You can always tell who has money and who only wants to look like they have money.
The ones flashing logos, filming “unboxings”, talking loudly about their new car – they’re almost never the real thing. The quiet guy in the slightly faded navy jumper, queuing behind you at Pret with a basic coffee and a Tesco meal deal? He might own half the street.
Once you actually sit down with people who’ve built real wealth – not lottery winners, but slow-burn millionaires – a strange pattern appears. They don’t hate spending. They’re just almost allergic to wasting. They notice every leak in the bucket, every pound that slips away on something that doesn’t genuinely matter to them. And the things they refuse to spend on are rarely the things you’d expect.
Here are nine places where money quietly dies for most of us – and where many millionaires, almost stubbornly, refuse to let it go.
1. Status-symbol cars that drain cash and energy
A wealth manager once told me about a client who could buy a new Porsche every year in cash but still drove a six-year-old Volvo with a crisp packet rattling in the door. Not because he couldn’t afford anything nicer, but because he hated the idea of paying for a “moving billboard of insecurity”. His words, not mine. The car was clean, safe, and boring – exactly how he liked his expenses.
There’s a quiet truth here: the more money people actually have, the less they seem to need their car to prove anything. They’ll pay for safety features, a good service history, maybe an electric model for the fuel savings. They rarely care about the badge. Some even buy second-hand luxury, letting someone else swallow that brutal first-year depreciation, and they talk about it like a small personal victory.
The emotional cost of high monthly payments
We’ve all had that moment when you see a gleaming car on the motorway and think: “Must be nice.” Yet speak to someone with genuine wealth and they’ll tell you what they really see – a rolling monthly commitment. That low-interest finance deal, the relentless insurance, the tyres that cost more than a weekend away. It’s not just money; it’s mental space, a constant background hum of obligation.
Millionaires don’t hate cars. They just refuse to let a vehicle own them. They’d rather drive something modest and feel quietly rich, than drive something flashy and feel permanently trapped by the payments.
2. Brand-new tech that’s basically the same as last year
There’s an odd kind of freedom in watching someone with serious money use a slightly cracked iPhone that’s two generations old. You expect them to be on the cutting edge, yet there they are, swiping away on a phone that would make a teenager roll their eyes. When you ask why, they shrug: “It still works. What’s the point?”
The thing about expensive tech is that the big leap is usually from “bad” to “good”, not from “good” to “slightly better camera in low light”. Millionaires tend to upgrade only when there’s a real difference in their everyday life, not just because the internet says it’s time. The constant cycle of pre-orders, trade-ins and upgrades feels, to them, like a strangely expensive hobby disguised as normal life.
Buying tools, not toys
One self-made software founder told me he has a rule: technology is either a tool that makes him money or it’s a toy he budgets for just like a holiday. No pretending. A laptop that speeds up his work? Tool. A third tablet for the living room “just because”? Toy. Once you admit something is a toy, you naturally spend less on it.
The wealthy people I’ve met will happily pay for reliable, fast, durable gadgets. They just refuse to buy a new phone every year to feel current. *Once you stop arranging your life around launch dates, there’s a surprising sense of calm.*
3. Overpriced “aspirational” housing
There’s a special kind of pressure that comes with house hunting, especially in the UK. You walk into a shiny show home, you smell the fresh paint and fake baking bread, and suddenly your current place feels like a storage unit. Estate agents talk about “stretching yourself” like it’s a character-building exercise. Millionaires hear that phrase and mentally walk out of the room.
People with real money are often deeply wary of being “house poor”. On paper, they could live in something huge with a sweeping driveway. On a spreadsheet, they see the maintenance, the council tax, the heating, the repairs, the never-ending list of “we really should fix that”. Many choose a home that’s comfortable and slightly under their means, not one that impresses the neighbours.
Space that works, not just space that wows
There’s a lovely ordinariness to the homes of many millionaires. Not always, of course – some do go full footballer. But the quiet ones tend to focus on function: decent location, good insulation, solid roof, enough space, not maximum space. The guest bedroom that never gets used, the formal dining room that sees Christmas twice a decade – they see all of that as wasted square footage they’re paying for every single month.
Let’s be honest: no one really lounges in the “gallery landing” they paid an extra £70,000 for. Millionaires are often allergic to paying for show-home features that exist purely to photograph well on Rightmove.
4. Constantly eating out for convenience, not joy
There’s a big difference between a beautiful dinner out that you remember for years and a £28 Deliveroo that arrives lukewarm on a Tuesday night because you couldn’t be bothered to cook pasta. Most of us blur those lines. Many millionaires don’t. They still eat out, of course, but they’re strangely precise about why.
They’ll happily spend on a special meal with people they care about, or a place that genuinely excites them. What they avoid is the slow leak of bland, automatic food spending: the coffee they didn’t really want, the takeaway that could easily have been a ten-minute stir-fry, the overpriced airport sandwiches bought out of boredom. They’re not trying to deprive themselves; they’re just awake to the fact that these “little treats” quietly snowball.
The quiet power of a basic kitchen habit
One millionaire I spoke to swears his wealth began with learning to cook three simple meals really well. Nothing fancy, just tasty, repeatable, cheap. Spaghetti with a proper sauce, a roast chicken that became soup the next day, a big vegetable curry he could freeze. With that sorted, he stopped panic-ordering food every time he was tired.
