Living outside Jackson Hole, This sister of a friend told me how hard it is to live there. You have to fly in your help (cleaning, yard work) from Salt Lake. I had no words.
That's still the norm in a lot of places where people having maids/nanny's is more common. I live in Thailand and if you have a full time 5-6 days a week maid usually they would be live-in. Most large houses (4 bed+) will have a maids room built in where they live. Then they essentially stay with you and integrate into the family somewhat. I imagine it would be similar in the US, but people are probably too privacy minded and do not want someone in their house all the time.
I went to the US for a year as part of a HS exchange in the early 00s and my host family was quite wealthy. They had three live-in maids that took care of the cleaning, cooking etc. that had their own rooms (that were off-limits for the children). So apparently it does happen. The family had a Mexican-American Background though so might've been a cultural thing.
Best part of the book is him describing how the wealthy think their literal servants are friends, and the serving class is like “I really wanna say fuck these people but they pay me to barely survive. No we aren’t friends lol.”
If they want a servant to be a friend then they need to pay their servant what Bruce Wayne pays Alfred Pennyworth.
Alfred is there 26 hours a day, 8 days a week, and he is extraordinarily well compensated. He's effectively a billionaire butler, he's running the place.
Also note that Bruce never talks to Alfred like an employer. He talks to him like family. Alfred is treated with only the highest standards of respect and Brice knows that he *needs* Alfred infinitely more than the inverse. Alfred sticks around because he sees Bruce as his own adopted son and sees that without guidance, Bruce would become no different to the monsters he hunts. Alfred is Bruce's conscience, his carer, his confidant, and his mother. Alfred is the crutch which keeps Bruce standing so that Batman can fly.
There is a black and white, olde worlde movie about a rich family that is shipwrecked on an island. The butler displays the leadership skills that keeps them all alive while they wait for help, and then they have to resume their previous societal roles when they are rescued and return to England. Very interesting plot.
Back when I was in my early 20's my beat up old car broke down in my job's parking lot when I was about to drive home. I was getting paid $10 an hour as a pastry chef at a catering company. This was barely enough to cover my rent. I was obviously pretty distraught over my car dying. My boss (company owner) ended up saying to me- 'Why are you so upset? It's just a car! Just buy another one!" I couldn't even respond, I just looked at her like she was crazy.
They have often been separated from financial anxiety long enough to lose their bearing on the cost of things vs salary.
I had a boss once who was almost zealous about the need for everyone to be at work whenever a snowstorm hit. He kind of saw it as the key battle in a war over productivity.
I had to pull him aside after he told an intern working half time for basically minimum wage that she should simply buy a car that can get through the snow so she can be at work in any weather event. Said it in front of the entire staff, and looked like a moron for doing so.
Once you accumulate some wealth (not even a lot, just enough to push the wolf away from the door for good) you just don’t think about things like “what if my car broke down tomorrow?” Life’s day to day problems just kind of become less consequential and you can focus your energy elsewhere. Problem? Make it go away with a little money.
Most people are extraordinarily myopic. That’s how THEY would deal with the problem, why shouldn’t that work for everyone else?
>I had a boss once who was almost zealous about the need for everyone to be at work whenever a snowstorm hit.
God, this just reminded me of when I worked at a pet store. It was a local chain in a city with loads of hills and not used to snow and ice. Well, snow hit one year. Roads were icy but most of us at least at my store could make it. So staff went in where we all had an email from the owner saying she wanted to keep the office workers safe in the icy conditions, so the office was closed that day if we needed anything, but every pet store had to be up and running (meaning too dangerous for them to commute, but apparently not too dangerous for us). The one store out closer to the mountains was completely snowed off. They asked if they could keep the store closed for safety, too, because no one could even get to it.
The response? No. Get to it as soon as you are able, try to not open the store more than a couple hours late.
Nerver felt so effing poorly valued to see in the same email chain the owner outright say she was protecting the office workers but fuck the retail workers.
They think it's a *fair* wage because they don't have to think about what things actually cost
When I first started making good money I really didn't keep track of what things cost at the grocery store, I was mostly just grabbing what I wanted to eat that week. I'm a little more frugal now and check the sales somewhat regularly
I hear this kind of thing so often on Reddit, it’s mind-blowing. “Just hire a nanny” “just hire a doula, oh and make sure to hire a backup just in case” “just hire a night nanny a couple nights a week”. Like yeah, you’re right, this parenting thing would be way easier if I could just hire a series of people to do it for me!
Granted at least one of them elaborated they weren’t from the US and anyone in their country rich enough to own a computer had hired help, but that’s mind blowing in its own way.
to be fair, in a lot of areas, it is literally cheaper to hire a full time au pair ($20K/year, though you have to own a home and have a room to spare) than to send two kids to daycare full time ($15K+ each—yes, really). It’s genuinely unbelievable how much childcare costs have gone up in the last five years. Daycare used to be the budget option for working families that didn’t have grandparents/aunts/etc to help. Now it’s more expensive than the “rich people” option.
And people wonder why the birth rate is so low!
Edit: forgot to mention the other consequence of this—for families where daycare is more expensive than mom’s wage, mom usually ends up having to be a SAHM, which has consequences down the line for the types of jobs she can get when trying to rejoin the workforce (and overall has a very detrimental effect on lifetime earnings). It sucks a LOT to try and raise a family in America.
My husband and I are working opposite shifts to avoid having to pay for daycare. One of my colleagues is doing the same thing. She describes it as "hot-racking with her husband," because they're never in bed together, asleep, at the same time.
Hot-racking being, basically, 30 guys on a boat with 10 beds who're each getting their 8 hours one after another on such a tight schedule that the damn rack's still hot when you climb into it.
And it's accurate, too; five nights a week, my going to bed routine involves a few minutes of "get up, you're late for work" as I kick my husband out.
I occasionally drive minibuses for a private school in the UK, have overheard some very privileged conversations from the students but one that sticks out is: A tutor on the bus asked a student what he says when other students make comments about the very expensive watches he wears to school, to which he said his response is “my dad has the same 24hours as your dad”. He then proceeded to go on about how his dad inherited a massive entertainment chain and various hugely successful companies from his grandfather.
"It's just so easy to just drop a grand at Target, y'know?" -my Starbucks coworker in Calabasas (Kardashian-land), after he spent $983 on toys for his 4 yr old nephew's birthday.
I don't know why he worked at Starbucks except maybe his rich family finally forced him to get a job?
I knew someone who grew up on an island full of rich twats (he refuses to visit it even though his wife really wanted to) who were all working part time at coffee shops or the moral equivalent because it was the bare minimum to satisfy the terms of their trust funds.
> I don't know why he worked at Starbucks except maybe his rich family finally forced him to get a job?
I worked with one of these guys once.
He lived in a luxury apartment, that his parents owned, in the most expensive part of London, and they made him get a job to stay there.
Not pay rent or anything, (they also paid for anything he wanted), he just had to have a job.
He was an absolute fucking twat.
Being told by a guy who has not worked a day in his life and living off of inherited money that poor people are poor because they don't invest their money right.
They have to say that to themselves to justify their existence. If they faced reality they would be living with existential dread 24/7. Some people sort of go through life in denial, kind of like being a little bit drunk all the time.... can't enjoy yourself thinking about how bad some people have it. Like we all do to some extent, but rich people do it really well and have lots more rationales than you or I do.
I saw a brilliant reply to a tweet once that I’ve used every time this situation arises. Some girl tweeted about how much she saved by cutting out coffee and this guy replied
“I’ve studied the habits of millionaires, and while cutting back on small expenses is a good start to building wealth, consider supplementing your income with massive financial fraud”
Credit to the author: https://x.com/macmaniacs/status/1762847347569299658
Roy Scott - you deserve to go viral
I was an assistant making just over 50k a year and i heard someone on the board of directors say, "of course he [mayor of a city] stole the money. You can't live on 90k a year!".
During the pandemic, senior management held company wide calls about mental health and wellbeing. One piece of advice always stuck with me. They suggest to stop the tedium of working in the same space, to move your desk to another room in your house. I had a choice between facing different walls
I work in mental health and the director of the mental health department suggested we all “spend time in our gardens or work out in your home gym”. She lives in a 2.8m house while her staff mostly live in 1bdrm apartments.
"When you're really stressed, just drop what you're doing for a while and go outside to get some sun by your pool. If you're feeling crazy, get Maria or Lupe or whoever your maid is to bring you a margarita!"
My boss was the same. “Find a dedicated space that is only for work.” “Get dressed up to work from home.” “Keep your regular hours.” Sorry, dude - daycare is closed, so I’m trying to take care of a baby and a toddler during regular office hours. I’m going to wear a tshirt covered in spit-up all day.
The dedicated space that is only for work actually did help me stay saner, though. I had a tiny apartment during the pandemic and working on my couch or in my bedroom was starting to weigh on me. The only unused space was this little corner of my kitchen but I made it cute. I bought this desk that attaches to the wall and folds up into a cabinet out of the way when you aren't using it, put a curtain up to give visual separation from the small kitchen table that was a foot away, and added a wall sconce. For a couple hundred bucks (that I was fortunate enough to be able to spare) I suddenly had somewhere that was more conducive to working.
I work in my bedroom so I can use my PC and my work laptop simultaneously. That one thing has saved my sanity more than anything else, just being able to watch youtube while I work or browse reddit when I have some downtime is a life saver. I just can't sit in an office all day with no stimulation but work, it drives me loco.
A rich person once said to me, "Why don’t you just buy a second house for your vacation getaways?" As if owning one house wasn’t already a huge financial stretch!
"How could your family accountant let that happen?"
When talking about how growing up, we couldn't pay the bills and had our water/electricity shut off multiple times.
Mine is a story my dad likes to tell about the first parent meeting at my college orientation. The school spent 20 minutes talking about tuition payment plans. then the mom of a kid I’d met earlier in the day raised her hand and asked, in genuine confusion, as if everyone else in the room was stupid:
“why would anyone bother with all that when you could just write one check for the entire year?”
I've told this before but my boss was trying to stop me from taking one or two days off at a time because their accountant was complaining about the extra work or whatever. I explained I was using the days to take a Saturday and Sunday off here and there to visit my family for birthdays or whatever.
