What the Boss Drives
What type of car do you think the average CEO drives? What types and brands come to mind? As reported on BusinessWeek Online on 10/6, a recent survey from CareerBuilder.com and Cars.com found that most people think the typical company leader drives a luxury sports car costing over $70,000. However, when CEOs were asked, they claimed to spend an average of just $25,000 on their primary car and only 19 percent reported driving a luxury car.
Matt's View
One possibility is that the CEOs surveyed were not coming clean with their car buying practices. The boss' car where I used to work, parked prominently in the reserved spot that most employees had to walk past, cost way more than $25,000. The other possibility is that the average CEO lives like The Millionaire Next Door profiled in the excellent book by the same name. Authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that the typical millionaire paid just under $25,000 for their most recently purchased car and 30 percent paid $19,500 or less. While the book was published in 1996, even after factoring in inflation, the wealthy, it seems, spend less on their cars than most people think. Hmm. Maybe there's a connection between building wealth and spending modestly on items that depreciate quickly.
This article filed in: Spending
Managing Money by The Book
- "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" - 2 Corinthians 12:7-9
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