If you were rich, you could have underclothes of your very own.
But you’re right. It’s clear that each of the Roy children are obscenely wealthy from their allotted Waystar Royco shares. But rather than just enjoy being rich or even just pursuing a career they might actually enjoy and be good at, they spend 4 seasons vying for control of the company. As far as I can recall, at almost no point in the show does any of them show the slightest interest or inclination for the actual operations of a global multimedia corporation.
You know what bothers me about portrayals of wealth in fiction. Like when rich people are shown wearing suits in their own home in the middle of the day. Even if the character is meant to be a super-powerful CEO, who are you wearing the suit for and why? Your household staff? In case some client or arch rival decides to show up at your home? Go throw on some $1000 pullover sweater and jeans or something.
I don’t think wealth management needs to be headache-inducing unless you’re tediously focused on maximizing wealth generation. If you already have great wealth, then you don’t need to do that, unless further accumulation of wealth happens to be a hobby you enjoy.
When you say “great wealth”, how much money did you have in mind? Even if it’s $100M, you could simply invest it in a dozen different stocks, or better yet, mutual funds, and just have the dividends deposited to your checking account for your living expenses. Not particularly complicated.
Having vast wealth doesn’t require you to accumulate material goods, or buy a 20,000-square-foot home, or multiple homes around the country. It certainly removes all of the financial obstacles, which would be really nice; but after that, it’s up to the wealthy person to make well-considered decisions as to whether buying a thing will make their life better or not. The wisdom you hear these days is to buy experiences, not material things, and wealth certainly opens that door. You enjoy traveling? Cool, fly first class and stay in the expensive hotel that includes an array of luxurious amenities and is positioned within stumbling distance of the attractions you want to see. There’s a bit of crossover too in that nice material things can, to some extent, facilitate more fulfilling experiences. Back to traveling: go get the best suitcases money can buy, instead of putting up with the cheaper ones that don’t have the features that would make your trip more enjoyable.
I think it was @LSLGuy who pointed out in another thread that being wealthy means not having to waste your time. The most obvious way this comes into play is that working at a job is no longer any kind of requirement, which frees up a good 50 hours each week.
There are, however, a lot of other ways that money buys you time. My wife and I got a small taste of this earlier this year. When we fly somewhere, we normally park our car at an off-site parking facility near the airport, then take a shuttle bus from the lot to the terminal. When we fly back, we have to:
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wait at the airport in a noisy, cold, exhaust-fumed area for the shuttle bus. Sometimes this takes 10 minutes, and sometimes there are so many people waiting ahead of us that we don’t even make it on the first bus.
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take a 10-minute ride on a crowded rattletrap of a shuttle bus to the parking lot.
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wait until several people get dropped at their cars before we get dropped at ours, another 10-15 minutes.
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trundle across the giant parking lot and then wait in line to pay at the exit booth, maybe another 10 minutes in all, and then finally start driving home.
Not a huge thing in the greater scheme of a vacation, but when you’re severely jet-lagged and just want to get home and lie down in your own bed, it feels like eternity.
On our most recent trip, for logistical reasons it made sense to hire a Metro Car to take us home from the airport. We scheduled/paid ahead of time. After our flight arrived, we walked to the ground transit center, found the Metro Car counter, and told the clerk who we were. He immediately walked us just outside the door to where our car and driver were waiting just for us; the driver loaded our luggage, and we were on our way. Gotta say, that felt pretty nice.
For really rich folks, this extends to the flight itself: they don’t wait for their plane, they hire a private plane and it waits for them, departing as soon as they’re on board. No stress over whether they’re going to get to the airport in time, no padding their leave-from-home time to account for the uncertainty of traffic jams or long lines at TSA, no puttering around the terminal looking at overpriced crap just to kill time because there turned out to be no traffic. Same thing on the return trip: no waiting for your luggage at baggage claim, no waiting in line at customs/immigration. How nice would that be?
Even if you don’t go as far as hiring a private plane for travel, being wealthy can save you time by not having to shop around for the cheapest airfare or hotel (or cheapest anything, for that matter). Just find the flight/hotel reservation that best meets your travel needs, click purchase, and you’re done. Need a new car, but you’re not interested in a $400,000 Aston Martin? That’s fine - pick the car you do want, with exactly the features you do want - even if it’s just a basic $27,000 Camry - and sign on the dotted line; don’t worry about haggling or playing one dealer off of another to try to get a price break, just buy the car and get back to living your life. Basically, think of every occasion on which you’ve ever spent time trying to save money, and flip it around: now you spend your money to save time.
So yes, I’d like to be rich enough to not have to be care about the price of things - to get the things I really want without having to think about cost, and to freely trade my money for time instead of the other way around. Maybe I’m fortunate in that I’m not the sort of person who would try to buy the most expensive thing available just because I can. My wife and I started our adult lives as skinflint college students; we’re now middle-aged, and as our financial situation has grown more and more comfortable over the years, we’ve loosened our purse strings and allowed ourselves to enjoy better material things and experiences, but we’re firmly middle-class: we still pay attention to price and have no trouble living far within our means. From where we are now, I don’t foresee us ever being financially insecure, but we will still have to pay attention to maintain that condition for the rest of our lives. It would be nice to be able to let our guard down and know that we can’t ever outspend our wealth unless we make a concerted effort to do so.
You better believe I’ve dreamed of it. Not for all stuff I could buy, but to be able to pay off all of my bills, help out my daughter and her family and my other grandkids. I would like to take a few trips, buy my modest dream home and then just live a stress-free life.
