There’s a persistent idea that you can read someone’s bank balance off their dinner plate, that ordering carefully or skipping the expensive bottle of wine gives something away. The actual data on who eats out complicates that idea before it even gets started. According to a September 2025 analysis by the National Restaurant Association, using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics spending data, households earning $100,000 or more account for nearly six of every ten dollars spent in American restaurants, despite making up only 43 percent of all households. Eating out, as a category, is disproportionately something higher earners do. Modest or careful dining isn’t a poverty signal on its own, because plenty of people who eat modestly aren’t poor at all.
The more interesting research question isn’t whether people eat out, but what kind of spending actually tracks with real wealth once you look past appearances. Thomas Stanley and William Danko spent years surveying and interviewing people with a net worth of a million dollars or more for their book The Millionaire Next Door, first published in 1996. It’s a work of popular nonfiction built on real survey data rather than a peer-reviewed academic study, so it’s worth reading as a large, carefully gathered body of self-reported financial behavior rather than an experiment, and it has drawn academic criticism of its own, notably from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who argued the sample suffered from survivorship bias by only studying people who’d successfully accumulated wealth rather than everyone who tried the same frugal approach. With that caveat in mind, what Stanley and Danko found, consistently, was that most of their millionaire respondents lived well below what their wealth could support. Modest cars, modest homes relative to their means, and a general reluctance to spend in ways that announced their net worth to onlookers. They called this pattern stealth wealth: people whose spending gives away almost nothing about what they actually have.
A separate, more rigorous strand of economics research helps explain why the opposite pattern, spending that’s meant to be seen, tends to correlate with financial strain rather than financial strength. Economists Sheheryar Banuri and Ha Nguyen designed a controlled lab experiment, published as a World Bank working paper in 2020 and later in an expanded form in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in 2023, to test what happens when spending becomes visible to other people rather than private. They found that making consumption observable increased how much people borrowed to fund it, and that increase in costly borrowing was concentrated specifically among participants with less money to begin with. In their design, status-driven spending didn’t reflect existing financial strength so much as it pulled people, especially people with the least room to absorb it, toward debt they wouldn’t otherwise have taken on.
Put the two threads together and the common assumption gets closer to backward than sideways. Highly visible, status-signaling spending, whether that shows up as an ostentatious restaurant order, a car, or clothing meant to be noticed, is the pattern with a documented link to debt, not wealth. Quiet, modest spending, the kind that gives an onlooker nothing to react to, is the pattern that shows up more often among people who have actually accumulated significant net worth. Neither piece of research claims the reverse rule holds either, that everyone who eats modestly must be secretly rich, or that everyone who orders the expensive entree is in debt. Individual meals are far too small a sample to diagnose anyone’s finances, and both studies are describing patterns across large groups, not making predictions about any one person’s dinner choice.
What the research does undercut pretty directly is the confidence behind judging someone’s financial situation by what’s on their plate or how carefully they order. The visible, easy-to-notice version of spending turns out to be a weaker signal of wealth than the invisible, easy-to-miss version, precisely because the behavior most likely to be interpreted as a sign of having money is, according to this research, more often a sign of trying to make it look that way.