In June 2014, a 92-year-old elderly man passed away in the town of Brattleboro, Vermont. The townspeople knew him as a harmless man who wore old flannel shirts and was skilled at chopping wood. He had once worked at a petrol pump, and in his later years, as a janitor and maintenance worker at a JCPenney store. What was revealed after his death left the entire town stunned. His lawyer said that looking at him, no one could ever guess the man was a multi-millionaire. That man left behind nearly 8 million dollars, the major portion of which went to the town’s library and hospital—1.2 million dollars to the library and 4.8 million to the hospital.
His name was Ronald Read. Hearing his story forces us to look back at ourselves. The man who could accumulate so much money never flaunted it. And what do we actually have, we who buy cars on installments just to show off to everyone?
Who is this Ronald Read?
Read’s beginnings were humble. He was born in 1921 and grew up in a poor farming family in Vermont. He was the first person in his family to graduate from high school. After returning from fighting in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific region during World War II, he settled back in Brattleboro and married a woman who had two children. An author described his career path this way: about 25 years at a petrol pump, and 17 years as a janitor at JCPenney!
Throughout this life, his salary was never sky-high. Yet no one in town ever knew what this man was quietly building. Until his death, even his friends and family did not know the extent of his wealth.
Why people display wealth—economist Thorstein Veblen wrote the answer to this question back in 1899. In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, he introduced the term “conspicuous consumption.” According to his explanation, buying luxury goods is often a way to openly display a buyer’s income and accumulated wealth capacity. Veblen argued that the utility of the item is not primary here; the goal of this consumption is to earn social status and respect. In other words, the real buyer of a lot of expensive things is not us, but the audience.
In the age of social media, this audience sits right in our pockets. Every photo, every check-in is a small advertisement. And to fund the cost of those advertisements, many people are borrowing from their futures.
In 1996, Thomas Stanley and William Danko’s The Millionaire Next Door shook up conventional ideas about the wealthy. Stanley had been researching the rich since 1973. The main observation of their book was that truly wealthy people mostly do not live in Beverly Hills; they live in the house right next door to you. They divided people into two groups: one group accumulates much more wealth relative to their income, while the other group has a high income but low wealth. Describing the second group, an analysis notes that they live high-status lifestyles and have savings goals, but they don’t even come close to accumulating as much wealth as their income suggests they should.
What is the behavior of the first group? They are frugal and do not feel the urge to flaunt their wealth through symbols of status. The book has a simple rule you can use to measure yourself: Multiply your current age by your annual pretax income, then divide by ten. What you get is the wealth you are expected to have based on your age and income. If your actual net worth is less than that, you are likely living on your income rather than your savings. Another practical piece of advice from the book concerning housing: do not buy a house whose mortgage is more than twice your family’s annual taxable income.
Since the topic of cars came up, let’s look at some numbers, because a car is usually the symbol of showy spending. A new car can lose 20 percent or more of its original price in its very first year alone, and on average about 60 percent after five years. The example from another report is simple: a new car bought for 50,000 dollars drops to around 35,000 dollars on average in two years. This does not even factor in the costs of loan interest, insurance, and maintenance.
However, in all fairness, one thing needs to be said: this loss remains strictly on paper until the car is sold. The problem isn’t owning a car. The problem is that the cars we buy not for necessity, but for show, sink their entire value into something that gets cheaper every single day—money that could grow daily if it were invested.
High income doesn’t automatically mean wealth, and the most dramatic example of this is professional athletes. NBA star Antoine Walker earned 110 million dollars during his playing career, yet filed for bankruptcy just two years after retiring. In 2009, a Sports Illustrated report noted that within two years of retirement, 78 percent of former NFL players face bankruptcy or severe financial distress.
However, there is also debate surrounding these statistics, and it is important to point that out. A subsequent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that the bankruptcy rate two years after retirement is 1.9 percent, and 15.7 percent after twelve years. No matter how low the number is, the latter rate is still not insignificant. The explanation given by that study also aligns with our point: athletes have a different earning pattern—a massive surge for a few years, followed by a drop in income. If you build a lifestyle based on an income that is bound to stop, trouble is inevitable.
