Frugal kids have good chance of becoming wealthy adults.

You can usually tell whether children are going to be wealthy or not by the time they are 3 or 4-years-old.

If they take their pocket money and immediately blow it on candies, and the next day ask to borrow a dollar you know you're unlikely to ever get back...let's hope this behavior doesn't last them a lifetime.

Sadly, too often it does.

But if a child is frugal with his pocket money, always putting aside a chunk of it, you can be confident he has a good chance of achieving financial independence as an adult.

And a frugal kid who invest her money in candies to sell to other kids at a profit might become another Warren Buffett.

Live below your means. This is a behavior that both Mr. Buffett and and Mr. George Soros exhibited from an early age.

Their achievement of wealth beyond most people's wildest dreams has not changed those core values.

Once a Swiss art dealer loaned Mr. Soros a Paul Klee painting he could easily afford.

"He loved it, but sent it back saying he could not separate the painting from the figure on its price tag," according to an account.

Some billionaires insist of being driven around in a chauffer-driven limousine.

Not Mr. Soros. He'd grab a taxi, ride a bus, take a tram or simply walk from one part of a town to another. "I always lived on a scale that was more modest than my financial resources."

For Mr. Buffett, thrift isn't just a personal virtue but an integral aspect of his investment method.

He admires managers who "attack cost as vigorously when profits are at record levels as when they are under pressure."

Stories about Mr. Buffett's frugality are legion. One day, he was riding the elevator up to his office and there was a penny on the floor. He reached down and picked it up. To the other stunned passengers in the elevator, he quipped, "The beginning of the next billion."

Excerpted from Mark Tier's book, The Winning Investment Habits Of Warren Buffett and George Soros.