She responded "wouldn't you rather take a whole week off so you can fly somewhere warm??"
I just stared at her and said "I make minimum wage. How am I supposed to pay for that?" She had no answer.
Was the accountant working extra to cover for you when you were gone, or was it the fact they had to adjust your payroll to account for the time off?
If it was the latter, sounds like a shitty accountant.
Basically it was extra paperwork for them because they were banking our vacation instead of paying out so it was more work for them if employees were taking a lot more smaller groups of days off.
The accountant was doing our books as a side gig and the owners really pushed back on paying them more for their time so the accountant then pushed back and said they would only dedicate a set amount of hours. So the bosses tried to find ways to cut down on the accountant's work.
I was talking to the owner of the building my old work/clinic was in. He was taking his wife back to Germany on vacation for the third or forth time that year. I mentioned how jealous I was. He told me that the only way I was going to go was to "just do it." He said that too many people wait for the right timing and don't just take themselves traveling.
I was making ~$55K/year at the time, the single earner for a family of three with a toddler. Rent was about 40% of my income.
My high school had some trips abroad that kids could do with other students and teachers. One girl was talking about the trip, and I said I wished I could afford to go. She said something about prioritizing… I was 16-17 and living with a single mom and her retired boyfriend. I babysat but didn’t make enough for a trip to Europe.
Drives me nuts hearing people talk about how it’s so important to travel when you’re young and to just “do it.” I was making less than $15 an hour and much of that was getting swallowed up by rent when I was in my 20s. It’s just such an incredibly ignorant and arrogant thing to say but you see it all the time on here.
A coworker asked me what bank I used for my safe deposit box. I said I didn't have a safe deposit box. She said "But where do you keep your jewels, then?"
Edit: I said I didn't have any jewels and she just said "huh" and changed the subject. I actually get the sentiment (if I owned anything expensive, I would probably also have a safe place for it), but something about it made her sound like a Disney villain even though she was a very nice person. It's a very vivid random memory, thanks OP!
Not always. Safe deposit boxes were very normal for people once upon a time. My poor grandparents had one and kept everything of value in it, including the little jewelry she had. They kept a few stock certificates. Not much, it was a small box. But for as little as they had, they still had one. I think my parents even did for a time.
Before my parents got a fire safe they stored a bunch of legal documents and such in a safety deposit box, definitely not an "only rich people" thing. The rich people thing is having jewels to stash more than the box itself.
my mom never let us believe in santa, she always said it was a “game people play.”
once when I was a little older I asked why, and she said that before I was born she taught kindergarten at a school with massive income inequality in Texas. every single January, all the rich kids would come back from christmas break bragging about all their presents and all poor kids would come back crying, because they couldn’t figure out what they’d done that was horrible enough to put them on Santa’s bad list, because he’d skipped their house again, just like he did every other year.
that changed my entire perspective. santa is supposed to give presents to good kids and skip bad kids’ houses, but if you believe that, then by default, all rich kids are automatically “good” and all poor kids are automatically “bad.”
Once I learned exactly what the previous comment said, I changed the Santa narrative in our house too. My daughter is only 18 months old, but I don't want to perpetuate that narrative anymore.
In fifth grade I cried in front of a teacher before winter break, because it was (broke) dad's Christmas that year, and I expected to get nothing. Surprise! I got a present from Santa (in dad's handwriting) for the exact thing I'd told my teacher that every kid had that I really wanted but wouldn't get.
Thanks, Mrs G.
I read a memoir a few years ago that I found incredibly frustrating because the author tried to paint herself as the child of some struggle. The story was framed as talking about the vehicles they owned, and one chapter opened up with her and her father in his new (to him) Porsche going to buy her a Volvo because the vehicle she already owned needed a brake job.
In that case, it seemed that the author grew up upper middle class in a rich area, so in comparing herself to those around her, she thought she was disadvantaged. She referred to herself as "kinda poor" because they only vacationed out of state rather than going to Disney annually.
Reminds me of the Victoria and David Beckham interview.
She was like “we struggled quite a bit” and David is like “what car did your dad drop you off in when you went to school?”
And she hummed and hawed and he asked her again but sterner and she says “It was a Rolls Royce”
She got called tf out by her millionaire husband lmao
To be fair, David Beckham grew up in a working class household. Sure, he's been a millionaire for a few decades now, but at least he had some frame of reference.
Company event where people with investment properties told us that you just need to save hard to get that deposit. "Just don't go out to dinner with your spouse as much, or just go to the pub every other Friday".
Ah yeah, so reducing restaurant dinners from 0 to 0 and the pub tab from 0 to 0. Still broke. My colleague left the zoom mid way through, if it was in person, he would have broken the door on the way out, or came across the conference table at them.
My boss at the time made between 5-10x more than I did. We were talking about big purchases like a car or house and he says something along the lines of "well you'll get a great deal since you'd all cash purchaser."
I just kind of smile and nod, knowing that, on my salary that he was aware of, I was not even an all cash purchaser of groceries.
This was the perfect opportunity to say, "wait how much do you think I'm being paid? I'd love if you could put in a good word and advocate for me with the higher ups"
Yeah, I would have to have them explain that to me. It would literally bug me not knowing how they came to that conclusion. Good excuse to push for a raise. "Paying cash on my salary? LOL, good one!"
Told my super rich boss my car was finito and I had to buy a new (used) one, he replied that he too was having car problems, the roof on his convertible wasn't opening. His third car.
My first office job paid ~25k/year (like 10 years ago, not in the 50s or something). They had a silent auction for charity where everything started at like $500+. I looked at it and was like "if they want us to donate that much, maybe they should pay us enough to be able to afford it."
I made $1500 flipping a car in a situation kinda like that.
One of the execs had donated a classic car ('78 Triumph Spitfire), and the minimum bid was $1500.
I googled it, and saw it was easily worth $3k, so I bid $1500.
I was the only bidder. Drove it around for a summer, sold it on ebay for 3k.
(I do understand that was only possible because I was making enough to have $1500 available! haha)
I had a boss complain in a department meeting about how hard it was to find a rental car for his family Hawaii vacation he was taking during the pandemic. Meanwhile the rest of us weren’t getting paid enough to make rent without a roommate.
I was talking about taxes and about rich people with my then boss. I said that 6 figure incomes need not apply for tax credits. She's a dentist. I was an assistant. Her base salary was literally 5 times my salary. She was shocked that I thought she was rich. Did I mention her husband also made 6 figures? I had to slowly explain to her that she made my annual salary in just 3 months. It was quite the conversation. ( We were state employees, she was nothing control of my pay)
While working for a valet parking service in the Santa Barbara area years ago, a woman hired us for a jewelry showing she was having at her giant house in Montecito, and while we were waiting for guests to arrive, my boss informed me that when the guests get in their cars to leave, that I needed to be sure to close their car doors or else they would just drive off with their doors open. As they're so used to people closing their car doors for them.
Words can't describe how blown away I was. Like really, you're just going to go flying down the 101 with you're fucking door open because you don't know how to shut it on your own?
Makes me wonder if they wipe their own behind. Like some super rich man or woman. I just can’t picture them sitting on the toilet with their pants/dress around their ankles reaching for the toilet paper. Only reason I tried was someone told me to never be intimidated around rich people. To just imagine them on the toilet with bad diarrhea. They’re human like the rest of us. But do they wipe? 🤷🏼♂️😁
I needed a bicycle to get to a new job. Found someone online selling a really nice bike for cheap so got in touch. Took two trains to their house to buy the bike and when I got there it was a mansion. The bike was in a garage full of super cars and classics. They asked me where my truck was to load the bike on, when I told them I was riding the bike home they laughed and before I knew it everyone in the house had been called to the garage to hear how I was riding the bike 3 hours home in the dark. No one offered me a lift, they just acted blessed at how they didn't have to do such things.
Feel this! Even from not as rich people, I have still been asked why I don’t take the car instead of public transport when I buy used stuff. Or once when I picked up a lamp for free, the woman asked me why I didn’t just buy it as it wasn’t expensive. Like what did she expect me to answer? Start sharing my whole story of how I just moved to a place on my own, and don’t have parents who can help buy stuff for me? If someone spends time on picking stuff up, or buying used stuff without a car, it’s probably not for fun.
Exactly my reaction! It was the last thing I expected to be asked from someone who had made a post online with it for free. Had no idea what to reply, and just felt it was a bit awkward and humiliating.
this is a great arrested development joke:
“yeah that’s right, mom! my boyfriend is a homeless guy! (whispered to herself) I wonder if he even has an apartment, or…”
I was a Live-In Super of a bldg in Boston. The bldg was 43 units, 40 were college kids. 1 year a young girl moved in next to me & 3 months later her electricity was shut off. She started pounding on my door demanding that I turn her electricity back on, I checked her circuit breakers, they were fine. Went into her apt & immediately noticed the pile of electric company mail on her table...with big red letters 'last warning'.
Me - "You didn't tell the electric company that you were the new tenant".
Tenant - "What's the difference, why do they need to know it's me?"
Me - "They need to send you a bill for electricity usage"
Tenant - "Now I know your messing with me, YOU DON'T PAY FOR ELECTRICITY!!"
She moved out 2 days later of embarrassment, her parents having to pay for breaking the lease.
She couldn't look at me for those 2 days...
To me the privilege isn't her being a fucking idiot about electrical bills. It's that her parents paid to break the lease in only 2 days over what is just embarrassment.
Edit: grammar
I’m a type 1 diabetic and medical costs are insane without insurance. This happened in 2012, when the ACA bill was going through congress. My boss was against it, and I told him how getting on insurance would help me. He grimaced and said, “That is YOUR responsibility. You should get a job!”
I worked *for him* and he made sure to not provide benefits for the employees.
Rishi Sunak (British Prime Minister…for the moment) is stinking rich and grew up in a pretty affluent family, went to a leading private school (Winchester) and Oxford. Doing the interview rounds in the current election campaign he was pressed by an interviewer about whether his family had ever had to give anything up. After much umming and ahhing, the only thing he could come up with was Sky TV (a British satellite TV service). He was lampooned for days about that one. He really is a colossal twat.
It’s fascinating that he didn’t realize that it would have been so much better to just answer truthfully, and then frame it in some way that his wealth allows him to distance himself from corruption.
