Rich Habits Study – Background and Methodology

Tom Corley boats - cropMy Rich Habits study has received international attention in the media. Newspapers, magazines, online sites, TV, radio and podcasts in 27 countries, so far, have shared bits and pieces of my research.

As a result, I have received tens of thousands of emails from around the world, regarding my research and my study methodology.

The overriding goal of my study was to answer two fundamental questions:

#1 Why are people rich or poor?

#2 What do the rich and the poor do from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment they go to bed at night? 

Below is a summary of my study:

  1. I interviewed 233 wealthy individuals and 128 poor individuals over a 3 year period beginning in March 2004 and ending in March 2007.
  2. Of the 233 millionaires, 177 were self-made millionaires and 56 inherited their money.
  3. Of the 177 self-made millionaires, 105 (59%) came from middle-class households and 72 (41%) came from poor households.
  4. I spent another 16 months analyzing and summarizing the data, completing my initial analysis sometime around August – October 2008.
  5. Rich Group: $160,000 in Annual Gross Income and $3.2 million in Net Assets.
  6. Poor Group: Less than $35,000 in Annual Gross Income and less than $5,000 in Liquid Assets.
  7. About 50% of the responses were physical meetings and the rest were via phone interviews and/or emails.
  8. None of the subjects were aware they were being interviewed as I was trying to control for individual bias in their responses.
  9. I asked each individual 20 broad questions (144 sub-questions) re: their daily activities. When you do the math that equals 51,984 total questions. If you’d like a copy of those questions, email me (tom@richhabits.net).
  10. I tracked their responses in individual physical folders and subsequently transferred the data to two large excel worksheets for each group. I then consolidated these into what has become my Research Summary schedule. If you’d like a copy email me (tom@richhabits.net).
  11. I analyzed each group’s responses over a 16 month period and separated these responses into specific categories, which are included in my Research Summary.
  12. I continued to analyze the data for 6 more years after completing the initial analysis. To date, I have documented 334 categories, or 346 different data points of both groups.
  13. Most of the interviews were geographically distributed as follows within the United States: 50% northeast, 20% southeast, 10% mid-west and the balance scattered across the country.
  14. Age Demographics:
    • Rich Group (233 Individuals):
      • Age 40 – 45 = 7 individuals
      • Age 46 – 50 = 37 individuals
      • Age 51 – 55 = 65 individuals
      • Age 56 – 60 = 72 individuals
      • Age Over 60 = 52 individuals
    • Self-Made Millionaire Group (177 of the 233 Individuals):
      • Age 40 – 45 = 2 individuals
      • Age 46 – 50 = 11 individuals
      • Age 51 – 55 = 25 individuals
      • Age 56 – 60 = 99 individuals
      • Age Over 60 = 40 individuals
    • Poor Group (128 Individuals):
      • Age 40 – 45 = 9 individuals
      • Age 46 – 50 = 15 individuals
      • Age 51 – 55 = 16 individuals
      • Age 56 – 60 = 41 individuals
      • Age Over 60 = 47 individuals
  15. For the wealthy – 4% were African American, 19% were Jewish and 77% were Caucasian.
  16. For the poor – 3% were Jewish, 33% were Caucasian and 64% were African American.
  17. In the wealthy group, 214 were men and 14 were women.
  18. In the poor group 114 were men and 14 were women.
  19. In the wealth group (233), 51% were self-employed entrepreneurs/business owners, 28% were professionals, 18% were senior executives in large publicly-held companies and 3% were other.
  20. In the poor group (128), 10% were self-employed entrepreneurs/business owners and the rest were employees.

I gathered data for both groups regarding their careers/employment, the percentage born to wealth, poverty or the middle-class, spending habits, academic performance, education, perceptions of wealth/poverty, various health data, inherited money data, gambling habits, home ownership, car ownership, reading habits, relationship management, savings habits, self-improvement habits, time management habits, beliefs, vacation habits, volunteering habits, networking habits, voting habits and work-related data.

I chose an interview format as I believed it would offer far more qualitative and quantitative data than a survey could provide.

I have written numerous books, each sharing different aspects of my research.

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Thomas C. Corley About Thomas C. Corley

Tom Corley is a bestselling author, speaker, and media contributor for Business Insider, CNBC and a few other national media outlets.

His Rich Habits research has been read, viewed or heard by over 50 million people in 25 countries around the world.

Besides being an author, Tom is also a CPA, CFP, holds a master’s degree in taxation and is President of Cerefice and Company, a CPA firm in New Jersey.
 
Phone Number: 732-382-3800 Ext. 103.
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Comments

  1. Anthony Pelletier says:

    I want it please.

  2. I been reading similar book. I do agree with every thing you have said. But is a little harder for woman and that is not and
    Excuse l been sick for a wild have lost every thing. l come from poor back ground where all l heard all my life was
    If you want to have some money you need work hard and my mother to this day says the same thing
    My ?To you is how to how can a person like me think different lam trying so hard to do that so l can teach
    People to do that is not that people are negative is for some of that’s all we hear day after day of are life’s
    I never said that to my kids . It was easier when l was younger . But you are right people don’t like to hear that. Cause your
    Are the victim or the one doing the victimization. Let me how to get your books and good luck

  3. 10. I tracked their responses in individual physical folders and subsequently transferred the data to two large excel worksheets for each group. I then consolidated these into what has become my Research Summary schedule. If you’d like a copy let me know.

    Please, share such excel worksheet with me. I really would like to study more about your research.
    Best regards;
    Jonas

  4. ucdstudents says:

    Why did you remove the parts where you bashed on poor people? Rude. We see you.

    -UC Davis sociology students

  5. Why did you remove so much of the original post?

  6. You are missing Hispanics and Asians in your study.

  7. Kevin McCaughey says:

    The author does not cite the failure rates for the three paths (saver-investors, virtuosos, dreamers) I would think it useful to know, for instance, if 85% of those pursuing “saver-investor” strategy became wealthy while only 15% of those pursuing a “dreamer” strategy did so.

    It is a good thing that I didn’t pursue the “virtuoso” strategy of being an All Pro NFL quarterback. If successful, I would indeed be wealthy, but I am also undersized, unathletic, and bruise easily. If I had, I would likely be living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.

Trackbacks

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  4. […] self-made millionaires in my five-year Rich Habits Study were hard-pressed to define their success according to an event. This is because, for most of the […]

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  6. […] self-made millionaires in my five-year Rich Habits Study were hard-pressed to define their success according to an event. This is because, for most of […]

  7. […] five-year Rich Habits study, I uncovered the process self-made millionaires use to convert their goals into daily […]

  8. […] You probably never heard of a “to-don’t” list before. I discovered this little-known secret strategy in my five-year study on the daily habits of rich people. […]

  9. […] to my five-year study of rich people (those with an annual income of $160,000 or more and a liquid net worth of $3.2 million-plus), I […]

  10. […] to my five-year study of rich people (those with an annual income of $160,000 or more and a liquid net worth of $3.2 million-plus), I […]

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  13. […] he got to know the substance of the lives of rich people after studying them for five years. On his website, Corley has explained the background of his methodology in detail. In an article for Business […]

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  17. […] C. Corley spent five years researching rich people’s habits (those who made $160,000 in annual gross income and had $3.2 million in net liquid […]

  18. […] C. Corley spent five years researching rich people’s habits (those who made $160,000 in annual gross income and had $3.2 million in net liquid […]

  19. […] In my five-year study of rich and poor people, 67% of the self-made millionaires said that their optimism was critical to their success in life. Conversely, 78% of the poor in my study admitted to being pessimists. Granted, cynicism and pessimism aren’t quite the same, but they have one major factor in common: negativity. […]

  20. […] C. Corley studied 233 rich people for five years, and the common denominator found in every single one of them? They […]

  21. […] me share some of my research with you. 76% of the wealthy in my Rich Habits Study were what you would call self-made millionaires. They came from non-wealthy households. 31% of […]

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