What sounds small becomes enormous when you repeat it over a decade. He joked that his net worth was built on saying no to lukewarm takeaway chips he didn’t even enjoy. There’s something weirdly grounding in that.
5. Trend-chasing wardrobes and logo-loud fashion
Open the wardrobe of many rich people and you’ll find… boredom. Good, thick cotton T-shirts, the same jeans in three colours, one well-cut coat, shoes that have been repaired more than once. They aren’t trying to look poor; they just don’t want to re-buy their personality every season.
The big logo thing is especially telling. When you’re still climbing, it feels good to flash proof you’ve “made it”. Once you genuinely have, it starts to feel like wearing the receipt on your chest. Millionaires often move towards quiet luxury: quality stitching, neutral colours, fabrics that feel good against their skin instead of shouting the brand name from across the street.
Clothes as uniforms, not costumes
A lot of wealthy people think in terms of uniforms: a small rotation of outfits they know they like, that fit and feel like them. It saves time, mental energy, and accidental splurges. They’d rather own one jacket they truly love and wear for ten years than seven cheap ones that fall apart and never sit quite right.
There’s a deeper thing happening there. When clothes stop being your main way to signal “I’m successful”, you free up a surprising amount of mental bandwidth to actually be successful.
6. Endless subscriptions they forgot they had
The world has quietly shifted from “buy this once” to “subscribe forever”. Streaming platforms, fitness apps, cloud storage, online newspapers, meal kits, digital planners. Most of us sign up, use them for three weeks, then let them gnaw away at our bank accounts like mice in the skirting boards.
Many millionaires treat subscriptions like recurring leaks. Once a quarter, they go through them line by line and ask: “Did this really earn its place in my life?” If the answer is no, it’s gone. They can absolutely afford the extra £9.99 a month. That’s not the point. The point is refusing to sleepwalk through expenses.
One investor described it perfectly: “Every direct debit is money I pay for a decision I made in the past. I want to be very sure past-me was thinking clearly.” It sounds extreme. It’s actually just awake.
7. Fancy versions of boring utilities
Energy companies, broadband providers, insurance firms – they know we’re tired. They know we don’t want to spend our Sunday afternoon comparing tariffs and haggling on the phone. So they quietly slide up the prices and throw in words like “premium” and “gold” to sweeten the pill. Millionaires often approach this world with an almost cold detachment.
They’re not loyal to providers. They’re loyal to maths. If the cover is the same and the price is lower, they switch. If the broadband is fast enough, they don’t pay extra for a speed they’ll never notice. If a deal has lots of “free” perks they’d never use, they ignore the noise and look at the final monthly figure.
There’s nothing glamorous about this. No one brags at dinner about getting £14 off their car insurance. But this mindset – caring about the unsexy numbers – is quietly where a lot of wealth is protected.
8. High-interest debt for things that don’t grow
The quickest way to stress, even on a decent income, is debt that grows faster than you can pay it off. Store cards, buy-now-pay-later deals, overdrafts that promise “flexibility” then punish you for using it. Millionaires are not magically immune to these traps – some of them fell into them earlier in life. That’s often exactly why they avoid them now with almost religious intensity.
They’re not scared of all debt. They’ll use a mortgage, or maybe a business loan, where the thing they’re buying has a decent chance of growing in value. What they avoid is borrowing for stuff that starts dying the minute you walk out of the shop: clothes, gadgets, nights out. Interest on those feels like a tax on impatience.
One woman who built a property portfolio from scratch told me she still hears the beep of the cashier’s scanner from the years she spent buying clothes on credit. “Every beep was future me getting poorer,” she said. She hasn’t carried a balance on a card since.
9. Impressing people they don’t actually like
This last one isn’t on any bank statement, yet it might be the biggest money-saver of all. So many of our expenses are really about other people. The wedding gift that’s far above what we can afford, the big night out we don’t enjoy but feel guilty skipping, the designer item bought for that one particular reunion. Millionaires do join in, but they’re oddly selective.
They spend very freely on the people who really matter to them: family, close friends, someone going through a rough patch. They’ll quietly cover a bill, fund a trip, send an expensive present if they know it’ll genuinely mean something. What they don’t do is bleed money trying to impress the outer circle – the colleagues they don’t respect, the school-gate competitors, the Instagram audience who barely know them.
There’s a moment many wealthy people talk about when you ask what actually changed once they had money. It’s not the cars or the houses. It’s the calm of not needing a stranger’s approval anymore. Once that pressure fades, a lot of expensive habits suddenly look very strange.
The quiet pattern behind all nine
Look closely at these nine money “no-go zones” and a pattern appears. Millionaires aren’t tight-fisted misers, sitting in the dark eating beans. They’re just laser-focused on this question: “Does this genuinely improve my life, or is it just numbing a feeling or filling a silence?”
They say no to status cars so they can say yes to real freedom. They skip the constant phone upgrades so they can invest in work they care about. They cook boring pasta tonight so they can afford a week away with their kids next year and actually relax. They cut the subscriptions, the upgrade plans, the fake luxuries – and then splurge hard when it’s on something that actually moves the needle for their happiness.
Maybe that’s the surprising thing about millionaires’ spending habits. It’s not that they never waste money. They’re human. They just waste far less on things they don’t truly care about – which quietly leaves far more for the things they really do.