Honestly, right?
“I’ve been fortunate in that my family’s privilege and wealth has ensured I’ve never suffered the harm that growing up in difficult circumstances can cause. That’s why I’m a staunch advocate for Cost of Living adjustments that prioritize families living below £X.XX, as well as policypolicysleazesmarmpolicypolicy, and I look forward to seeing you all at the polls”
I’m no campaign wonk, but if I can workshop an answer whilst shitposting from the treadmill, what’s his excuse?
>I’m no campaign wonk, but if I can workshop an answer whilst shitposting from the treadmill, what’s his excuse?
Rich entitled upbringing, and in spite of the fancy schools he attended, not too bright or fast on his feet. PM is a hobby, not something he's serious about.
I know bugger all about him, just guessing while playing games.
My old boss was verbally criticizing her new son in law, and said, “He won’t be any kind of decent husband, hell he only makes xxx an hour at his lousy job”.
My boss clearly forgot that I was making less than that…
I love the Derry Girls and I asked my husband to watch it with me again cuz I found it really funny. After watching the 1st episode with him, he said "It is funny but I can't relate to their problems with money and food".
Used to travel for a glamping company (glamour camping) where we would set up huge canvas tents for fancy weddings and parties. We woke up real early one morning to a bunch of calls from some rich LA socialite about how the tents were wet - no other explanation. We rushed over and it turns out she had no idea what the concept of condensation in the morning was. I can't control nature, sorry lady your not getting your deposit back.
Agreed. There are plenty of poor people who don't understand that concept either. Don't get me wrong, money can buy a good education. Not that having a good education forces that person to actually take in that information. But I grew up poor, like not eating for a day or 2 when school was out poor, and I know condensation is a thing. WTF do they think happens to an iced beverage? The glass is leaking?
ETA: Now I'm just imagining someone running over every few minutes to wipe the condensation off.
I work for a startup based out of San Francisco. I'm a remote employee halfway across the country, and am therefore a sort of 'second class citizen'. My direct peers who work in SF make at least double what I do, and they almost all had extremely privileged upbringings. They went to top 10 business schools, they "summer" in Tahoe, that kind of thing.
I was in the home office a few months ago for our annual kickoff meeting, and one of the speakers polled the room: "Has anyone here worked at Amazon?" (nobody raised their hand) "Wow, I'm surprised."
I said, "Does warehouse count?" And the entire room erupted in laughter. For certainly, I'd just told a very enjoyable joke.
Reminds me of a teacher I had in high school, she was a princeton grad but got in with a full scholarship, never could have afforded it otherwise. She joked that until she went there, she'd never heard someone use the word summer as a verb before
Oh my god, I did a college tour at Princeton and made the mistake of asking where the dining hall/cafeteria was. I got the lecture on joining dining clubs.
Actually the majority of juniors and seniors do join these clubs- it's important to remember that Princeton doesn't have the equivalent of sorority/fraternity houses that many other campuses do. There's a significant amount of financial aid that makes it pretty comparable to eating in the dorms. They also tend to be pretty mixed ethnically. That said there's definitely a class aspect in some clubs' personalities that crosses races and ethnicities (middle-class/working class strivers vs. those born to wealth) .
I don’t think I know anyone who is rich rich, but I have a PhD, and most of my colleagues grew up in a more privileged home than I did. I’m the first in my family to have a graduate degree; I worked my ass off at a state school. My dad worked in a factory; my colleagues all assume he was an engineer (he was not). I am one of the few PhDs that I know who has worked a variety of low-wage jobs, including in grad school. It’s a bizarre feeling to have so little in common with your coworkers. When you said your colleagues thought you were joking about working in a warehouse, I felt that in my soul.
I had a peer call me and ask for $5,000 to pitch in to purchase a gift for our manager. I told her there is no way I would do that. I don’t even spend that much on my family combined. She was shocked and told me they already purchased the gift. My response was, well that sucks.
That comment was damn funny even though you were serious. I’m not in the spoiled, entitled group, but your comment was priceless! I’m sorry they were such AH’s.
yeah that's a pretty funny joke regardless if intended as a joke or not and I imagine 9/10 dev teams regardless of socioeconomic status would have laughed. Not sure if OP would have preferred them to sit there stonefaced instead?
The I wana say 12 or 13? year old son of one of my clients literally expressed confusion to me when I asked them where I could get more paper towels from when they ran out in the wash room of his parents however many million dollar yacht. He said something like "Its always there what do you mean?" he was so disconnected from the process of I guess cleaning and restocking that he just thought that stuff would always be there and never run out lol the look of genuine confusion on his face was just something else.
Thats not the first time I experienced that either, talking to the kids of extremely wealthy people is always a trip.
That doesn't even take that much money.
I know people who barely qualify as upper middle class who have kids so sheltered from the concept of work that they, as teenagers, were amazed at a restaurant where you could see the kitchen.
They had never stopped to think how the food for cooked.
When we met in our friend group, the rich friend showed us his new expensive winter jacket for 500€+ and from time to time he goes on a shopping haul with his rich dad where he spends 1-2k.
One time we confronted him about his bragging and asked him if he didn’t think that his spending for clothes is quite a lot. His answer:
„Well… I know some people who spend more and I know some people who spend less - so I think I am average“
Statistics 101
This girl got genuinely angry and offended when people suggested she could take public transportation to the airport instead of paying for a $50 Uber. She posted on social media about it
EDIT: The bus they suggested is very convenient and goes directly from our college to the airport, so it’s not like she’d have to drag her luggage from bus line to bus line
There was a guy who recently gave all his money away and lived on the streets to prove that anyone could earn millions.
Then his father died and left him millions.
He then stopped living on the streets and claimed to have proved his point.
Edit: Spelling.
There was a similar rich dude that wanted to prove "Becoming a millionaire is easy, anyone can do it". So he pretended to have $0 with the goal of making a million in a year.
He ended up quitting, retiring back to his mansion, after 10 months due to "health reasons". He also only made about $60,000 in those 10 months.
"How do you only have one dishwasher?" Imagine their shock when I told them the apartment that I had just moved out of, that I lived in for 14 years, didn't have one at all.
I've known quite a few people to not realize the benefit they received by just *getting* a house, car, and cost of a degree (sometimes including advanced) from their parents.
Much easier to budget when those items are removed from the equation. Even more so when you can get some income from the house.
This! I am a fairly low income single parent but I help my daughter out with car insurance etc because she needs a car to work so that she can pay rent while she studies for her degree.
She wouldn’t be able to do what she needs to without a little help here and there.
Different scale than buying new cars/city apartments/business ‘loans’ the wealthy give their ‘self-made’ kids but works the same.
I saw this documentary about one of America's most prolific 18th-century slave traders and in an interview with his present-day descendants it was asked if they felt they had benefited from the privilege of their lineage and most said no, that they lived somewhat average lives. Then they were asked where they went to college, and it was all Princeton, Brown and Harvard. And it turned out their average lives were full of property and creative jobs... They just failed to grasp how fortunate their lives were.
Just found the [scene here](https://youtu.be/kXdBLeNigbA?si=adUML7b3Ri9p5CMs&t=3926).
I wouldn’t consider this out of touch, but I was definitely amazed.
Several years ago I worked at a retail store that sold a lot of different items. I was on the cashier one Friday afternoon when three young women (~early twenties) walked in decked out in luxury brands. They bought a suitcase and several other random items that totaled almost $400. Once I announced the total price, one of them pulled out 4 Benjamin’s like she was pulling out issues and handed them to me without looking. I asked if they were going on a trip. One of them answered “no we got sick of carrying our stuff.”
I mean, I get tired carrying stuff too. But damn, to buy a whole suitcase and more just because they were tired was crazy to see.
I was talking to a very rich lady we had just videotaped. She was a board of director at one of the largest oil companies on the planet.
She told me she used to summer in Prague.
I told her I used to summer in school.
I thought that was a damned funny line. But it didn’t even register to her. She was just confused on how that had anything to do with what she said.
During a dinner party we started talking about our experiences in high school. I mentioned the diversity of my large 6A school and that almost half the student population was on free or reduced lunch.
A woman who had grown up privileged in the San Fransico area absolutely burst out laughing and thought I was joking. She said "free or reduced lunch!!?? WHY?? What, they couldn't afford food?" It got real quiet and real awkward when I explained, yes, that's exactly what happens in public school. She had only attended private school (kindergarten through grad school).
I was working at a car dealership and saw the owner pull up in a $250k Porsche GT3. Told him how much I loved the car and dreamt of owning one someday. Owner looked at me confused and said "what do you mean? We sell them right here you know?" Totally blew my mind that he didn't realize his employees couldn't afford the cars they were selling.
One of the best articles i’ve ever read about the difference between multi-millionaire and billionaires was a profile on THE top private jet salesman in the entire world, a guy who was obsessed with private jets out of sheer love for aviation and engineering, who’d done well enough to amass a net worth of $80 million.
The kicker in this fantastically written articles was about how despite the fact that this salesman now had a fortune that would be totally inconceivable to 99.99%+ of people, he was still *nowhere near* having the amount of money where it would make financial sense for him to justify owning his own private plane.
This is the problem with extreme wealth inequality at the highest levels: when you’re worth $100 million, your *entire community* — basically every single person you interact with outside of service staff — is either as rich as you are or richer. If you’re worth $100 million and you only hang out with billionaires, *you quickly start to genuinely believe that you’re poor.*
Can confirm. My old boss sold his business for about $50m, had a small private jet while he owned the business (Cessna CJ3)…immediately after selling the business, he had to sell the jet. He had no concept how expensive it was to actually OWN a jet.
I used to teach at a very expensive private school. This school went all the way through from kindergarten to high school. I had to give some students, who were about 9 years old, a ride in my car one time. A spoilt set of twins, in particular, couldn't understand why my car was so old and "poor looking". Adults are apparently supposed to have new expensive cars. "My dad is an adult and he drives a Rolls Royce. He gets a new car every year. You should get a new car too. Why don't you buy a new car?". When I tried to explain that I was still in my first year of teaching and had only finish uni last year so didn't really have money yet, the response was "but our dad has always had new cars. Even when he was at university". On another occasion, one of them smashed her brand new iPhone on purpose to prove to other students her dad would buy her a new one.
