What the Very Rich Stop Buying

The Million Dollar Question: According to a Ramsey Solutions survey of more than 10,000 American millionaires, what were the two most common car brands in their driveways?
A) BMW and Mercedes-Benz B) Toyota and Honda C) Lexus and Audi D) Tesla and Porsche

Read on for the answer.

Two things happened in 2025 that are hard to reconcile if you believe money simply buys more things. The global market for luxury goods lost roughly 20 million customers. And private jets flew more departures than in any year on record. This piece is about what connects those two facts — which categories wealthy households quietly drop as net worth climbs, which ones absorb the money instead, and why the switch is far less about restraint than it looks.

What it is

There is a widely held assumption that consumption scales with wealth: twice the money, twice the stuff. It holds reasonably well through the first million or two. Then it stops.

What replaces it is not frugality. It is reorganization. Certain categories get abandoned outright — visible logos, the luxury-badge car, most of the clothing budget, the fourth house nobody visits — while a narrower set of categories quietly absorbs the difference. Those replacement categories tend to share a trait: they buy time, health, privacy, access, or the removal of friction, and almost none of them are visible to anyone standing on the sidewalk.

The market-level evidence is unusually clean. Bain & Company and Altagamma put personal luxury goods — handbags, watches, apparel, jewelry — at about €358 billion in 2025, a roughly 2% erosion. More striking than the revenue figure is the customer count: the active luxury client base fell to around 330 million, down from roughly 400 million in 2022. That is a market that has given back a decade of customer growth.

Meanwhile the experience side of the same industry expanded. Bain’s numbers put luxury hospitality at roughly $280 billion and growing, fine dining up around 8%, and luxury cruising up something like 30% — a small base, but a violent direction. And WingX counted 3,878,336 private-jet departures worldwide in 2025, a 4.6% increase and an all-time record, with US departures running 29% above 2019.

Nobody got poorer. The money moved.

Who uses it

This pattern is not uniform across the wealth ladder, and the differences matter more than the headline.

$1M–$5M. Almost nothing gets dropped here. Households in this band are typically still accumulating, still working, and still shopping in the same stores as everyone else — just more often and at the better end of the rack. If anything, this is the band where visible spending rises fastest relative to prior income. The exception is the self-made first generation, who often never developed the habit in the first place.

$5M–$30M. This is where the visible-status drop-off happens, and it happens fast. Logos go first, then the badge car, then the compulsion to upgrade a watch every two years. Spending on services — a house manager, a travel planner, better medical access — starts appearing on the ledger for the first time and rarely leaves.

$30M–$100M. Whole categories disappear. Not “spends less on clothing” but “has three suppliers, replaces things when they wear out, and has not walked into a shop in four years.” Ownership starts converting into access: charter and fractional instead of a hangar, club membership instead of a second house, a service contract instead of a purchase.

$100M+ and $1B+. At this level the household mostly stops buying products at all. It buys institutions and payrolls — a family office, a security detail, a foundation, a legal function. Consumption becomes an operating budget with staff, insurance, and a controller. The Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026 counts 713,626 individuals worth $30 million or more globally — a population that grew by roughly 89 people a day over the past five years, and one whose spending increasingly runs through entities rather than credit cards.

One important counter-current: this is not a generational one-way street. Business of Fashion has reported on YouGov survey data finding that a majority of luxury buyers — driven by younger cohorts — now say they prefer expressive, logo-forward pieces to understated ones. Restraint is a phase and a posture, not a law of nature.

Why they use it

Four forces do most of the work.

Signals stop signalling. A logo works as a marker of scarcity only while it is scarce. Once monograms reached airport duty-free, entry-level accessories, and a vast counterfeit market, wearing one stopped conveying much beyond participation. The predictable response among people who could still afford the signal was to abandon it and find another one — usually a quieter one, legible only to a smaller audience. This is the same dynamic explored in old money vs. new money: the grammar of the signal changes, the signalling does not stop.

