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Ryan D’Agostino’s delightful romp through America’s most expensive neighborhoods is not only a delightful read, but also a real eye-opener to the world of success and the well-to-do. A charming primer to learn how to be Rich Like Them.

EMC
Rating: 5 / 5

I borrowed this book from the library. But after reading one chapter I knew that I had to own a copy and bought one. It’s the type of book you want to pick up as a reference.

This book is quite similar to Thomas J. Stanley’s ‘The Millionaire Mind’. The people I have read about so far, did not have any exceptional talent or extrodinary abilties. They just worked smart, worked hard, believed in themselves. They set a goal and focused on accomplishing that goal.

One of the things I liked is the people that are interviewed are pretty much regular folks. They don’t put on airs, they are just very level headed and practical.

The negative reviews I have read so far seem to be calling the book superficial for not providing more insight on how to get rich. I think they are missing the point. This is not a paint by numbers book on how to get rich. This is a book about the qualties of the men and women who lived in the lavish houses and how they came to be rich and successful

Like anything else in life, there are no shortcuts. You have to have a vision and a goal and be prepared to work very hard to achieve that goal. You also need to believe in yourself.
Rating: 5 / 5

Author D’Agostino took an admittedly unscientific route to find the secrets of wealth. His strategy was to take the 100 richest zip codes and randomly knock on the doors of homes that suggested a wealthy owner. He would then interview the people who answered their doors to find their wisdom and secrets to their success. What D’Agostino “discovered”, for the most part, are lessons learned and strategies and techniques for wealth that have appeared elsewhere: work hard, perservere, be prepared for opportunity, etc. Ironically, for me, D’Agostino’s accounts of his walks through neighborhoods devoid of pedestrians and street life, but filled with large homes on large properties, can evoke the fears and realizations of urban planners and environmentalists – sprawl, SUV’s and other large vehicles zooming around lifeless communities. There is a lot of architecture and material possesions in his stories, but there is stark little indication of neighborhood or even family life, suggesting some of the dysfunction that resides in these bastions of wealth, as they do in Westchester County, New York – high rates of teenage drug use, suicide and depression, for example. I am not here belittling wealth or the good efforts of those who acquire it, but rather acknowledging the other side of the coin that D’Agostino’s writing contains implicitly. Other get rich books get to the point faster and with more suggestions. Although it is useful to draw lessons from others anecdotes, I think it is more efficient to draw them from more explicit texts that get right to the point.
Rating: 3 / 5

Americans are horribly ignorant of money– how to make it, how to spend it, how to hang on to it, and who to listen to when seeking advice on it. Unfortunately, in Rich Like Them, author Ryan D’Agostino doesn’t sound like someone able to effectively evaluate financial advice.

The premise is simple. D’Agostino goes door to door in very wealthy neighborhoods to seek financial advice from those people who apparently have succeeded with money. He is clearly enamoured of his wealthy subjects and spends a great deal of time describing their huge houses, fancy cars, meticulous landscaping, pricey artwork, and high rolling company. D’Agostino is always very impressed by those who live well.

But his constant focus on the material benefits of wealth leads one to wonder: Is he interviewing those people who truly are wealthy and worthy of being interviewed, or merely those that are best at maintaining an appearance of wealth? If we’ve learned anything during the recent period of overextension, overspending, hyper consumerism and distorted risk (D’Agostino’s research was conducted primarily around 2005-2007, the height of this era), it’s that Americans are very good at appearing to live better than they can actually afford.

D’Agostino takes a moment to ridicule those who were not willing to invite him into their homes to share their stories. He calls them “close minded” and “uninteresting.” I’d bet that many of those people who shut the door on him had better things to do, like devise clever ways to make more money. In fact, his self-congratulatory methodology skews his research by focusing on those individuals who tend to think very highly of themselves and those who are eager to flaunt their wealth– that is, those people again who are focused on appearing wealthy.

Furthermore, in his intro, D’Agostino dismisses some subjects who offer only “bland aphorisms.” But most of what is offered by his preferred subjects amounts to common sense wisdom: work hard, focus on your goals, buy low, sell high, look for opportunities etc. etc. If you interviewed 100 ordinary middle class Americans or even 100 financial failures, you’d probably get much of the same advice. Occasionally some of the pearls of wisdom or personal philosophies his subjects reveal to D’Agostino are actually basic principles from particular financial sectors. If you were not familiar with those financial sectors, then such words would sound brilliant and creative.

All in all, I didn’t find Rich Like Them particularly better than other generic, financial inspiration books. The premise had potential but the results were nothing special.
Rating: 2 / 5

I was disappointed in this book. I think the author conducted a very interesting experiment. He put a lot of time and effort into finding subjects to interview. But, there was too much information in the book about the author and his opinions about the people he met.

I just wanted to hear the stories of how the millionaires earned their fortunes. Unfortunately, the author tries to give the reader to much advice about how these people became successful. He does a terrible job trying to draw conclusions about how these people got to be successful. Just let them tell their stories please.
Rating: 2 / 5

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