Once had a college age coworker explain to a bunch of us in EMS try to explain that his family wasn’t “that rich” because they “only have a beach house, not a summer house” and then explained the difference between the two. Another coworker then went to pull up his apartment complex, and pointed out the trailer park next door. Rich coworker then remarked that it must be nice to live next to a storage facility (referring to the trailer park). He didn’t believe us when we explained that people lived in those trailers. He thought that was only something that happened on reality TV shows. We all hoped that inner city EMS would help bring him back down to earth, but it had no effect.
At a high-end kids clothing resale store called Once Upon a Child.
The store only buys Nike, adidas or other well-known brand name kids clothes, and only kids clothes. Everything must be new or barely worn or they won't buy it, usually when you bring in a bunch of stuff for them to buy they'll only buy 10% of what you bring in. I once saw them say no to a beautiful custom made dress that an Indian couple had spent $300 on for their only-child daughter, the reason was that it wasn't a brand name.
So.
At that store, some Mom was selling a bunch of clothes and finding out what the store was taking and for how much. Her 8 year old had wandered off into the store and came back with something she wanted to buy.
Mom: "No sweetie, we don't shop here, we only come here so poor people have nice things to buy"
I think they might be franchised. The one by me was picky, but not that picky. They wanted gently used, and a lot of kids clothes are worse off than that.
>They wanted gently used, and a lot of kids clothes are worse off than that.
Yeah, "once upon a child" not "twice in the thunderdome." lol.
When I was kid a lot of our pants would end up looking like the "distressed" jeans people pay extra money for now.
Rich friend- “Just take Friday off work and fly out to visit me this weekend, I know it’s last minute but I’m sure there’s seats available.” Me- “Ahh I don’t think I can make this weekend.” Rich friend- “Oh yeah I looked and saw it was only coach available, don’t be embarrassed, I don’t blame you for not wanting to sit next to “them”” Me thinking- “does this guy truly think that’s why?? Lol I just earn average money…”
On a similar note, we were shunned for not coming out to a birthday dinner party. It was hundreds of dollars per person. Would have been the most expensive meal we'd ever eaten and we wouldn't have made rent.
Rich kid (who is a super nice guy) wanted to go drinking with my buddy. My buddy said he didn't have any money. The rich kid said "No problem, we'll stop at a bank machine on the way there." The concept of having 'no money' didn't even register. The rich kid thought that my buddy just didn't have any money in his wallet.
"$350,000 a year is not enough to live."
This was my canker sore of an uncle-in-law three years ago complaining that if he's not making close to a million a year, he can't "live" as it won't cover "the basics".
He also lacked the self-awareness to realize he's the only person on his payroll making over $100,000 / year. If he can't make it on $350k / year then what does he think his employees do?
[When McDonalds put out an employee budget](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2013/07/18/why-mcdonalds-employee-budget-has-everyone-up-in-arms/)
You know the $100 for car insurance or the $20 in medical...
An old rich titled landowner complained that he didn't have as much power and prestige as his ancestors.
He hated that a mere bank manager, a *commoner*, had more power and respect in a small rural town than him.
He yearned for the good old days where his family basically ruled the area and us commoners knew who our masters were.
His equally wealthy landowning relative thought the same. His solution was to control local politics and politicians. He made sure everything happened to his advantage. He used that power to make sure that his hand-picked men were given council related jobs, even if it meant firing the people already in those jobs.
I knew a family who lost their home because of him.
My friend has a charity and these wealthy folks took him out to dinner to talk about the work he does. When it came down to making a donation (of any amount) they were hesitant on whether to give. The bill for dinner came to the table and it was like $1500 and they just dropped their amex card like it was no big deal.
Owner of the company I used to work for was a car guy. His daily driver was a giant, fully kitted out Chevy Tahoe (that he rarely drove more than just himself in) and he also owned a ferrari, one or two Mercedes, and a Jaguar I think. Specific models I don't know, I just know they were pricy.
One day after I had worked there for a couple years, he came to our office in NorCal and tossed me the fob to his Tahoe and said I need you to drive this down to Paso Robles (our office on the Central Coast, about a 5 hour drive, where he is based out of). When I asked how I would get home, he said he would make sure I get taken care of. When I asked how he would get back home, he said, "my Ferrari that I'm picking up from the shop."
Later in the day I asked him to show me where his windshield wiper controls were since rain was expected during my drive. He said it's all automatic, and when I asked how that works, he goes, "How old is your car?"
Very nice guy that gave out generous bonuses every year but he was pretty out of touch with us normies.
Gwyneth Paltrow talking about how her lifestyle brand Goop caters to the "common woman" with items including the $595.00 hoodie, $625.00 cardigan, $720.00 v-neck top and $66 egg shaped vagina jade rock.
Doctor told me to work with my personal trainer to figure out a routine that wouldn't make my chronic autoimmune disorder worse. I asked if he was going to cover the cost of a personal trainer out of his own pocket bc insurance sure as shit won't cover it and I've never been able to hold a job in my entire adult life because of said chronic autoimmune disorder. Dude was SHOCKED poor people exist and one was in his office.
I'm on social security due to chronic illness atm.
Went to the orthopedist because of pain. It was winter.
She said cycling would help my hip pain and to just get an e-bike, they're fun to use! And so easy, I might even lose a few pounds!
When I told her there is no way with my financial situation she looked dejected for a few seconds before suggesting to wish for one for Christmas from my family.
I still don't own an e-bike.
A lot of doctors come from wealthy families. Many of them never had a job prior to becoming a doctor. Meaning they went to high school, went to college, went to medical school, without ever working, and their first job was residency. Meaning for some of them surgeon was their first job.
When our multimillionaire CEO made us say "thank you" for the napkins provided in our staff meeting bc someone else in the company bought us pizza and mgmt was kind enough to furnish the napkins.
my coworker argued with me when i told him $20,000 would be life changing for me and my family, because it wouldn’t be life changing for his. i think he thinks everybody has a rich dad that gives them money. i work at this job literally to survive and he works there because his dad told him he needed to get a job to keep getting his “allowance”. 🙃
A really rich kid I worked with (well, he was like maybe 25 or 26) was out to dinner with us on a work event. He ordered a bottle of wine from the Sommelier and the Sommelier indicated he no longer had that vintage but he had a similar vintage. He also explained, politely, the cost delta.
The first bottle was going to be $750 and the new bottle would be $825.
Rich kid looks around the table and asks “…is that a lot?”
Our boss just said “not if you’re buying. But if I’m buying you better pick something else.”
I’ve told this story before on Reddit but it’s still one of my favorite examples.
Me and my ex were struggling financially when we first got married. I made enough to pay the bills, but there was nothing extra.
She decided to enroll in school, and when she was filling out the FAFSA for financial aid, she asked me what my adjusted gross income was for the previous year. I have always done my own taxes, but at the time always threw the paperwork away when I was done, so I had no idea what it was.
Our friend who was at our house at the time came from a very wealthy family who owned a hotel chain, had government contracts, etc. Without a second thought, he said just call your accountant, they’ll have it. He was baffled by the fact that having a personal accountant isn’t something everyone has. Blew his mind.
I was telling a cute girl I met at a friend's birthday about a boom I was reading (The Zanzibar Chest.) It was about a British journalist whose father was some minor colonial official. The journalist traveled extensively as part of his dad's work and his own. I mentioned wanting to travel to less popular destinations (always wanted to go to Mongolia - my grandfather got lost in the desert there once and it was a wild story). Her response was that I should just enjoy my life and go. I know lots of people who travel a lot so the advice was not that outlandish bit I mentioned family I was taking care of, things I needed to save for and not having flexibility at work. It became a point of contention like "no, you just have to say fuck it and go. Your family will understand." My grandfather had late stage Alzheimers and we were taking care of him at home - he didn't know my name much less understand things.
Living outside Jackson Hole, This sister of a friend told me how hard it is to live there. You have to fly in your help (cleaning, yard work) from Salt Lake. I had no words.
None of the help can afford to live in Jackson Hole.
Since the collapse of that highway many of them will have a 3 hour commute.
I think I just figured out why in bygone ages it was common to include room and board in a servant's wages.
That's still the norm in a lot of places where people having maids/nanny's is more common. I live in Thailand and if you have a full time 5-6 days a week maid usually they would be live-in. Most large houses (4 bed+) will have a maids room built in where they live. Then they essentially stay with you and integrate into the family somewhat. I imagine it would be similar in the US, but people are probably too privacy minded and do not want someone in their house all the time.
I went to the US for a year as part of a HS exchange in the early 00s and my host family was quite wealthy. They had three live-in maids that took care of the cleaning, cooking etc. that had their own rooms (that were off-limits for the children). So apparently it does happen. The family had a Mexican-American Background though so might've been a cultural thing.
I was the help flown into Jackson Hole for a year. It was one of the best times of my life.
there's an excellent book called "Billionaire Wilderness" by Justin Farrell about this
Best part of the book is him describing how the wealthy think their literal servants are friends, and the serving class is like “I really wanna say fuck these people but they pay me to barely survive. No we aren’t friends lol.”
If they want a servant to be a friend then they need to pay their servant what Bruce Wayne pays Alfred Pennyworth. Alfred is there 26 hours a day, 8 days a week, and he is extraordinarily well compensated. He's effectively a billionaire butler, he's running the place.
Also note that Bruce never talks to Alfred like an employer. He talks to him like family. Alfred is treated with only the highest standards of respect and Brice knows that he *needs* Alfred infinitely more than the inverse. Alfred sticks around because he sees Bruce as his own adopted son and sees that without guidance, Bruce would become no different to the monsters he hunts. Alfred is Bruce's conscience, his carer, his confidant, and his mother. Alfred is the crutch which keeps Bruce standing so that Batman can fly.
There is a black and white, olde worlde movie about a rich family that is shipwrecked on an island. The butler displays the leadership skills that keeps them all alive while they wait for help, and then they have to resume their previous societal roles when they are rescued and return to England. Very interesting plot.
