It was, but I’m kinda pissed about the damn Pterodactyls.
Aw, I thought it was kinda charming. My kids have a rec room (with television) and we always have plenty of food in the house. Friends are quite welcome. I hope they grow up feeling a sense of wealth, in the figurative if not literal sense.
I also liked your remark about keeping possessions at a minimum.
Good luck with dental school.
I would disagree with Groo’s version of the world. People’s ability to make money is generally going to fall on a bell curve. Training, education, etc. can help or it can hinder this. Lack of training, education, etc. can help or hinder this. That basically balances out so that you still end up with a bell curve, though perhaps a bit wider one. Of course, since the only way to make money is by working in a hierarchy–and any hierarchy has more people at the bottom than the top–it ends up as a skewed bell curve.
Any position does tug at its children to some extent. The wealthy can pay for better education, they have more contacts, and they can show their children what tricks they have learned to win by. The poor can’t send their children to school, bog them down with their own debts, and teach them to distrust schooling and banks–giving them all the wrong lessons. Those in the middle class can only afford middle-quality schools, they might teach some of the right lessons to their kids, some of the wrong. But still, the natural order will be to gather about the middle so being born poor or rich, you’ll still generally end up further towards normalcy than your parents.
Sage Rat - I meant to wave back earlier. I don’t remember much about your background except for the dog. 
Would you mind speaking in broad terms about how old you are, where you went to university, degree level, and what you do for a living (or to keep busy)?
I worked at Lehman Brothers for a year in Hong Kong. The sales people and management were about 90% East Coast prep school/ivy league background. There were a few West Pointers thrown in (and I suspect largely because they spoke Korean) and the rest like me came with experience from other firms. It was very clear that the kids recruited out of the Ivy League had a 5 year advantage over those that didn’t. The Ivy Leaguers were recruited with a good package, had training programs, mentoring programs, and a lot of investment by the firm into them becoming successful… It was definately a restricted club where outside memberships were rare and bar about 10x higher. I certainly didn’t fit that culture. The other investment banks I worked at or knew well were much much much more a free market meritocracy. The Ivy League would definately help get you in the door but was not the only determiner, and once you were in the door it was a purely swimming with the sharks meritocracy.
In investment banking, the bell curve will definately be skewed toward the wealthy end of the spectrum. There are not many people from a poor background that make into the fast track at a bank. There are plenty of them that do the tertiary support jobs for 30 years and do better than the average American money-wise but will never make it into the high flying club.
I’m thirty. My dad’s dad was an appliance repairman and his mom was a sales clerk and house wife. My mom’s dad was a government worker inspecting fruit and farms, and her mom was a housewife.
My parents started a business just after I was born and by the time I was in middle school, it was a multinational, publicly traded company with about a thousand employees.
Outside of education (university), a car which I got after I graduated from university, and some help buying a condo, I haven’t received any money. But on the other hand, this did allow me to never have to be paying back student, car, or house payments, so this is hardly insubstantial.
I went to university in Japan because I felt that four more years of liberal arts education in the US would just be a retread, so I may as well get something out of it. The choice of Japan was basically just that it would be the most challenging.
I taught myself how to program during spring and summer break of my third year of university from books. (My school had no classes in computers beyond how to work a mouse and open a browser.) Before I graduated, I decided that I would go back to the US for a year, work as a programmer, and then return to Japan and enter animation school.
I returned shortly after 9/11 and couldn’t get a job, so ended up spending a year writing a book and doing small jobs for my uncle. Once I did get a job, it came to be that I’m such a cheap liver that (without any school/car payments), I only used about 1/4th of my salary each month. After working for a year and a half, I had enough money to go to Japan and live for 3-4 years plus pay my way through animation school (a two year program.)
Being a trade school, though, I wasn’t eligible for a student visa, so I had to continue working part time as a programmer on a work visa. I was getting up around 7am, going to school until 2pm. Work until 11 or midnight. Get home between midnight and 1am. Then I still had homework. After about a year, I burnt out and physically couldn’t get up in the mornings, so that my attendance at school kept decreasing until eventually I had all but quit. I had a two year contract with my programming job though, so I finished that out, but never really recovered.
After I got back to the US, I slept for about 6 months, and since then have been working on a software package by myself at home and working a part time job. The money that I earned from my first job never really got touched since I was working the whole time I was living in Japan. Between that, my part time job, and my naturally cheap living, I’m set to carry on as I am more-or-less indefinitely. Hopefully I’ll be able to start a small business once my software package is done–but it’s a sufficiently large project that I’ll still be at least another year working on it.
I realize this is a rather dumb example, but I’m going to toss it in anyhow. A few years ago, before The Apprentice totally jumped the shark, they had a Street Smarts vs Book Smarts edition. I know that editing and whatever played a part in the perceptions of the contestants, but you could just tell which camp a person fell into. I remember threads here on SDMB about the female contestants’ hair and that was one giveaway—the contestants from better backgrounds just had a more polished look.
Agreed.
But deserved.
Seriously? Well I have a summer home, dawling! Yes, but I’m an investment wanker. Really, how droll, I’ll be making a gazillion as a dentist. Pshaw, Daddy gave me more than that for college pocket money.
I went to this school, I lived here, I do this, I’ll make this much. What a wankfest.
You deserve every bit and then some more, in my opinion.
lindsay, sweetheart, what color Bentley did your parents end up getting?
You don’t need to hurry up and answer—Hope I don’t come off as bragging, but I have an ENTIRE ROOM in my home dedicated to watching TV or listening to music (God has truly blessed our family) so I will be busy for a while…
I have not read the entire thread yet- so I hope this has not yet been addressed…
And truly, lindsay, this is NOT meant to be a threadshit, but upon reading this, and reflecting back on your previous posts, I think I see a trend that I noticed in myself as a young child…
I thought I was raised in priviledge and luxury because I got everything I had ever thought to ask for, and I was extremely well educated. I was a spoiled brat, due to my every whim being given. However, my parents were simply middle class in a very poor town when I was young, and my tastes had never been rarified with my schoolmates and as we hadn’t had a television, I didn’t get enticed by much, so it was easy to give me anything I wished, and not strain the budget.
I did, however, have to break myself of some extremely offensive spoiled behavior as a young adult because of it, after we moved into a large city, and I had to adjust to coping with luxuries, and/or the perceived lack of them being given to me…
Later in life, my mother once reflected that she should have raised me more in line with my friends’ standards of living, but it was ingrained in my parents to save after their own childhoods.
And some of my friends are/were indeed middle upper, while we were firmly middle middle…
So I guess I am sort of saying I see you as being spoiled, slightly, but without reason- you just seem to have gotten whatever you tried for/asked for…
I like you, don’t get me wrong- and this is of course, just MHO…
What the definition of growing up as the child of wealth? Try the 16 year old (two years befroe he can drive) whose father buys him a $700,000 car, whose other car is a chaffeur driven Bentley, or the guy that owns a $5 million limited edition roadster.
That’s when you start to talk money.
Though we do allow zombies now, the OP asks that this one be closed, and I’m happy to do so.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator