Benefit 1: Avoiding Stress and Gaining Time#

If you wanted to get rich so you could just relax all day, making a ton of money might actually be the worst way to do that! Sure, with lots of cash, you might not need a regular 9-to-5 job. But wealthy people can easily fall into the trap of buying themselves more jobs.

Think about it:

• Buying a bunch of rental properties seems smart, but managing tenants, maintenance, agent fees, accounting, and HOA rules takes constant effort. Not to mention the work of actually buying and selling them. (I even made a whole video on how to avoid this property trap!)
• But even avoiding the property trap won’t help if you start accumulating lifestyle clutter.
• If you think rich people need a flashy sports car, you’ll buy one, even if you don’t really care about cars.
• Then you’ll need a second car because the fancy one is completely impractical.
• But that second car can’t be just any car; it also needs to be luxurious so people don’t think your fancy car got repo’d when they see you driving a Chevy.
• Next, you might decide you need a bigger house with enough garage space for all these expensive cars.
• That bigger house means more furniture, more cleaning, more gardening. You can pay people to do this, but then you’re managing employment contracts or dealing with companies.

This is a lot like lifestyle creep, where buying one expensive thing makes everything else you own feel cheap or out of place. You might feel weird parking your new fancy car outside a normal family home. You might want new branded clothes to drive it in. And while you’re at it, you might upgrade the person riding shotgun…

All these upgrades cost money, but assuming you’re super rich, that’s not the main problem. The real problem is that picking out fancy clothes, looking after a bigger house, and (as a joke) showing up to family court are all very time-consuming and very stressful.

If your goal was to get rich to kick back and relax, congratulations, you messed up royally.

Even the fancy cars themselves require extra maintenance and lead to awkward chats at the gas station with everyone asking what you do, how much the car cost, or if they can trade. The attention might be fun briefly, but it gets old fast.

Plus, niche, high-end cars like those from Ferrari or Rolls-Royce often have reliability issues. They don’t have the huge research and development budgets that big companies like Toyota, Chevy, or Ford do. So, while they might use great materials and be exciting, they can be unreliable. The navigation system might be terrible, and you might have to wait for a replacement part to be shipped across the world from Italy or the UK when something inevitably breaks on these handmade machines. Suddenly, your job becomes dealing with service centers, mechanics, and insurance companies.

If you didn’t even care that much about the flashy car in the first place, and your goal was truly to avoid working, you’d be much better off with a comfortable, well-built house in a nice area and a reliable, mass-market car in the garage.

Surveys have actually found that for people with eight-figure net worths (that’s tens of millions), a Ford F-150 is often their go-to vehicle. And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. An F-150 isn’t cheap, but for the money, you get all the comfort, practicality, safety features you could ever want, without attracting any attention while you’re living your best life.

Benefit 2: Protecting Friends and Family#

Okay, maybe you don’t care about relaxing all the time. You’re still not convinced. Let’s look at the next reason you might want to be rich: taking care of your friends and family. For anyone with young kids, this is probably the top priority.

Again, stealth wealth is amazing for this. Your hidden money can still provide a comfortable home, allow one parent to stay at home, and cover college tuition. That part’s obvious.

Where stealth wealth is uniquely brilliant here is how it protects your family and friends. People who flash their wealth with big houses and fancy cars are easy targets. Targets for lawsuits, not just from strangers, but sometimes even from within their own family!

The story of Jack Whitaker is maybe the best example of how vital it is to keep your wealth quiet. Whitaker was already a successful businessman, but then he won $314 million in a state lottery – the biggest jackpot ever at that time. This money massively boosted his net worth, but it also made him incredibly famous publicly.

Unfortunately, his state required lottery winners to be announced publicly. So, even before the money hit his bank account, he was flooded with letters and messages from people begging for money or pitching business ideas. This unwanted attention also landed on his family. Over just ten years, they became victims of kidnappings, burglaries, and ransom demands.

Tragically, Whitaker didn’t just lose all the lottery money; he also lost his successful business, his marriage, and one of his children. He famously said later that he wished he had just torn the lottery ticket up.

Now, that’s a worst-case scenario, of course. There are very famous celebrities with lots of money who deal with this kind of public life without such tragic results. But they often need public attention to make their money in the first place, and they usually have support teams (like other celebrities and managers) who help them handle it. Even so, if given the choice, I’m sure most of them would happily trade the constant public spotlight for privacy, as long as they could keep their money.

Benefit 3: Enjoying Your Passions (The Right Way)#

So, stealth wealth helps you live a less stressful life while keeping your family safe. But what about actually having fun? Some of you watching probably want to get rich so you can travel to space, get into car racing, or sit right by the court at every game of your favorite sports team. Surely these expensive hobbies go against the rules of stealth wealth, right?

Wrong! Stealth wealth doesn’t mean you can’t spend money on things you love that cost a lot. It just means you enjoy those passions without trying to get attention for it.

• Want to go to space? Awesome, go for it! Just don’t plaster pictures of it all over the internet.
• Love cars? Great! Keep a fun weekend car alongside your normal daily driver. Even if it needs a bit of work, it’ll be a project you love, not just a giant headache.