Tom Corley is the author of the Rich Habits Study, “Rich Habits”, Rich Kids”, “Effort-Less Wealth”, “Change Your Habits Change Your Life”, “Rich Habits Poor Habits”, and “Rich Habits Wealth Academy”. Tom is also a CPA, CFP®, and has a Masters in Taxation.
I spent five years sitting across from 233 wealthy people (177 of them self-made) and 128 people living in poverty. I asked each of them the same 144 questions about how they spent every hour of their day—from the moment their feet hit the floor in the morning until their head hit the pillow at night. I expected the usual explanations for the wealth gap: better schools, family money, connections, or pure luck.
What I found instead was far more uncomfortable.
The single biggest difference between the two groups was not starting capital, education, or inheritance. It was the daily habits each group repeated, almost mindlessly, year after year.
And where did most of those habits come from?
From their parents.
- 68% of the self-made millionaires in my study said they picked up most of their good habits from their parents.
- 94% of the poor said they picked up most of their bad habits from their parents.
- 74 percent of the self-made millionaires specifically credited their parents with teaching them the success habits that helped them become wealthy.
Parents are not a side factor. They are the primary factory of adult outcomes.
A Brown University study of 50,000 families by Dr. Pressman found that most of our adult habits are forged by age nine. During those formative years, parents are the dominant influence.
Habits spread like a virus through social networks—research from Yale’s Nicholas Christakis confirms this. Children spend most of their early lives watching, listening to, and imitating the people who raise them. If those people model poor habits, the children absorb them. If they model rich habits, the children absorb those instead.
The differences were stark and specific.
- 63% of the self-made millionaires were required by their parents to read to learn—two or more books a month on history, biographies, science, or self-improvement.
- 97% of the poor were not.
- 6 percent of the wealthy played the lottery.
- 77 percent of the poor played it every week.
- The self-made were taught that they alone create their financial circumstances. The poor were taught that forces outside their control—rich people, the government, bad luck, the system—dictated their lives.
- 82% of the poor believed their poverty was caused by external factors.
- 79 percent of the wealthy believed the opposite.
Many of the self-made millionaires did not come from wealth.
Forty-one percent grew up poor. Their parents were often poor or middle-class themselves, but at some point those parents figured out what to do and what not to do. They refused to pass on the same mistakes. They became success mentors for their kids:
- They required work for the things their children wanted.
- They limited television.
- They taught that pursuing wealth was a good thing, not something to resent.
- They enforced accountability instead of excuses.
The poor in my study, by contrast, were far more likely to come from broken homes, absentee parents, or households that modeled dependence, victimhood, and poor money habits. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, and chronic financial chaos were common.
Children in these environments did not receive the daily mentorship that turns habits into automatic success. Single-parent households, in particular, create a structural disadvantage: one parent often works long hours just to survive, leaving little time to teach reading, saving, goal-setting, or delayed gratification.
We do not have a wealth gap in this country. We have a parent gap.
Parents cause poverty.
Parents are to blame for the habits that either build wealth or lock people into poverty.
This is not a popular statement. It offends people who prefer to blame systems, politicians, or the rich. But the data from my study, and the supporting research on how habits form and spread, does not care about popularity or the opinions of social justice warriors.
The cycle is not unbreakable. Generational poverty does not have to happen.
Parents who change their own habits can change the trajectory of the adult lives of their children.
That is why I wrote Rich Kids—to document the specific habits self-made millionaires learned from their parents, so other parents can teach them these same life-changing habits.
The truth is uncomfortable precisely because it places the responsibility where it belongs: with the people who shape the first nine years of a child’s life. Until more parents accept their role as success mentors to their children, rather than bystanders or models of failure, the parent gap will continue to produce the wealth gap.
