Transcripts

Lewis Schiff:
It's somebody who has a net worth between one million and ten million dollars. It's a self-made person - they never receive more than $50,000 from their family. The population of those folks with one million to ten million dollars is one of the fastest growing populations in America.

Lewis Schiff, co-author of the book The Middle Class Millionaire, says these people have some interesting characteristics in common.

They're openly aspirational. So, they have a strong middle class ethic. They work very hard; in fact, according to our survey they work seventy hours a week compared to the regular middle class, which works forty hours a week. They also report that in the face of adversity, such as career set backs, when they experience adversity they got back up and tried again doing the same thing. When we asked the middle class that question they report that when they face adversity they gave up and tried other projects. The third thing is they seem to leverage information better. Sometimes it's in the form of networking, they know more people, and they're more willing to ask people for things, they're more willing to be asked for things. So, they take what's out there all around us and they turn it into opportunities for themselves.

And middle class millionaires are willing to take more chances.

The middle class millionaire failed at least twice as often as the middle class. We had some cases in our survey sample where we had people reporting six substantial career set backs and still having accumulated a million dollars in net worth or more.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.