Uh, yeah. But Jay Leno, like Bill Harrah did before, ain’t collecting them for themselves (although Jay does seem to enjoy them now and then). They are preserving important works of … call it what you want, Art, Science, Technology… for future generations to enjoy. So, Rock on Jay! Get a few more. Lord knows I’d love him to take a few of mine just to know they were well cared for.
He don’t respond to my emails. Neither did Billy Gibbons.
I’m of two minds on Leon’s car collecting; he is doing something he clearly loves, and doing it on an epic scale. What good is being rich if you can’t? (Though I’d have been more like Seinfeld, collecting Porsches.)
But also it’s got to be cumbersome. I had a small 3-car collection and it got annoying after months, despite me loving the cars. They take up physical and mental real estate and that leads to diminishing returns on enjoying them. Especially in Leno’s case, where’s he made his hobby a job. Finding time to drive them has to be even tougher when you have to take a camera crew and chase car along.
With my wife and my background in business and finance, I think I’d much rather be spending my working time managing my own wealth than advising Wall Street banks on improving their systems and operations for managing other people’s wealth.
I recall a scene in Succession where Tom is telling Greg how $5 million sucks because you are kind of rich, but can’t really do anything with it. Or the scene in Wall Street where Gordon Gekko is explaining the difference between a “Wall Street working stiff earning $400k a year, comfortably, and flying first class” and being a “real player”.
Although I think I’d be happy just being comfortable and not having to work on anything I don’t want to work on as well as not having my wife stressed out over work and finances. I don’t need master of the universe powers beyond my own little sphere of influence.
I have to say, it is pretty nice having enough money that you don’t have to care about money for most normal upper middle class stuff. Although every now and then I do find myself getting concerned about the occasional big expense. Like a few weeks ago, I had to shell out a bunch of money at the dentist and then we took the family to an expensive steak house for dinner. My wife’s like
“what are you all annoyed about?”
“I’m annoyed because I just spent over $2,000 on a combination of teeth and expensive meet to chew with those teeth!”
Around our house the recent comment has been, “So yer saving up for a more expensive casket?”
It is a weird position to be in, after a lifetime of frugality, to realize that a grand - or 10 - here or there isn’t going to affect any aspect of how you live your life or what estate you leave.
I found this true for my main hobbies as well: Motorcycles, cycling, and guitar/bass/uke. I end up with too many and there is more overhead to keep them going, more storage, more dead batteries, etc. I’m trying to scale down to just what I need for all. For cycling, that means three bikes: Road, mountain, and commuting. For moto, that means two: Touring and dual-sport (dual-sport functions as my in town putting around). Guitar is the tough one since I have acoustics and electrics guitars, ukes, and electric basses (resisting the urge to get an acoustic bass - I don’t have a real need). A couple I’ve had for decades that are sentimental but I don’t really play…those are the ones I need to let go.
As far as this topic goes, I think in the past when I was extremely poor, in debt, and living paycheck to paycheck I definitely dreamed of having money. Now that I have it, I’m not rich but I think I have more than I need and I can afford to buy stuff for the hobbies I listed above, but I don’t want more stuff. We’ve lived over 15 years with one four wheeled vehicle and it is enough for us even though sometimes it would be nice to have two. I want to simplify my life and having more stuff doesn’t help with that.
Sure, when I was young. And I guess if you have a lot of money when you’re young, there is more to spend it on than when you’re older. We’re not rich, but at our age have more money than it’s likely we will ever spend. The combination of reasonably good health and excellent health insurance means there shouldn’t be any large outlays of cash necessary. We traveled a lot during our working years, so don’t have that urge. We did the RV thing, so no 40’ behemoth in our future. We write checks to our progeny each year, as they need it more than we do. It beats being poor, which I have also been in my life.
I remember the former, don’t recall the latter. Wall Street was in theatres in 1987, when $400K was the equivalent of about $1M today. That’d be a damn nice salary, I’d say.
The scenes you describe neatly illustrate the difference between merely being rich and doing the kind of things that rich people stereotypically do, e.g. living like kings/queens, pursuing business/political power, rubbing elbows with obnoxious high-society types, or trying to accrue more wealth. It’s possible to be the former without having to engage in any of the latter, and I think some people in this thread have missed that distinction.
This is a difficult discussion to have without defining “rich.”
Who was it who said there’s a difference between being a pro ballplayer rich and being a pro ball team owner rich?
I think the point is that it’s a nice salary if you just want to work for a couple of years, buy a modest house, then live off the interest. Gordon is talking about enough money where you are playing, if not running the game. Not sitting on the sideline.
You don’t have to be rich to do that, just comfortably retired. I love only working on stuff I want to, even though I totally enjoyed what I worked on my last five years at work.
Understood - and I think the former, rather than the latter, is what many/most of the people in this thread aspire to.
Chris Rock said:
Shaq [NBA basketball player, Shaquille O’Neal] Is Rich but the White Man Who Signs His Check Is Wealthy
Thanks. That’s especially true today, when major league teams sell for billions so you need to already be a billionaire if you want to become an owner.
These days, Shaq is worth over $400 million, which definitely qualifies as “wealthy”.
And you don’t need to be a billionaire to own a major sports team. You can work your way up from being a successful Hollywood movie star and entrepreneur like Ryan Reynolds!
Yeah, I guess it’s all relative.
My wife’s cousin married this guy who’s part owner of a major NBA team. Nice guy. Thanks to him we got to watch a few games from the owners box, which is really cool. But I also recall his daughter bugging him about getting Jay-Z to play her birthday after seeing him on an episode of MySuperSweet16 on MTV. His response was “no” but something led me to believe that this was not as absurd a request as it would be for most other people.
Rich people problems.