The Fake Frugality of the Fabulously Fortunate

Kiplinger’s has even done the math.

“If you spend $8 buying lunch from a restaurant every day,” the magazine informs us, “you can save $60 a month and $720 a year by bringing your own lunch made using ingredients that cost only $5.”

Frugality, these Kiplinger’s calculations suggest, might not be enough all by itself to reach super-rich status. You may need some patience, too. Saving up a mere million via $720 worth of annual lunch-time frugality would take almost 1,400 years, more than a millennium.

Saving up to the level of a true super-rich fortune — what researchers define as a net worth over $50 million — would take considerably longer than this millennium-plus. In fact, let’s admit what ought to be undeniably obvious: Frugality has never made anyone super rich. And those who have achieved super-rich status don’t need to be frugal to maintain that status.

Consider, for instance, the daily lives of those 72,000 American adults who last year, according to the Credit Suisse Research Institute, held fortunes worth at least $50 million. The “poorest” of these super rich, assuming a modest annual return on their investments, can spend $2.5 million a year on whatever luxuries they chose — the equivalent of about $50,000 a week —and still end the year just as wealthy as they began it.

These rich need not practice frugality. And they don’t. They outfit their homes instead with $30,000 “gift-wrapping” rooms and $15,000 “smart toilets.” They install biometrically secure “safe boxes” for their mobile valuables in their $200,000 Bentleys. They dress their Dachshunds in bejeweled vests that run nearly $1,000.

Those frugality secrets that Kiplinger’s assures us will turn average Americans into super-rich ones? Kiplinger’s can’t reveal these secrets because they simply do not exist. But Kiplinger’s — with its “Frugal Habits of the Super Rich” — may have revealed something far more significant than any frugality secrets could ever be. Kiplinger’s has revealed just how powerfully the “myth of merit” still dominates our national discourse over our super rich and their fabulous fortunes.

This myth of merit holds that the ultra-rich among us owe their incredibly good fortune to good behavior of one sort or another. Either they work incredibly hard or perform incredible feats — or discipline themselves to lead fantastically frugal lives. As a society, in effect, we simply do not want to believe that our rich may have gained their riches through exploiting others or rigging our economy or just finding themselves in the right place at the right time. So we ascribe to our awesomely affluent rich noble qualities that make them ever so deserving of their wealth.

Yes, by all means, let’s honor frugality and try to live frugally. The Earth will thank us for our effort. But to take frugality seriously, our staggeringly unequal society would have to challenge — not fawn over — the fortunes of our super-rich. Only these ultra-wealthy, after all, can afford to pay frugality no mind.