Many people think millionaires spend their free time drinking champagne, driving fast cars, or sailing.
Wealthy people get a lot of media attention, but little is known about their everyday lives.
They looked at how millionaires manage their time compared to others. The researchers wanted to know if millionaires work differently and what they do in their free time.
The scientists wanted to find out something very specific, so they did this.
There were two things shown in earlier studies. There is a stable relationship between wealth and life satisfaction. The richer, the happier. At first, this sounds logical.
People who give priority to money are less satisfied with their lives than people who give priority to time.
What millionaires do with their time seems to be important to their happiness.
Paul Smeets and his colleagues surveyed a group of Dutch millionaires who had an average of over $2 million in assets.
They gave them the same questionnaire as 1,232 others, and they were selected to represent the Dutch population with an average wealth of $36,000.
All participants were asked to indicate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, and how much time they spent free over the last day.
The researchers distinguished between active leisure, which included sports, meeting friends, hobbies, and volunteer work, and passive leisure, which included things like watching TV, resting, sleeping, and doing nothing.
There werecessities like looking after children, cooking, shopping, and housework. The other categories were eating and work.
The millionaires spent their time in the same way as everyone else. Like other people, they worked a lot and had long commute times. They said they spent 30% of their day working, compared to 25% for everyone else.
There were only a few differences.
The millionaires spent the same amount of time shopping and cooking as other people, but they spent less time with their children and chores around the house.
Major differences were discovered when it came to leisure activities.
The groups spent a lot of time on leisure activities.
The non-millionaires preferred to lie on the couch, watch TV, or scroll through social media.
The millionaires spent most of their time working. 22% of their time was spent moving around, playing sports, or doing volunteer work. Just under 16% of the others' time was spent actively.
The millionaires spent 29 minutes, or a half hour, more active than everyone else. 19 minutes was spent on sports and exercise alone.
The rich were more satisfied with their lives than everyone else.
The researchers were able to show that life satisfaction was related to active leisure activities.
The more active a person was, the better their life was. And vice versa.
The more passive someone is, the less satisfied they are. The researchers said that this applied to everyone regardless of their money.
The biggest difference between the millionaires and the others was that they spent more time actively.
According to the scientists, the money probably didn't do any harm, but it didn't help either.
It is possible that the wealth of the millionaires shaped the way they thought about and planned their time, according to the researchers.
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