5 Things Rich People Refuse to Buy

**Daniel Berk** (0:00)
One of the richest people I've ever had on Moneywise is worth about $3 billion, and his big money advice is to keep driving the Chevrolet. Another guest lost 95% of his net worth overnight, built it all back, and the only time he gets new socks is when his wife buys them for him. He does not buy his own socks. And Bryan Johnson, the don't die guy, spends $2 million a year on his body and told me he basically refuses to spend money on anything else.
I'm Daniel Berk. I host Moneywise and I went back through 100 episodes of Rich People breaking down where their money actually goes. And somewhere in the middle of that binge, I started noticing the same five things come up over and over again. So I started Googling and it turns out there's about 50 years of research explaining why they act like this. Nobody sent these guys the studies. They just ended up in the same spot and it's what a lot of rich people resonate with with how they spend their money. So today's episode is five things rich people won't buy and the science behind each one. Stick around for the end because there's a version of this that ruins people and I've had those guests on too. First I want to answer the question that a lot of my friends ask me which is why do people come on Moneywise and even tell you this type of stuff? Well, Moneywise is brought to you by Hampton, which is a private community of founders and a lot of the guests that we have on Moneywise come from Hampton. These are people that are already used to talking about real numbers behind closed doors, how their exit was, what they did with the money, how much they made. They say all these things in their private core groups, which is a group of founders that they meet with every single month.
Moneywise is framed a little bit like what those core groups are like, except I talk one-on-one with some of these founders and high net worth individuals.
If that's the type of community that you want to be a part of, that you want to check out, go to joinhampton.com. It's a great community. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already. Number one, things that rich people will not spend money on and it's first class.
It's the most common one by far. Flying up front. Our biggest episode ever is called How Rich is Rich Enough to Fly Private. The guest in that episode was a crazy wealthy guy and he said, I still fly coach unless it's international. I can barely see the value in flying first. He called it his poor kid habit. I love that. I heard the same thing from a guest worth around 120 million who told me that he has friends with way more money who simply cannot imagine not flying economy. They cannot make themselves click the upgrade button. The science on this one is very interesting. There is a thing called hedonic adaptation. If you only remember one idea from this video, make it this one. Whatever you upgrade, your brain gets used to really fast. It's another way to say lifestyle creep or lifestyle inflation. You get a bump and then you slide right back to where you were before. The famous study here is from the 70s. Researchers went and found lottery winners, people who hit the actual jackpot. Within about a year, they were no happier than their neighbors. The crazy thing about this is that the actual lottery winners scored lower than regular people on enjoying everyday stuff, like breakfast or conversations with friends. Winning the lottery made their normal life worse.
Their bar for happiness moved and it never moved back.
Comfort is the fastest version of this type of lifestyle creep.
First time you fly first class, you feel like you made it. Third time, it's just a seat. Except now coach, which was fine for your entire life up until that point, feels more like a punishment. You paid four times the fare, but what you actually bought was a worse experience of coach.
I think the guys who don't upgrade the seats understand that. Even if they've never read this study, they realize, why would I pay three to five times the coach seat for a first class seat if it's just not three to five times better? If it doesn't add three to five times the value to my life, why spend the money on it? Number two is new cars. Back to the three billion dollar guy, he's never sold a company, and he told me that they'll never spend all the money that he has. His money is going to outlast everyone in the family, and his advice to people coming up is don't go buy the Ferrari. Just drive the Chevrolet or the Ford that you already own, and data backs this up in a really funny way. There's this book called The Millionaire Next Door. There's two researchers who spent years surveying millionaires, and the most popular car was the Ford F-150. About half of them had never paid more than 30 grand for a vehicle. The flashy cars were mostly being driven by high earners with almost no net worth. The authors got a phrase for it from a Texas rancher. It became big hat, no cattle. My favorite study on this is when researchers asked drivers how they actually felt during their last commute, and they checked it against what their car was worth.