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Ingvar Kamprad died on January 27, 2018. All claims about his frugal lifestyle were accurate during his lifetime, but the fact is written in present tense.
Despite being one of the top 10 richest men in the world, Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) lives in a small home, eats at IKEA, and uses the bus.
IKEA's Billionaire Founder Lived Like He Shopped There
When Ingvar Kamprad died in 2018, he was the eighth-richest person on Earth with a fortune estimated at $58.7 billion. Yet this Swedish billionaire lived a life that would make extreme couponers look extravagant. The man who built IKEA into the world's largest furniture seller drove a 1993 Volvo for two decades, flew economy class, and was once refused entry to his own Businessman of the Year Award because he arrived by public bus.
This wasn't a publicity stunt or late-life penny-pinching. Kamprad's frugality was genuine, consistent, and borderline obsessive. He assembled his own IKEA furniture in his modest Swiss bungalow. He bought clothes at flea markets. He got haircuts in developing countries when traveling because they were cheaper. And yes, he recycled tea bags and pocketed salt packets from restaurants.
The Philosophy Behind the Parsimony
For Kamprad, frugality wasn't about deprivation—it was ideology. He famously told employees to "use both sides of the page" when writing or printing. He believed waste was the enemy of good business, and he practiced what he preached. His personal habits mirrored IKEA's entire business model: eliminate waste, maximize value, keep it simple.
This mindset created one of history's great ironies. Kamprad became spectacularly wealthy by selling affordable furniture to regular people, then lived exactly like his customers. He didn't just eat at IKEA—he genuinely preferred the Swedish meatballs. His 1993 Volvo 240 GL wasn't a collector's item; it was just reliable transportation that still worked fine.
When Frugality Becomes Philosophy
The numbers behind Kamprad's wealth were staggering and complicated. Forbes once estimated his fortune at $33 billion in 2007, making him the fourth-richest person alive. By 2015, Bloomberg put him at $58.7 billion. But these estimates fluctuated wildly because of IKEA's Byzantine ownership structure—Kamprad had transferred ownership to a foundation whose bylaws prevented him and his family from directly benefiting from the funds.
In other words, he was technically worth tens of billions while simultaneously unable to access most of it. Not that he seemed to want to. Even when he could have afforded anything, he chose economy flights and budget hotels. When asked about staying at expensive hotels, he reportedly said: "Why would I? I'm very comfortable in economy."
The Legacy of Living Small
Kamprad worked until his final days, serving as a "senior advisor" after stepping back from operations in 1988. He died peacefully in his sleep from pneumonia on January 27, 2018, at age 91, in Småland, Sweden—the same region where he founded IKEA in 1943 at just 17 years old.
His children didn't inherit a massive fortune in the traditional sense. True to form, Kamprad had structured his wealth to benefit the company itself, once explaining: "Everything we earn we need as a reserve." Even his $58.7 billion was, in his mind, working capital for IKEA's future, not a family inheritance.
The man who democratized furniture design spent his life proving that wealth doesn't require waste. He built a global empire on efficiency, then lived that efficiency every single day—bus pass, recycled tea bags, and all. Not because he had to, but because he genuinely believed it was the right way to live.