Diminishing returns are real, but not where people think. The famous “money stops buying happiness at $75,000” claim has been substantially revised. In a 2023 adversarial collaboration, Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers found that for most people well-being keeps rising with income well past $100,000, while for an unhappy minority it flattens around that level. What does diminish sharply is the marginal return on any single consumption category. The tenth pair of shoes and the fourth house obey a hard curve; access to a doctor at 11pm does not.

Time becomes the binding constraint. Whillans, Dunn, Smeets, Bekkers and Norton, writing in PNAS in 2017, showed across samples totalling more than 6,000 people in four countries that spending money on time-saving services predicted greater life satisfaction — and that people were reliably happier after a $40 time-saving purchase than a $40 material one. Their most quotable finding came from the wealthy sample: of more than 800 Dutch millionaires surveyed, nearly half reported spending nothing at all to buy time. Which is to say the substitution is available to the wealthy but not automatic, and the ones who make it deliberately tend to be better off for it.

Objects create work. Every purchase above a certain size arrives with a maintenance schedule, an insurance policy, a storage problem, and eventually a disposal decision. Past a few dozen such objects, acquiring one more is not a pleasure but an administrative act. This is the least romantic driver and probably the most powerful.

How it works

The mechanics are more interesting than the psychology, because the same three conversions show up again and again.

Ownership converts to access. The boat, the plane, the ski house, the vineyard — each starts as an aspiration to own and, for a large share of households, ends as a subscription. Charter, jet cards, fractional shares, club memberships, and long-term rentals all trade a lower ceiling of control for the removal of every operational headache. The private-aviation figures above are the clearest evidence: flying is at record levels while the number of people who want a hangar of their own has not grown anything like as fast.

Products convert to services. Rather than buying better cookware, the household hires someone to cook. Rather than buying a better car, it retains a driver. Rather than buying home gym equipment, it books a trainer and, increasingly, a diagnostic program. Each conversion moves the spend from a one-time line item into a recurring one, which is why household budgets at this level look less like shopping and more like payroll — a shift covered in detail in household staff.

Purchases convert to memberships. Health is the fastest-moving example. Where an annual physical was once a transaction, longevity and concierge programs sell a yearly relationship. Fountain Life’s flagship membership has been reported in the roughly $19,500–$21,500 per year range, covering whole-body and cardiac imaging, extensive blood work and physician access. Concierge primary care sits well below that; full-service longevity programs sit above. Either way, the money leaves the household on a standing order rather than a purchase decision. See longevity and concierge medicine for how those programs actually work.

The common thread: the replacement categories are recurring, invisible, and hard to compare on price. That is not a coincidence. It is most of the appeal.

What it costs

Take the two sides of the ledger separately.

What gets dropped. The luxury-badge markup on a car is typically $20,000–$60,000 over an equivalent mainstream vehicle, and a great many wealthy households simply decline to pay it. Ramsey Solutions’ National Study of Millionaires, which surveyed more than 10,000 American millionaires, found Toyota and Honda were the two most common brands in the sample, that only about 3% drove a Mercedes-Benz, and that the typical respondent was driving a roughly four-year-old car. An Experian Automotive analysis widely cited alongside it found that around 61% of US households earning over $250,000 did not drive a luxury brand at all. Both figures describe self-made, largely first-generation wealth in the low single-digit millions, and should not be read as describing $100 million households — but within their band they are consistent and repeatedly replicated.

Clothing is the other big drop. Households in the $5M–$30M band commonly settle into an annual apparel spend in the low tens of thousands and hold it flat for a decade, which is a small fraction of what an outsider would guess. Watches and jewelry follow a similar path — fewer purchases, higher unit prices, longer holding periods. Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index closed 2025 down just 0.4% overall, with watches up 5.1% and classic cars down 3.7% — a market where the very best objects hold value and the merely expensive ones increasingly do not. More on that dynamic in watches.

