guidelines may have actually become poor. Maybe even a higher percentage. But we won’t know because they weren’t polled!

The books were entertaining to read though, and I suspect that they are on the right track. But enough with the survey stuff until they do something that make sense in stats.

To quote:

“I have repeatedly told people that millionaires are frugal, but many think the entire do-it-yourself concept defines frugality. Millionaires are frugal when frugality translates into real increases in the economic productivity of the household. Webster’s defines frugal as ‘characterized by or reflecting economy in the expenditure of resources’. The key word here is resources, and not just first-cost money or dollar resources. … They reason that it’s more productive to earn income from their vocation and use it to hire professional painters, carpenters, and plumbers.”

This book suffers from some serious flaws, in my opinion, which I spell out in detail in my own review on my blog (which appears in a slightly different form on Amazon.com). Where the first book compared Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAWs) to Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAWs), this book mostly compares millionaires to deca-millionaires, which causes the author to draw some probably incorrect inferences, such as that businessmen are more likely to have higher net worth than stockbrokers. If you’re only looking at people with a net worth of $1 million and up and compare, say, actors and musicians to stockbrokers, you might very well find that actors and musicians in that group have a higher net worth. But this is only because you’ve eliminated the vast majority of actors and musicians–those who aren’t millionaires–from the sample.

I also fault Stanley for being inconsistent. He endorses the importance of never lying, but gives one of his interview subjects a complete pass on lying about being a college graduate in order to get a job.

Similarly, Stanley draws some conclusions about the importance of religion for the wealthy which are based on splitting his data sample in a way that causes an error similar to the stockbroker/businessman example–his data actually seem to show that millionaires are far less religious than the general public, but Stanley draws the opposite conclusion after splitting his sample into religious millionaires and “other millionaires” before he begins his analysis. (Some of his data is actually somewhat ambiguous, and self-reports on church attendance are notoriously unreliable, as I mention in my review.)