Batman’s Batman
Back when I was in my early 20's my beat up old car broke down in my job's parking lot when I was about to drive home. I was getting paid $10 an hour as a pastry chef at a catering company. This was barely enough to cover my rent. I was obviously pretty distraught over my car dying. My boss (company owner) ended up saying to me- 'Why are you so upset? It's just a car! Just buy another one!" I couldn't even respond, I just looked at her like she was crazy.
These people have to know how much they are paying though.
They have often been separated from financial anxiety long enough to lose their bearing on the cost of things vs salary. I had a boss once who was almost zealous about the need for everyone to be at work whenever a snowstorm hit. He kind of saw it as the key battle in a war over productivity. I had to pull him aside after he told an intern working half time for basically minimum wage that she should simply buy a car that can get through the snow so she can be at work in any weather event. Said it in front of the entire staff, and looked like a moron for doing so. Once you accumulate some wealth (not even a lot, just enough to push the wolf away from the door for good) you just don’t think about things like “what if my car broke down tomorrow?” Life’s day to day problems just kind of become less consequential and you can focus your energy elsewhere. Problem? Make it go away with a little money. Most people are extraordinarily myopic. That’s how THEY would deal with the problem, why shouldn’t that work for everyone else?
>I had a boss once who was almost zealous about the need for everyone to be at work whenever a snowstorm hit. God, this just reminded me of when I worked at a pet store. It was a local chain in a city with loads of hills and not used to snow and ice. Well, snow hit one year. Roads were icy but most of us at least at my store could make it. So staff went in where we all had an email from the owner saying she wanted to keep the office workers safe in the icy conditions, so the office was closed that day if we needed anything, but every pet store had to be up and running (meaning too dangerous for them to commute, but apparently not too dangerous for us). The one store out closer to the mountains was completely snowed off. They asked if they could keep the store closed for safety, too, because no one could even get to it. The response? No. Get to it as soon as you are able, try to not open the store more than a couple hours late. Nerver felt so effing poorly valued to see in the same email chain the owner outright say she was protecting the office workers but fuck the retail workers.
They think it's a *fair* wage because they don't have to think about what things actually cost When I first started making good money I really didn't keep track of what things cost at the grocery store, I was mostly just grabbing what I wanted to eat that week. I'm a little more frugal now and check the sales somewhat regularly
“If you can’t afford childcare, just hire a nanny. We love ours!”
I hear this kind of thing so often on Reddit, it’s mind-blowing. “Just hire a nanny” “just hire a doula, oh and make sure to hire a backup just in case” “just hire a night nanny a couple nights a week”. Like yeah, you’re right, this parenting thing would be way easier if I could just hire a series of people to do it for me! Granted at least one of them elaborated they weren’t from the US and anyone in their country rich enough to own a computer had hired help, but that’s mind blowing in its own way.
to be fair, in a lot of areas, it is literally cheaper to hire a full time au pair ($20K/year, though you have to own a home and have a room to spare) than to send two kids to daycare full time ($15K+ each—yes, really). It’s genuinely unbelievable how much childcare costs have gone up in the last five years. Daycare used to be the budget option for working families that didn’t have grandparents/aunts/etc to help. Now it’s more expensive than the “rich people” option. And people wonder why the birth rate is so low! Edit: forgot to mention the other consequence of this—for families where daycare is more expensive than mom’s wage, mom usually ends up having to be a SAHM, which has consequences down the line for the types of jobs she can get when trying to rejoin the workforce (and overall has a very detrimental effect on lifetime earnings). It sucks a LOT to try and raise a family in America.
My husband and I are working opposite shifts to avoid having to pay for daycare. One of my colleagues is doing the same thing. She describes it as "hot-racking with her husband," because they're never in bed together, asleep, at the same time. Hot-racking being, basically, 30 guys on a boat with 10 beds who're each getting their 8 hours one after another on such a tight schedule that the damn rack's still hot when you climb into it. And it's accurate, too; five nights a week, my going to bed routine involves a few minutes of "get up, you're late for work" as I kick my husband out.
I occasionally drive minibuses for a private school in the UK, have overheard some very privileged conversations from the students but one that sticks out is: A tutor on the bus asked a student what he says when other students make comments about the very expensive watches he wears to school, to which he said his response is “my dad has the same 24hours as your dad”. He then proceeded to go on about how his dad inherited a massive entertainment chain and various hugely successful companies from his grandfather.
Yes we all have 24 hours, but if you have employees, you get 8 of their hours too.
Reminds me of all those MLM’s in the 2010’s sharing “You have the same hours in the day as Beyoncé” on Instagram
"It's just so easy to just drop a grand at Target, y'know?" -my Starbucks coworker in Calabasas (Kardashian-land), after he spent $983 on toys for his 4 yr old nephew's birthday. I don't know why he worked at Starbucks except maybe his rich family finally forced him to get a job?
I knew someone who grew up on an island full of rich twats (he refuses to visit it even though his wife really wanted to) who were all working part time at coffee shops or the moral equivalent because it was the bare minimum to satisfy the terms of their trust funds.
Or, for "meeting chicks, man", you know ?
> I don't know why he worked at Starbucks except maybe his rich family finally forced him to get a job? I worked with one of these guys once. He lived in a luxury apartment, that his parents owned, in the most expensive part of London, and they made him get a job to stay there. Not pay rent or anything, (they also paid for anything he wanted), he just had to have a job. He was an absolute fucking twat.
Being told by a guy who has not worked a day in his life and living off of inherited money that poor people are poor because they don't invest their money right.
The fact that some people believe that all are born with silver spoons like them is wild
They have to say that to themselves to justify their existence. If they faced reality they would be living with existential dread 24/7. Some people sort of go through life in denial, kind of like being a little bit drunk all the time.... can't enjoy yourself thinking about how bad some people have it. Like we all do to some extent, but rich people do it really well and have lots more rationales than you or I do.
I saw a brilliant reply to a tweet once that I’ve used every time this situation arises. Some girl tweeted about how much she saved by cutting out coffee and this guy replied “I’ve studied the habits of millionaires, and while cutting back on small expenses is a good start to building wealth, consider supplementing your income with massive financial fraud” Credit to the author: https://x.com/macmaniacs/status/1762847347569299658 Roy Scott - you deserve to go viral
I think the biggest one is just try being born into a rich family
I was an assistant making just over 50k a year and i heard someone on the board of directors say, "of course he [mayor of a city] stole the money. You can't live on 90k a year!".
I wonder* if they would apply this logic to poor people who steal necessities to get by *I don't wonder because I know the answer
My parents always talk about the baseball strike in the 90s when some player said "Come on, some of these guys are living on just $500,000 a year!"
Some jagoff in congress, and this was before the pandemic, thought that our average salary was $100,000 per year
I wanna live in his reality
Borrow money from your parents and start a business.
Borrow a small loan? Perhaps a million dollars?
During the pandemic, senior management held company wide calls about mental health and wellbeing. One piece of advice always stuck with me. They suggest to stop the tedium of working in the same space, to move your desk to another room in your house. I had a choice between facing different walls
I work in mental health and the director of the mental health department suggested we all “spend time in our gardens or work out in your home gym”. She lives in a 2.8m house while her staff mostly live in 1bdrm apartments.
"When you're really stressed, just drop what you're doing for a while and go outside to get some sun by your pool. If you're feeling crazy, get Maria or Lupe or whoever your maid is to bring you a margarita!"
My boss was the same. “Find a dedicated space that is only for work.” “Get dressed up to work from home.” “Keep your regular hours.” Sorry, dude - daycare is closed, so I’m trying to take care of a baby and a toddler during regular office hours. I’m going to wear a tshirt covered in spit-up all day.
The dedicated space that is only for work actually did help me stay saner, though. I had a tiny apartment during the pandemic and working on my couch or in my bedroom was starting to weigh on me. The only unused space was this little corner of my kitchen but I made it cute. I bought this desk that attaches to the wall and folds up into a cabinet out of the way when you aren't using it, put a curtain up to give visual separation from the small kitchen table that was a foot away, and added a wall sconce. For a couple hundred bucks (that I was fortunate enough to be able to spare) I suddenly had somewhere that was more conducive to working.
I work in my bedroom so I can use my PC and my work laptop simultaneously. That one thing has saved my sanity more than anything else, just being able to watch youtube while I work or browse reddit when I have some downtime is a life saver. I just can't sit in an office all day with no stimulation but work, it drives me loco.
A rich person once said to me, "Why don’t you just buy a second house for your vacation getaways?" As if owning one house wasn’t already a huge financial stretch!
"How could your family accountant let that happen?" When talking about how growing up, we couldn't pay the bills and had our water/electricity shut off multiple times.
Mine is a story my dad likes to tell about the first parent meeting at my college orientation. The school spent 20 minutes talking about tuition payment plans. then the mom of a kid I’d met earlier in the day raised her hand and asked, in genuine confusion, as if everyone else in the room was stupid: “why would anyone bother with all that when you could just write one check for the entire year?”
She knew what she was doing
Yeah, that screams "I'm flexing how rich I am" energy.
Couldn’t afford our utilities because the accountant was so damn expensive
When they tell me I should just take off and go somewhere for a week. Even if I made the money, I'd be eating the time itself from the no pto I get
I've told this before but my boss was trying to stop me from taking one or two days off at a time because their accountant was complaining about the extra work or whatever. I explained I was using the days to take a Saturday and Sunday off here and there to visit my family for birthdays or whatever. She responded "wouldn't you rather take a whole week off so you can fly somewhere warm??" I just stared at her and said "I make minimum wage. How am I supposed to pay for that?" She had no answer.
Was the accountant working extra to cover for you when you were gone, or was it the fact they had to adjust your payroll to account for the time off? If it was the latter, sounds like a shitty accountant.
Basically it was extra paperwork for them because they were banking our vacation instead of paying out so it was more work for them if employees were taking a lot more smaller groups of days off. The accountant was doing our books as a side gig and the owners really pushed back on paying them more for their time so the accountant then pushed back and said they would only dedicate a set amount of hours. So the bosses tried to find ways to cut down on the accountant's work.
So it was you boss not the accountant who was the moron?
I was talking to the owner of the building my old work/clinic was in. He was taking his wife back to Germany on vacation for the third or forth time that year. I mentioned how jealous I was. He told me that the only way I was going to go was to "just do it." He said that too many people wait for the right timing and don't just take themselves traveling. I was making ~$55K/year at the time, the single earner for a family of three with a toddler. Rent was about 40% of my income.
