Warren Buffett: Breakfast at McDonald’s, flip phone for calls; how 6th richest person spends his fortune

Despite being among the richest people on Earth, Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett lives quite a frugal life when one looks at the lifestyle of other billionaires. Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO and the sixth richest person in the world with a net worth of $78.4 billion as of August 23, 2020, on Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Buffett owns no mega-mansions, supercars, and yachts. He is among the very few super-rich who neither believe in living life king size nor engage in a splendid display of wealth.

For instance, his breakfast is at McDonald’s every day for which he spends no more than $3.17 each time, CNBC reported. His phone until February this year was a $20 Samsung SCH-U320 flip phone that he used for years despite owning around 5.9 per cent of a company like Apple. However, the phone he upgraded to was an iPhone 11. “You’re looking at an 89-year-old guy who’s barely beginning to get with it,” Buffett told the CNBC in February admitting that he mostly uses it for Phone calls instead of “all its facilities like most people.”

For the house he lives in, he spent just $31,500 in 1958, which now according to Wealth-X, as per the report, is worth around $1 million. The house has five bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. Back in 2012, Buffett had said that he “never had any great desire to have multiple houses and all kinds of things and multiple cars.” However, he did buy a house with six-bedroom, seven bathrooms, and multiple balconies for $150k in 1971 which he sold for $7.5 million in 2018.

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His car was a 2006 Cadillac DTS from which he upgraded to around $46,000 luxury sedan Cadillac XTS in 2014. This happened after his daughter Susie convinced him it was “embarrassing” to be driving an older car. Importantly, Buffett choice for Cadillac cars likely comes from Berkshire Hathaway’s 5.2 per cent stake in the brand’s parent company General Motors. Apart from cars, Buffett had earlier said that one of the luxury things he owns was a private jet as it helped him save a lot of travel time. The jet was the “only thing that I do that costs a lot of money,” he had said back in 2012.