As the saying goes, watch the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. But as it turns out, even some of the wealthiest people on the planet follow the money-saving mantra, well after they’ve made it. IKEA’s billionaire founder, Ingvar Kamprad, took his love for budget furniture home with him—literally.
“I don’t think I’m wearing anything that wasn’t bought at a flea market,” Kamprad said in a 2016 documentary on Sweden’s TV4. “I want to set a good example.”
Kamprad could have bought himself anything. But like many average Joes, he’d sneak home little packets of salt and pepper from restaurant visits.
He once revealed to the newspaper Sydsvenskan that the €22 haircut price in the Netherlands was above budget and that he’d usually get it done while visiting “a developing country.”
“Last time it was in Vietnam,” Kamprad added.
And although he certainly no longer needed the cash, he kept working at Ikea until he was 87, before passing away in 2018 at 91.
When you look among the ultra-wealthy, many opt out of wasting their money on status symbols that drain rather than build wealth.
“The Hendersons and the Perdues did not encourage extravagance,” Perdue previously told Fortune. “Nobody wins points for wearing designer clothes.”
Perhaps most famously, legendary investor Warren Buffett has long adopted a frugal lifestyle: he never spends more than $3.17 on breakfast, he lives in the same house he bought for $31,500 in 1958, and he drives a car that’s over 20 years old.
The man worth $144 billion is often quoted for saying: “I’m not interested in cars, and my goal is not to make people envious. Don’t confuse the cost of living with the standard of living.”
Kamprad long insisted that his penny-pinching ways were just down to his upbringing in Sweden. “It’s in the nature of a Smaland to be thrifty,” he said in the same TV4 interview.
Småland is the rural province in southern Sweden where Kamprad grew up and, with a “local ethos,” built IKEA at just 17 years old in 1943. In the company’s employee guidelines, Kamprad stressed that “wasting resources is a mortal sin at IKEA.”
“We have Småland in the blood, and we know what a krona is—even though it is not as much as it was when we bought candy and went to elementary school,” he said, referring to the Swedish currency.
It’s a complicated legacy to sit with. But Ikea has outlived its founder, with frugality a part of its DNA. Being simple, efficient, and affordable is what has kept it such a huge success decades later.
Today, Ikea has 504 stores across 63 countries worldwide. Last year alone, it generated around $50 billion in sales and welcomed 915 million visitors.