My high school had some trips abroad that kids could do with other students and teachers. One girl was talking about the trip, and I said I wished I could afford to go. She said something about prioritizing… I was 16-17 and living with a single mom and her retired boyfriend. I babysat but didn’t make enough for a trip to Europe.
Drives me nuts hearing people talk about how it’s so important to travel when you’re young and to just “do it.” I was making less than $15 an hour and much of that was getting swallowed up by rent when I was in my 20s. It’s just such an incredibly ignorant and arrogant thing to say but you see it all the time on here.
[удалено]
A coworker asked me what bank I used for my safe deposit box. I said I didn't have a safe deposit box. She said "But where do you keep your jewels, then?" Edit: I said I didn't have any jewels and she just said "huh" and changed the subject. I actually get the sentiment (if I owned anything expensive, I would probably also have a safe place for it), but something about it made her sound like a Disney villain even though she was a very nice person. It's a very vivid random memory, thanks OP!
“Bend over and I’ll show you”
You've got a lot of nerve talking to me like that, Griswold.
I wasn’t talking to you
This is the first one I’ve read that is actually the rich out of touch and not just depressing wealth disparity in America
Not always. Safe deposit boxes were very normal for people once upon a time. My poor grandparents had one and kept everything of value in it, including the little jewelry she had. They kept a few stock certificates. Not much, it was a small box. But for as little as they had, they still had one. I think my parents even did for a time.
Before my parents got a fire safe they stored a bunch of legal documents and such in a safety deposit box, definitely not an "only rich people" thing. The rich people thing is having jewels to stash more than the box itself.
Not understanding why we didn’t get more than one gift on our birthdays and Christmas. It was usually clothes
my mom never let us believe in santa, she always said it was a “game people play.” once when I was a little older I asked why, and she said that before I was born she taught kindergarten at a school with massive income inequality in Texas. every single January, all the rich kids would come back from christmas break bragging about all their presents and all poor kids would come back crying, because they couldn’t figure out what they’d done that was horrible enough to put them on Santa’s bad list, because he’d skipped their house again, just like he did every other year. that changed my entire perspective. santa is supposed to give presents to good kids and skip bad kids’ houses, but if you believe that, then by default, all rich kids are automatically “good” and all poor kids are automatically “bad.”
Santa only gives one small gift in our house. Took a minute for grandparents to understand, but they are on board
Once I learned exactly what the previous comment said, I changed the Santa narrative in our house too. My daughter is only 18 months old, but I don't want to perpetuate that narrative anymore.
Same here. Santa only brings socks or clothes and treats in the stocking. Mom, dad, and various family members give the 'cool' gifts.
kinda makes more sense if it's some kind of wooden toy or something too. You telling me the elves made this playstation? come on.
In fifth grade I cried in front of a teacher before winter break, because it was (broke) dad's Christmas that year, and I expected to get nothing. Surprise! I got a present from Santa (in dad's handwriting) for the exact thing I'd told my teacher that every kid had that I really wanted but wouldn't get. Thanks, Mrs G.
"Why did you take your car to get 'looked at'? Just get a different one. I dont know why you waste your time with repair men like that."
I read a memoir a few years ago that I found incredibly frustrating because the author tried to paint herself as the child of some struggle. The story was framed as talking about the vehicles they owned, and one chapter opened up with her and her father in his new (to him) Porsche going to buy her a Volvo because the vehicle she already owned needed a brake job.
Why people wanna look like they struggled when they didn’t?
In that case, it seemed that the author grew up upper middle class in a rich area, so in comparing herself to those around her, she thought she was disadvantaged. She referred to herself as "kinda poor" because they only vacationed out of state rather than going to Disney annually.
Reminds me of the Victoria and David Beckham interview. She was like “we struggled quite a bit” and David is like “what car did your dad drop you off in when you went to school?” And she hummed and hawed and he asked her again but sterner and she says “It was a Rolls Royce” She got called tf out by her millionaire husband lmao
To be fair, David Beckham grew up in a working class household. Sure, he's been a millionaire for a few decades now, but at least he had some frame of reference.
Company event where people with investment properties told us that you just need to save hard to get that deposit. "Just don't go out to dinner with your spouse as much, or just go to the pub every other Friday". Ah yeah, so reducing restaurant dinners from 0 to 0 and the pub tab from 0 to 0. Still broke. My colleague left the zoom mid way through, if it was in person, he would have broken the door on the way out, or came across the conference table at them.
My boss at the time made between 5-10x more than I did. We were talking about big purchases like a car or house and he says something along the lines of "well you'll get a great deal since you'd all cash purchaser." I just kind of smile and nod, knowing that, on my salary that he was aware of, I was not even an all cash purchaser of groceries.
man, i get office politics, but there is nothing on earth that could have prevented me from calling him out on that
This was the perfect opportunity to say, "wait how much do you think I'm being paid? I'd love if you could put in a good word and advocate for me with the higher ups"
Yeah, I would have to have them explain that to me. It would literally bug me not knowing how they came to that conclusion. Good excuse to push for a raise. "Paying cash on my salary? LOL, good one!"
Told my super rich boss my car was finito and I had to buy a new (used) one, he replied that he too was having car problems, the roof on his convertible wasn't opening. His third car.
My first office job paid ~25k/year (like 10 years ago, not in the 50s or something). They had a silent auction for charity where everything started at like $500+. I looked at it and was like "if they want us to donate that much, maybe they should pay us enough to be able to afford it."
I mean that's a fair point lol
I made $1500 flipping a car in a situation kinda like that. One of the execs had donated a classic car ('78 Triumph Spitfire), and the minimum bid was $1500. I googled it, and saw it was easily worth $3k, so I bid $1500. I was the only bidder. Drove it around for a summer, sold it on ebay for 3k. (I do understand that was only possible because I was making enough to have $1500 available! haha)
I had a boss complain in a department meeting about how hard it was to find a rental car for his family Hawaii vacation he was taking during the pandemic. Meanwhile the rest of us weren’t getting paid enough to make rent without a roommate.
I was talking about taxes and about rich people with my then boss. I said that 6 figure incomes need not apply for tax credits. She's a dentist. I was an assistant. Her base salary was literally 5 times my salary. She was shocked that I thought she was rich. Did I mention her husband also made 6 figures? I had to slowly explain to her that she made my annual salary in just 3 months. It was quite the conversation. ( We were state employees, she was nothing control of my pay)
What did she say or how did she respond when you told her that she makes in 3 months what takes you a year to make?
She didn't say anything. She turned and walked back to her office and didn't bring up money ever again.
Interesting. Hopefully she took that as a lesson that most people are not making 6 figures.
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It seems like, when one isn't rich, one either has the time to do stuff, or one has the money, but usually not both.
And sometimes, neither (even if working).
While working for a valet parking service in the Santa Barbara area years ago, a woman hired us for a jewelry showing she was having at her giant house in Montecito, and while we were waiting for guests to arrive, my boss informed me that when the guests get in their cars to leave, that I needed to be sure to close their car doors or else they would just drive off with their doors open. As they're so used to people closing their car doors for them.
Jesus, that's pathetic lol
Words can't describe how blown away I was. Like really, you're just going to go flying down the 101 with you're fucking door open because you don't know how to shut it on your own?
Makes me wonder if they wipe their own behind. Like some super rich man or woman. I just can’t picture them sitting on the toilet with their pants/dress around their ankles reaching for the toilet paper. Only reason I tried was someone told me to never be intimidated around rich people. To just imagine them on the toilet with bad diarrhea. They’re human like the rest of us. But do they wipe? 🤷🏼♂️😁
They probably use the best bidet money can buy, and pat dry with a towel.
I'd assume the best bidet will dry it for you too
I needed a bicycle to get to a new job. Found someone online selling a really nice bike for cheap so got in touch. Took two trains to their house to buy the bike and when I got there it was a mansion. The bike was in a garage full of super cars and classics. They asked me where my truck was to load the bike on, when I told them I was riding the bike home they laughed and before I knew it everyone in the house had been called to the garage to hear how I was riding the bike 3 hours home in the dark. No one offered me a lift, they just acted blessed at how they didn't have to do such things.
Feel this! Even from not as rich people, I have still been asked why I don’t take the car instead of public transport when I buy used stuff. Or once when I picked up a lamp for free, the woman asked me why I didn’t just buy it as it wasn’t expensive. Like what did she expect me to answer? Start sharing my whole story of how I just moved to a place on my own, and don’t have parents who can help buy stuff for me? If someone spends time on picking stuff up, or buying used stuff without a car, it’s probably not for fun.
The person giving away a free thing asked why you didn't instead spend money? Wtf.
Exactly my reaction! It was the last thing I expected to be asked from someone who had made a post online with it for free. Had no idea what to reply, and just felt it was a bit awkward and humiliating.
"You don't get rich by paying for shit, lady!" Make her wonder. haha
Many variations on 'why don't the homeless just rent an apartment/buy a house?!'
this is a great arrested development joke: “yeah that’s right, mom! my boyfriend is a homeless guy! (whispered to herself) I wonder if he even has an apartment, or…”
I was a Live-In Super of a bldg in Boston. The bldg was 43 units, 40 were college kids. 1 year a young girl moved in next to me & 3 months later her electricity was shut off. She started pounding on my door demanding that I turn her electricity back on, I checked her circuit breakers, they were fine. Went into her apt & immediately noticed the pile of electric company mail on her table...with big red letters 'last warning'. Me - "You didn't tell the electric company that you were the new tenant". Tenant - "What's the difference, why do they need to know it's me?" Me - "They need to send you a bill for electricity usage" Tenant - "Now I know your messing with me, YOU DON'T PAY FOR ELECTRICITY!!" She moved out 2 days later of embarrassment, her parents having to pay for breaking the lease. She couldn't look at me for those 2 days...
To me the privilege isn't her being a fucking idiot about electrical bills. It's that her parents paid to break the lease in only 2 days over what is just embarrassment. Edit: grammar
I’m a type 1 diabetic and medical costs are insane without insurance. This happened in 2012, when the ACA bill was going through congress. My boss was against it, and I told him how getting on insurance would help me. He grimaced and said, “That is YOUR responsibility. You should get a job!” I worked *for him* and he made sure to not provide benefits for the employees.