What absorbs it. Private aviation is the largest single line for most households that use it: ad-hoc charter runs roughly $5,000–$15,000 per flight hour depending on aircraft, a jet card commitment typically starts in the low-to-mid six figures, and whole ownership of a midsize aircraft comfortably clears $1 million a year all-in. Household staff — a house manager, a driver, a chef, childcare — runs $150,000 to well past $500,000 a year at full coverage. Health and longevity programs run from a few thousand a year for concierge primary care into the mid five figures for full diagnostic memberships. Security, insurance, and family-office overhead sit on top.

The net effect is that a $30M household often looks less consumptive than a $3M one on any visible measure while spending considerably more in absolute terms. The spending has simply moved into categories that leave no evidence in the driveway.

Hidden costs and tradeoffs

Dropping a category is not free.

Service dependence is sticky in one direction. Once a household stops doing its own logistics, the capability atrophies. Staff turnover, a move, or a bad year turns a solved problem back into an unsolved one, and the household is now worse at it than before.

The standard cannot be un-raised. This is the most reliably reported regret in the whole area. Flying private for two years makes commercial genuinely harder, not just less pleasant. The replacement categories are, structurally, the ones with the strongest ratchet effects.

Recurring costs are harder to see and harder to cut. A $60,000 car is a decision made once. A $60,000-a-year set of services is a decision made once and then paid forever, usually without revisiting. Households routinely underestimate the capitalized value of their standing orders by a wide margin.

“Less but better” is often more expensive per unit. Buying four things a year instead of forty does not necessarily reduce the bill, because the four are the ones with no substitutes and no discounting. Restraint in count is not restraint in spend.

Social cost, where the old signals still read. In circles that still parse logos and badges — plenty exist, in plenty of countries — dropping the visible markers is not neutral. It reads as either a statement or a decline, and neither is always the intended message.

What people get wrong

It is not frugality. The most common misreading of the millionaire-car statistics is that wealthy people are careful with money in general. They are careful about that category. The same household that will not pay $40,000 for a badge will pay $200,000 a year for staff without a second thought, because one purchase buys nothing it values and the other buys hours.

It is not universal. A very large number of wealthy households never stop buying anything. The Bain and Altagamma data shows the high-end tier of the luxury market — roughly 40% of it — contracting only slightly while the entry tiers took the real damage, which tells you the top-end buyer largely stayed. The category-dropping described here is a strong tendency, not a rule, and it is heavily influenced by generation, geography and industry.

Quiet is a signal, not an absence of one. Unmarked clothing that costs more than marked clothing is a status claim aimed at a smaller audience. Reading it as modesty misses the point entirely.

The famous statistics are band-specific. Survey data on self-made American millionaires describes households worth $1M–$10M. Applying it to $500 million families produces nonsense — those households have different constraints, different tax structures, and a completely different relationship to visible spending.

The money does not vanish. Dallas Fed research finds consumption is increasingly concentrated among high-income households — the top quintile now accounts for something like 57% of US consumer spending, up several points over three decades — and attributes that concentration mainly to rising income and wealth concentration rather than to the wealthy suddenly consuming a larger share of what they have. The top of the distribution is spending more than ever in dollar terms. It is just spending it on things with no logo on them.

Bottom line

The Million Dollar Question: B — Toyota and Honda. Ramsey Solutions’ survey of more than 10,000 American millionaires found those two brands most common in the sample, with only about 3% driving a Mercedes-Benz. The honest caveat is that this describes first-generation, self-made wealth in the low millions rather than the whole distribution — but within that band the finding is consistent, and it is the single fastest illustration of the pattern.

The useful way to read all of this is not “wealthy people are secretly modest.” It is that consumption above a certain level is a portfolio, and the portfolio rebalances. Categories that deliver status get abandoned once the status stops arriving. Categories that deliver time, health, access or the removal of friction absorb the difference, and they do it through recurring payments that no observer ever sees.

So the more informative question is never what someone stopped buying. It is what the replacement costs — and whether it can ever be cancelled.

---

Related reading: Wealth Levels: Life at $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B · Old Money vs. New Money · Watches · Household Staff · Longevity