In a recent TED Talk, Tim Jackson talked about conspicuous consumption. I really liked this quote:

"This is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about."

"86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires."

This is a good example of one of those stats designed to fool people who don't understand statistics.

According to wikipedia there are ~9.3 million millionaire households in the US representing ~7% of US households. [1] Meaning that millionaire households purchase luxury cars at a far higher rate than non-millionaire households which is the opposite of what this article implies.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire

Few people just want to have money for no reason. Most people want to have money because of what they want to spend it on; their outrageous expenses are their passion in life and their reason for wanting money. It isn't helpful advice to say, "Don't spend money on Manolo Blahniks, and then you'll have plenty of money," if your whole reason for wanting money is so you can wear Monolo Blahniks.

In other words, it sounds like a sermon on loving money for itself instead of loving it for what it can buy you. Or, if you read it charitably, it's a sermon on loving security more and short-term pleasures less. As much as I sneer at expensive fashion and gravitate toward the <$10 wine bin at the grocery store, this article strikes me as nothing but unhelpful moralizing. Yeah. I get it. If I don't spend money, I'll have more. Yeah, I really, really get that looking good and living it up is a vacuous pastime -- I'm totally with you on this one -- but it's the most common passion on the planet, and it's a cop out to tell people to stop enjoying the one aspect of life that gives them the most pleasure and call it financial advice.

I buy the general principle that living a high-income/high-expense lifestyle isn't the path to accumulating wealth, but you can rephrase the stats to get different results as well.

For example,

86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires

can be rephrased in a way that makes it seem like driving luxury vehicles is a trait of rich:

millionaires are 3x as likely to drive a luxury vehicle as non-millionaires

I wonder if this is also skewed by the "millionaire" cutoff not being as high as popular culture thinks of it being; the millionaires of 1970s films correspond to $5m+ today, and the millionaires of the roaring 20s correspond to $12m+ today. A huge proportion of people with net worths in the low single digits of millions have almost all their money in their retirement plan plus house, and not a particularly large disposable income. Sure, in theory they could get money out of the 401(k) and blow it, but the fact that it's semi-locked-up and a hassle to get out makes it easier to preserve it.

It's possible it generalizes to higher tiers of the rich, but I'm not that sure. Do people with net worths of $10m+ have similarly frugal lifestyles? Or is this mainly a feature of people with net worths in the $1m-3m range?

The problem with this is that it leaves me asking, "Does cperciva know what a co-founder is?" A co-founder isn't someone you bring in with a one-way communication channel that does your work for you. That would be closer to, "my employees that I don't have to pay", except, well, you do have to pay for AWS.

There are lots of ways to shorten your path to market using external services, whether human or infrastructural. But they won't tell you that you're being a dumbass and help you steer the company in a better direction.

Since I'm creating a wedding startup, the insane amount of money people throw at one event has been in my mind lately...

It's a brutal cycle — the weddings featured in magazines and online are almost always out of the average couples budget, and what those stories do is create the idea of "this is what you should have". Couples then concern themselves with having the best card boxes, the perfect playlist, hand making favors that will be thrown out the next day by the majority of their guests, because this is what they're told is the right way of throwing a wedding. A one day event that people spend way too much money on because they're persuaded to by this industry.