I hope you took his advice and got a job…somewhere else!
Rishi Sunak (British Prime Minister…for the moment) is stinking rich and grew up in a pretty affluent family, went to a leading private school (Winchester) and Oxford. Doing the interview rounds in the current election campaign he was pressed by an interviewer about whether his family had ever had to give anything up. After much umming and ahhing, the only thing he could come up with was Sky TV (a British satellite TV service). He was lampooned for days about that one. He really is a colossal twat.
Oh but remember he has "friends in middle class and working class.. well, not working class" His own words.
I bet his definition of "middle class" involves owning at least several ponies
It’s fascinating that he didn’t realize that it would have been so much better to just answer truthfully, and then frame it in some way that his wealth allows him to distance himself from corruption.
Honestly, right? “I’ve been fortunate in that my family’s privilege and wealth has ensured I’ve never suffered the harm that growing up in difficult circumstances can cause. That’s why I’m a staunch advocate for Cost of Living adjustments that prioritize families living below £X.XX, as well as policypolicysleazesmarmpolicypolicy, and I look forward to seeing you all at the polls” I’m no campaign wonk, but if I can workshop an answer whilst shitposting from the treadmill, what’s his excuse?
>I’m no campaign wonk, but if I can workshop an answer whilst shitposting from the treadmill, what’s his excuse? Rich entitled upbringing, and in spite of the fancy schools he attended, not too bright or fast on his feet. PM is a hobby, not something he's serious about. I know bugger all about him, just guessing while playing games.
My old boss was verbally criticizing her new son in law, and said, “He won’t be any kind of decent husband, hell he only makes xxx an hour at his lousy job”. My boss clearly forgot that I was making less than that…
I love the Derry Girls and I asked my husband to watch it with me again cuz I found it really funny. After watching the 1st episode with him, he said "It is funny but I can't relate to their problems with money and food".
"just dip into your trust fund, I do it all the time"
"I asked my mom and turns out we're quite poor." We quote this all of the time now lol
Jenny Joyce will go far in life (but she will not be well-liked).
Used to travel for a glamping company (glamour camping) where we would set up huge canvas tents for fancy weddings and parties. We woke up real early one morning to a bunch of calls from some rich LA socialite about how the tents were wet - no other explanation. We rushed over and it turns out she had no idea what the concept of condensation in the morning was. I can't control nature, sorry lady your not getting your deposit back.
That's not out of touch. That's just plain dumb on her part.
Agreed. There are plenty of poor people who don't understand that concept either. Don't get me wrong, money can buy a good education. Not that having a good education forces that person to actually take in that information. But I grew up poor, like not eating for a day or 2 when school was out poor, and I know condensation is a thing. WTF do they think happens to an iced beverage? The glass is leaking? ETA: Now I'm just imagining someone running over every few minutes to wipe the condensation off.
Well my girlfriend who is from a wealthy background just implied that having a barbecue is “hick”
Guess she's not invited then.
Sounds like she hasn’t tasted real good food yet
I work for a startup based out of San Francisco. I'm a remote employee halfway across the country, and am therefore a sort of 'second class citizen'. My direct peers who work in SF make at least double what I do, and they almost all had extremely privileged upbringings. They went to top 10 business schools, they "summer" in Tahoe, that kind of thing. I was in the home office a few months ago for our annual kickoff meeting, and one of the speakers polled the room: "Has anyone here worked at Amazon?" (nobody raised their hand) "Wow, I'm surprised." I said, "Does warehouse count?" And the entire room erupted in laughter. For certainly, I'd just told a very enjoyable joke.
Reminds me of a teacher I had in high school, she was a princeton grad but got in with a full scholarship, never could have afforded it otherwise. She joked that until she went there, she'd never heard someone use the word summer as a verb before
Oh my god, I did a college tour at Princeton and made the mistake of asking where the dining hall/cafeteria was. I got the lecture on joining dining clubs.
Please elaborate. This is foreign to me.
Princeton has several private clubs that you can join for dining and socializing.
Actually the majority of juniors and seniors do join these clubs- it's important to remember that Princeton doesn't have the equivalent of sorority/fraternity houses that many other campuses do. There's a significant amount of financial aid that makes it pretty comparable to eating in the dorms. They also tend to be pretty mixed ethnically. That said there's definitely a class aspect in some clubs' personalities that crosses races and ethnicities (middle-class/working class strivers vs. those born to wealth) .
Me neither, but I Winter in poverty so turnabout is fair play.
I don’t think I know anyone who is rich rich, but I have a PhD, and most of my colleagues grew up in a more privileged home than I did. I’m the first in my family to have a graduate degree; I worked my ass off at a state school. My dad worked in a factory; my colleagues all assume he was an engineer (he was not). I am one of the few PhDs that I know who has worked a variety of low-wage jobs, including in grad school. It’s a bizarre feeling to have so little in common with your coworkers. When you said your colleagues thought you were joking about working in a warehouse, I felt that in my soul.
I had a peer call me and ask for $5,000 to pitch in to purchase a gift for our manager. I told her there is no way I would do that. I don’t even spend that much on my family combined. She was shocked and told me they already purchased the gift. My response was, well that sucks.
That comment was damn funny even though you were serious. I’m not in the spoiled, entitled group, but your comment was priceless! I’m sorry they were such AH’s.
yeah that's a pretty funny joke regardless if intended as a joke or not and I imagine 9/10 dev teams regardless of socioeconomic status would have laughed. Not sure if OP would have preferred them to sit there stonefaced instead?
The I wana say 12 or 13? year old son of one of my clients literally expressed confusion to me when I asked them where I could get more paper towels from when they ran out in the wash room of his parents however many million dollar yacht. He said something like "Its always there what do you mean?" he was so disconnected from the process of I guess cleaning and restocking that he just thought that stuff would always be there and never run out lol the look of genuine confusion on his face was just something else. Thats not the first time I experienced that either, talking to the kids of extremely wealthy people is always a trip.
That doesn't even take that much money. I know people who barely qualify as upper middle class who have kids so sheltered from the concept of work that they, as teenagers, were amazed at a restaurant where you could see the kitchen. They had never stopped to think how the food for cooked.
I think you would have to come from a pretty wealthy family to not have even seen your parents cook lol.
When we met in our friend group, the rich friend showed us his new expensive winter jacket for 500€+ and from time to time he goes on a shopping haul with his rich dad where he spends 1-2k. One time we confronted him about his bragging and asked him if he didn’t think that his spending for clothes is quite a lot. His answer: „Well… I know some people who spend more and I know some people who spend less - so I think I am average“ Statistics 101
This girl got genuinely angry and offended when people suggested she could take public transportation to the airport instead of paying for a $50 Uber. She posted on social media about it EDIT: The bus they suggested is very convenient and goes directly from our college to the airport, so it’s not like she’d have to drag her luggage from bus line to bus line
I live in a city of 800,000 people and our busses don't go to our airport. It's fucking stupid.
There was a guy who recently gave all his money away and lived on the streets to prove that anyone could earn millions. Then his father died and left him millions. He then stopped living on the streets and claimed to have proved his point. Edit: Spelling.
There was a similar rich dude that wanted to prove "Becoming a millionaire is easy, anyone can do it". So he pretended to have $0 with the goal of making a million in a year. He ended up quitting, retiring back to his mansion, after 10 months due to "health reasons". He also only made about $60,000 in those 10 months.
Rich assholes cosplaying poverty is so infuriating.
"How do you only have one dishwasher?" Imagine their shock when I told them the apartment that I had just moved out of, that I lived in for 14 years, didn't have one at all.
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The same goes for George Harrison's Friar Park estate. People claimed it has 100+ rooms whereas the family are adamant it only has 30 or so.
I've known quite a few people to not realize the benefit they received by just *getting* a house, car, and cost of a degree (sometimes including advanced) from their parents. Much easier to budget when those items are removed from the equation. Even more so when you can get some income from the house.
This! I am a fairly low income single parent but I help my daughter out with car insurance etc because she needs a car to work so that she can pay rent while she studies for her degree. She wouldn’t be able to do what she needs to without a little help here and there. Different scale than buying new cars/city apartments/business ‘loans’ the wealthy give their ‘self-made’ kids but works the same.
I saw this documentary about one of America's most prolific 18th-century slave traders and in an interview with his present-day descendants it was asked if they felt they had benefited from the privilege of their lineage and most said no, that they lived somewhat average lives. Then they were asked where they went to college, and it was all Princeton, Brown and Harvard. And it turned out their average lives were full of property and creative jobs... They just failed to grasp how fortunate their lives were. Just found the [scene here](https://youtu.be/kXdBLeNigbA?si=adUML7b3Ri9p5CMs&t=3926).
I wouldn’t consider this out of touch, but I was definitely amazed. Several years ago I worked at a retail store that sold a lot of different items. I was on the cashier one Friday afternoon when three young women (~early twenties) walked in decked out in luxury brands. They bought a suitcase and several other random items that totaled almost $400. Once I announced the total price, one of them pulled out 4 Benjamin’s like she was pulling out issues and handed them to me without looking. I asked if they were going on a trip. One of them answered “no we got sick of carrying our stuff.” I mean, I get tired carrying stuff too. But damn, to buy a whole suitcase and more just because they were tired was crazy to see.
I was talking to a very rich lady we had just videotaped. She was a board of director at one of the largest oil companies on the planet. She told me she used to summer in Prague. I told her I used to summer in school. I thought that was a damned funny line. But it didn’t even register to her. She was just confused on how that had anything to do with what she said.
During a dinner party we started talking about our experiences in high school. I mentioned the diversity of my large 6A school and that almost half the student population was on free or reduced lunch. A woman who had grown up privileged in the San Fransico area absolutely burst out laughing and thought I was joking. She said "free or reduced lunch!!?? WHY?? What, they couldn't afford food?" It got real quiet and real awkward when I explained, yes, that's exactly what happens in public school. She had only attended private school (kindergarten through grad school).
I was working at a car dealership and saw the owner pull up in a $250k Porsche GT3. Told him how much I loved the car and dreamt of owning one someday. Owner looked at me confused and said "what do you mean? We sell them right here you know?" Totally blew my mind that he didn't realize his employees couldn't afford the cars they were selling.