What did Read do? His strategy was surprisingly simple. He bought shares in railroad, utility, banking, healthcare, and consumer goods companies, while avoiding tech companies. According to his lawyer, he only invested in what he understood and what paid dividends. His sources of knowledge were easily accessible: he read the Wall Street Journal, studied stocks at the local library, and discussed investments with his neighbors.
His greatest strength was patience. At the time of his death, he owned at least 95 stocks, most of which he had held for decades, selling very few. Most importantly, for 55 years, he invested the gap between his income and his ego into dividend-paying stocks and reinvested the dividends. That phrase—”the gap”—belongs to investment writer Morgan Housel. According to him, savings is the gap between your ego and your income.
A blogger provided an estimated calculation that illustrates the power of time. In their estimation, investing 350 dollars a month at an 8 percent return for 65 years adds up to nearly 8 million dollars. This isn’t Read’s exact calculation, just an illustration. But the message is clear: the result came not from a massive lump sum, but from a long duration and consistency.
Perhaps many of us now want to paint a picture of miserliness out of Read’s life, but small snapshots of his life tell a different story. He would gather twigs and branches himself for his home’s stove and drove a secondhand car. Another source says he used a safety pin to fasten his coat. Moreover, every day he would eat breakfast sitting in the same spot, at the same seat, with a peanut butter-spread English muffin. There might have been less comfort in this life, but there is no room to say there was a lack of contentment. He lived by his own yardstick.
An analyst expressed a different view regarding the real lesson of this story. According to them, this is not actually a story about blue-chip shares or extreme frugality, but rather a story about a man’s own internal scorecard who did not care about others’ evaluations. That is something to ponder. Being frugal is not hard; what is hard is staying on your own path when everyone else is watching.
Simplifying this story and telling you that “you can do it too” wouldn’t be quite right. It would be a distortion of the truth not to mention a few caveats.
First, Read worked for a long time. Even though it was a low-paying job, he worked for many years, once even retiring and then returning to work. Second, his portfolio was far from ideal. Managing around 95 stocks is difficult; experts typically recommend 10 to 20. Third, the importance of income cannot be denied either. An analysis of a 2019 Federal Reserve survey showed that broadly speaking, higher income increases wealth, and climbing from one income tier to a high wealth tier is very difficult. Therefore, the accurate takeaway is that income is not irrelevant, but having an income alone does not create wealth. How much of that income you are able to keep for yourself and your future is what ultimately matters.
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Another question some people have raised: if Read had given away his money while he was still alive, would he have felt even greater satisfaction? No one knows the answer to that. But the question serves as a reminder that the purpose of saving isn’t just accumulating. Money is ultimately meant to serve life.
Respecting money doesn’t mean depriving yourself. It means asking yourself before every major expense: Will this money work for me in the future, or will it just create an image in the eyes of others? Money that goes into wealth grows over time, while money that goes into praise never returns. Whether income is low or high, the first decision in building wealth is singular: regularly setting aside a portion of your income and leaving it untouched.
The next time you see someone in a flashy car and expensive clothes and think to yourself that person must be very rich, pause for a moment. They might truly be rich, or they might be living a borrowed life. And if you see a quiet person driving away in an old car wearing old clothes, remember Ronald Read before taking them lightly. The man who spent his life holding a broom left this world as the largest donor in the history of the town’s library and hospital.
Wealth is invisible, because wealth is all the things you didn’t buy. The money used for showing off today is of no use tomorrow. And the money you can quietly put to work today will one day speak on your behalf.
If Ronald Read’s life is one side of the mirror, we are on the other. He had no audience. We do, and they live right in the palm of our hand.
In Veblen’s time, people displayed wealth through their homes, clothing, and the number of servants they kept. Today, screens do that job. And the consequences of this have been measured in surveys, even though most of those surveys are from America and Canada.
According to a 2023 Credit Karma survey, 76 percent of Gen Z and 69 percent of Millennials admitted that they fell into debt due to FOMO, or the fear of missing out. Another analysis revealed an even stranger fact: 40 percent of Gen Z regularly take on debt to chase things or experiences seen on social media, and a nearly equal number said that purchases are made partly just to share them on social media. In other words, in many cases, we aren’t buying things—we are buying post material.
There are psychological consequences to this as well. A survey by Allianz found that 61 percent of Millennials reported feeling inadequate by comparing their financial situation to what they see on social media. Yet, as a financial planner reminded us, what people post is merely a highlight reel of their best moments. We suffer from an inferiority complex by comparing someone else’s best day to our ordinary days, and we borrow to cure that inferiority.
Travel is now a major stage for this exhibition. A Forbes Advisor survey says that 48 percent of participants went to a destination simply because they saw it on social media. And 42 percent said that seeing similar travels led them to rack up credit card debt or spend more than they had planned. Travel is not a bad thing. The problem begins when destinations are chosen based on picture frames, and the expenses continue as installments for years.
In our country, the biggest arena for display is arguably weddings. A report by The Financial Express stated that even an ordinary wedding for the urban middle class now rarely costs less than a million, yet family incomes have not kept pace with social expectations. The report pointed to the competition for prestige, social comparison, and the fear of “what will people say” as the causes. Social media has accelerated this cycle. Weddings have gradually transformed into public exhibitions of economic capability.
The wedding industry has also grown around this expectation. The U.S. wedding services and events market is valued at approximately $60 billion to $70 billion annually (with core wedding services estimated around $63.95 billion, and broader total wedding-related consumer spending reaching over $100 billion when factoring in travel, gifts, and apparel). The massive expenses are driven by the social pressure of a “perfect wedding” involving gold, decoration, photography, apparel, and event management. In the eyes of society, a wedding is not just the union of two people, but proof of a family’s standing. Families are driven by the fear that a simple wedding might be seen as a sign of financial weakness.
In Veblen’s concept, there was also a behavior that is very familiar to us today. He described “conspicuous compassion”—that is, performative giving with the objective of increasing prestige and social status. In today’s era, taking pictures, making videos, and tagging donations has become normal for many. Yet Read left his massive donation in complete silence, with no one knowing about it during his lifetime. The difference between giving and display lies right here: the first is for others, and the second is for one’s own image.
If we brought Read into today’s world, what would we see? He probably wouldn’t appear on any feed at all. No one would give a “like” to his old car, flannel shirt, and safety-pinned coat. But at age 92, he left behind savings that changed the history of a town’s hospital and library.
Next time you stand before a major expense, ask yourself a simple question: If there were no audience here, if no one ever found out, would I still buy this? If the answer is yes, then this is likely your own need or joy, and you can spend with peace of mind. But if the answer is no, then the real buyer of that money is not you—it’s your audience. An audience never pays your future bills.
Now what I am writing next is worth reading with a special caution. The events included here are not just statistics; they are the grief of individual families. I am not mentioning anyone’s name or details!
Weddings, festivals, the urge to uphold social standing—these expenses often do not come from income. They come from debt. At first, debt feels easy. But the rule of weekly installments is that whether you have money in hand or not, the week will come around again.
In Read’s story, we saw that the money you don’t spend is your true wealth. The trap of installments shows the exact opposite: when you spend money you haven’t earned yet, the future borrows against you, and that debt must be paid back with interest—sometimes paid with your dignity, your peace of mind, or your family life.
Before making any major expense for weddings, festivals, or social status, it is wise to ask yourself three questions:
Is the money for this expense coming from my actual income, or from debt?
If my income suddenly drops, how will I manage the installments?
Will the people I am spending this money for stand by my side on the day I can no longer pay?
The answer to that third question is often far more honest than the first two.
And for anyone currently struggling under the weight of debt, the rule is simple: Do not try to carry it alone. Speak with someone you trust, open up about the situation to your family, and talk to your lender about restructuring your installments. No matter how heavy the humiliation and pressure feel, there is always a way out, and there are people willing to help you find it.
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If you equate happiness with money, you have a problem. To indulge in a bit of rhetoric: time is money, but money is not time. Finding the balance of what is necessary and sufficient is the key to survival—and to the prosperity that follows survival.