Basic Trope: A wealthy person chooses to live below his or her means.
- Straight: Alice wins the lottery. Instead of buying a mansion, she buys a modest 3-bed-2-bath ranch-style house.
- Exaggerated: Alice wins the lottery. Instead of buying a house, she moves back in with her parents.
- Downplayed:
- Even though Alice and Bob both earn six figures a year, they opt for a small and simple wedding at a local park instead of a big and opulent wedding at a banquet hall.
- Alice is a billionaire who lives an upper middle class lifestyle, feeling that going beyond a certain point is just gratuitous waste.
- Justified:
- Alice wants to save the money, so that she doesn't run out like so many other lotto winners she's heard about.
- Alice prefers the simpler things in life.
- Alice knows A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted and so decides not to waste her wealth on things she doesn't need.
- Alice grew up poor, and old habits die hard, even when penny-pinching is no longer a necessity for basic survival.
- Alice doesn't want people hounding or harassing her, or stalking her, or robbing her, or killing her, because they know (or assume) that she has money.
- Alice wants her children to not grow up spoiled.
- Alice uses most of her money for investments which are illiquid (not easy to convert into cash) and thus not easy for her to access on a whim.
- Inverted:
- Alice wins the lottery. She proceeds to buy a mansion, a second mansion (you know, for the vacation home!), two boats, a new wardrobe full of designer clothes, a purebred dog, an extremely lavish wedding (and a designer Fairytale Wedding Dress to go with it), fur coats, and a luxury car for every day of the week.
- Alice works a low wage retail job and rarely ever has more than a couple hundred dollars in the bank at a time, but with the use of credit cards, loans, and the occasional gift from loved ones, she lives a lifestyle way more costly than she could otherwise afford.
- Subverted:
- Alice makes a large donation to charity.
- Alice uses the money to buy a whole condo complex.
- Alice spends large sums of money to help her impoverished community.
- Alice does move back in with her parents not long after winning the lottery, but it's to take care of her sick mother and help her father out at home.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice donates more than half the money to the charity, and puts the rest away in savings.
- So she can move her family and friends in with her. And she still has money left over.
- She doesn't spend much, if anything, on herself.
- She puts most of her money in savings, and doesn't bother upgrading her wardrobe, going out, etc., instead focusing on taking care of her family.
- Parodied: Alice wins the lottery. She upgrades from a cardboard box on the street to...a larger cardboard box on the street.
- Zig Zagged: Alice buys some luxury items, and some more mundane stuff.
- Averted: Alice is poor, and stays poor the whole time.
- Enforced: The author doesn't want to have Alice's new wealth upset the overall social dynamic of the work, yet also doesn't want to throw away some useful aspects of not having to worry about answering the question of "where does Alice get that money from?" if it's needed, like for a life-saving surgery.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Alice wins the lottery, but then she remembers what happened to her friend Bob last year. She doesn't want that to happen to her.
- Exploited: Alice doesn't want people hounding her, so she keeps the news that she's won the lottery quiet (either she requests to be kept anonymous, or has the money put into a trust or an LLC), and she doesn't buy or flaunt expensive things.
- Defied: Alice decides that life is short, and as long as she's got money to burn, there's no reason not to spend it on the finer things!
- Discussed: "Alice, you know you don't have to live like a pauper now that you have that money, right?"
- Conversed: "She has more money than God! Why doesn't she splurge it on a mansion or a fancy car or something?"
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