One of the best articles i’ve ever read about the difference between multi-millionaire and billionaires was a profile on THE top private jet salesman in the entire world, a guy who was obsessed with private jets out of sheer love for aviation and engineering, who’d done well enough to amass a net worth of $80 million. The kicker in this fantastically written articles was about how despite the fact that this salesman now had a fortune that would be totally inconceivable to 99.99%+ of people, he was still *nowhere near* having the amount of money where it would make financial sense for him to justify owning his own private plane. This is the problem with extreme wealth inequality at the highest levels: when you’re worth $100 million, your *entire community* — basically every single person you interact with outside of service staff — is either as rich as you are or richer. If you’re worth $100 million and you only hang out with billionaires, *you quickly start to genuinely believe that you’re poor.*
Can confirm. My old boss sold his business for about $50m, had a small private jet while he owned the business (Cessna CJ3)…immediately after selling the business, he had to sell the jet. He had no concept how expensive it was to actually OWN a jet.
I used to teach at a very expensive private school. This school went all the way through from kindergarten to high school. I had to give some students, who were about 9 years old, a ride in my car one time. A spoilt set of twins, in particular, couldn't understand why my car was so old and "poor looking". Adults are apparently supposed to have new expensive cars. "My dad is an adult and he drives a Rolls Royce. He gets a new car every year. You should get a new car too. Why don't you buy a new car?". When I tried to explain that I was still in my first year of teaching and had only finish uni last year so didn't really have money yet, the response was "but our dad has always had new cars. Even when he was at university". On another occasion, one of them smashed her brand new iPhone on purpose to prove to other students her dad would buy her a new one.
Once had a college age coworker explain to a bunch of us in EMS try to explain that his family wasn’t “that rich” because they “only have a beach house, not a summer house” and then explained the difference between the two. Another coworker then went to pull up his apartment complex, and pointed out the trailer park next door. Rich coworker then remarked that it must be nice to live next to a storage facility (referring to the trailer park). He didn’t believe us when we explained that people lived in those trailers. He thought that was only something that happened on reality TV shows. We all hoped that inner city EMS would help bring him back down to earth, but it had no effect.
At a high-end kids clothing resale store called Once Upon a Child. The store only buys Nike, adidas or other well-known brand name kids clothes, and only kids clothes. Everything must be new or barely worn or they won't buy it, usually when you bring in a bunch of stuff for them to buy they'll only buy 10% of what you bring in. I once saw them say no to a beautiful custom made dress that an Indian couple had spent $300 on for their only-child daughter, the reason was that it wasn't a brand name. So. At that store, some Mom was selling a bunch of clothes and finding out what the store was taking and for how much. Her 8 year old had wandered off into the store and came back with something she wanted to buy. Mom: "No sweetie, we don't shop here, we only come here so poor people have nice things to buy"
Jeez, what bougie 'Once Upon a Child' do you visit? Ours isn't that snooty.
Thank you, lol. Once Upon a Child stores weren’t always in the fancy towns iirc.
I think they might be franchised. The one by me was picky, but not that picky. They wanted gently used, and a lot of kids clothes are worse off than that.
>They wanted gently used, and a lot of kids clothes are worse off than that. Yeah, "once upon a child" not "twice in the thunderdome." lol. When I was kid a lot of our pants would end up looking like the "distressed" jeans people pay extra money for now.
Rich friend- “Just take Friday off work and fly out to visit me this weekend, I know it’s last minute but I’m sure there’s seats available.” Me- “Ahh I don’t think I can make this weekend.” Rich friend- “Oh yeah I looked and saw it was only coach available, don’t be embarrassed, I don’t blame you for not wanting to sit next to “them”” Me thinking- “does this guy truly think that’s why?? Lol I just earn average money…”
On a similar note, we were shunned for not coming out to a birthday dinner party. It was hundreds of dollars per person. Would have been the most expensive meal we'd ever eaten and we wouldn't have made rent.
If your struggling financially you could just cancel your Disney plus
What's that gonna save? Like 1 banana a month?!
“Why can’t you just get a new couch? It’s almost time for summer furniture anyway.”
"How poor can someone really be if they have a refrigerator in heir home"?
I mean, refrigeration is a miracle of modern times. I love mine.
I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost? 10 dollars?
Rich kid (who is a super nice guy) wanted to go drinking with my buddy. My buddy said he didn't have any money. The rich kid said "No problem, we'll stop at a bank machine on the way there." The concept of having 'no money' didn't even register. The rich kid thought that my buddy just didn't have any money in his wallet.
"$350,000 a year is not enough to live." This was my canker sore of an uncle-in-law three years ago complaining that if he's not making close to a million a year, he can't "live" as it won't cover "the basics". He also lacked the self-awareness to realize he's the only person on his payroll making over $100,000 / year. If he can't make it on $350k / year then what does he think his employees do?
thinking we are still living on the 2k checks we got 4 years ago
[When McDonalds put out an employee budget](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2013/07/18/why-mcdonalds-employee-budget-has-everyone-up-in-arms/) You know the $100 for car insurance or the $20 in medical...
An old rich titled landowner complained that he didn't have as much power and prestige as his ancestors. He hated that a mere bank manager, a *commoner*, had more power and respect in a small rural town than him. He yearned for the good old days where his family basically ruled the area and us commoners knew who our masters were. His equally wealthy landowning relative thought the same. His solution was to control local politics and politicians. He made sure everything happened to his advantage. He used that power to make sure that his hand-picked men were given council related jobs, even if it meant firing the people already in those jobs. I knew a family who lost their home because of him.
My friend has a charity and these wealthy folks took him out to dinner to talk about the work he does. When it came down to making a donation (of any amount) they were hesitant on whether to give. The bill for dinner came to the table and it was like $1500 and they just dropped their amex card like it was no big deal.
Owner of the company I used to work for was a car guy. His daily driver was a giant, fully kitted out Chevy Tahoe (that he rarely drove more than just himself in) and he also owned a ferrari, one or two Mercedes, and a Jaguar I think. Specific models I don't know, I just know they were pricy. One day after I had worked there for a couple years, he came to our office in NorCal and tossed me the fob to his Tahoe and said I need you to drive this down to Paso Robles (our office on the Central Coast, about a 5 hour drive, where he is based out of). When I asked how I would get home, he said he would make sure I get taken care of. When I asked how he would get back home, he said, "my Ferrari that I'm picking up from the shop." Later in the day I asked him to show me where his windshield wiper controls were since rain was expected during my drive. He said it's all automatic, and when I asked how that works, he goes, "How old is your car?" Very nice guy that gave out generous bonuses every year but he was pretty out of touch with us normies.
Gwyneth Paltrow talking about how her lifestyle brand Goop caters to the "common woman" with items including the $595.00 hoodie, $625.00 cardigan, $720.00 v-neck top and $66 egg shaped vagina jade rock.
When they claim that it's not the money that made them happy.
“Money won’t make you happy” Well it’ll sure as shit put a stop to some things that make me unhappy.
Doctor told me to work with my personal trainer to figure out a routine that wouldn't make my chronic autoimmune disorder worse. I asked if he was going to cover the cost of a personal trainer out of his own pocket bc insurance sure as shit won't cover it and I've never been able to hold a job in my entire adult life because of said chronic autoimmune disorder. Dude was SHOCKED poor people exist and one was in his office.
I'm on social security due to chronic illness atm. Went to the orthopedist because of pain. It was winter. She said cycling would help my hip pain and to just get an e-bike, they're fun to use! And so easy, I might even lose a few pounds! When I told her there is no way with my financial situation she looked dejected for a few seconds before suggesting to wish for one for Christmas from my family. I still don't own an e-bike.
A lot of doctors come from wealthy families. Many of them never had a job prior to becoming a doctor. Meaning they went to high school, went to college, went to medical school, without ever working, and their first job was residency. Meaning for some of them surgeon was their first job.
When our multimillionaire CEO made us say "thank you" for the napkins provided in our staff meeting bc someone else in the company bought us pizza and mgmt was kind enough to furnish the napkins.
my coworker argued with me when i told him $20,000 would be life changing for me and my family, because it wouldn’t be life changing for his. i think he thinks everybody has a rich dad that gives them money. i work at this job literally to survive and he works there because his dad told him he needed to get a job to keep getting his “allowance”. 🙃
A really rich kid I worked with (well, he was like maybe 25 or 26) was out to dinner with us on a work event. He ordered a bottle of wine from the Sommelier and the Sommelier indicated he no longer had that vintage but he had a similar vintage. He also explained, politely, the cost delta. The first bottle was going to be $750 and the new bottle would be $825. Rich kid looks around the table and asks “…is that a lot?” Our boss just said “not if you’re buying. But if I’m buying you better pick something else.” I’ve told this story before on Reddit but it’s still one of my favorite examples.
At least he had the awareness to look around and ask. I am way more willing to forgive ignorance if one has some understanding that they are ignorant.
Me and my ex were struggling financially when we first got married. I made enough to pay the bills, but there was nothing extra. She decided to enroll in school, and when she was filling out the FAFSA for financial aid, she asked me what my adjusted gross income was for the previous year. I have always done my own taxes, but at the time always threw the paperwork away when I was done, so I had no idea what it was. Our friend who was at our house at the time came from a very wealthy family who owned a hotel chain, had government contracts, etc. Without a second thought, he said just call your accountant, they’ll have it. He was baffled by the fact that having a personal accountant isn’t something everyone has. Blew his mind.
I was telling a cute girl I met at a friend's birthday about a boom I was reading (The Zanzibar Chest.) It was about a British journalist whose father was some minor colonial official. The journalist traveled extensively as part of his dad's work and his own. I mentioned wanting to travel to less popular destinations (always wanted to go to Mongolia - my grandfather got lost in the desert there once and it was a wild story). Her response was that I should just enjoy my life and go. I know lots of people who travel a lot so the advice was not that outlandish bit I mentioned family I was taking care of, things I needed to save for and not having flexibility at work. It became a point of contention like "no, you just have to say fuck it and go. Your family will understand." My grandfather had late stage Alzheimers and we were taking care of him at home - he didn't know my name much less understand things.