Explain how rich people think

In My Humble Opinion
101

From the perspective of the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Steve Jobs of the world, YES. I believe that is a good way of looking at it. They have developed so much wealth, power, and influence through their success that on some level everyone else looks like a lazy, passionless, wage slave.

I would also imagine that as you become accustomed to the luxury wealth provides, it becomes a necessity. For example…

For those people, not showing up to dinner in a tuxedo or dinner jacket or whatever the dress code would appear as absurd as leaving the house wearing a trash bag with holes cut for your arms and head.

I think that’s what happens with extreme wealth. You become so disconnected from every day people stuff that you can’t relate. Even worse, you have so much power and influence over so many people’s lives that you don’t often know (or care) how your decisions may impact them.

102

Okay. I think there are plenty of gradations along the RICH/POOR scale, including wage slaves who tell themselves that they are dedicated to pushing the minimum wage button 12,000 times a day the very best way they know how and want to perform that task until the day they die.

103

In my late teens I knew a cat that retired from McDonalds. Older Italian immigrant, did all the stock-work/maintenance/major janitorial chores. A second career I’m sure and obviously he “retired” with absolutely no benefits from that gig (but got some mild recognition and a paid vacation trip). But no harder worker or more dedicated employee I’ve ever met.

104

Elon Musk presumably also likes traveling, reading, maybe even gardening and painting too. Difference is he gets to do that on a $30 million superyacht. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

I’m not sure what that has to do with the topic of “how rich people think”?

I would imagine that most rich people don’t see the honor in being someone’s hardest working and most dedicated minimum wage employee (unless maybe it’s one of theirs). Can’t say I do either.

105

Very little, really. Just that comment by slicedalone made me think of him. ‘Stream of consciousness posting.’

Eh, well I’d say you may have a slight issue with classism :slight_smile:. I mean would the opposite of honorable be dishonorable? I can’t apply it to that guy. He worked hard and got by doing a job with a set routine that wasn’t too much for old bones and where his shitty English wasn’t a glaring disadvantage. I see nothing inherently honorable about being say, a CFO, either. Certainly some of them are contemptible shitheels, they very opposite of honorable.

106

I don’t believe many wealthy people are “honorable” beyond what that are required to present to the world to meet societal norms. But what I mean to say is I don’t think many rich people care how hard the old McDonalds worker works because his job is beneath them. Although I could envision some wealthy people using that as an example for other poor people to emulate - basically shut up and just bust your ass at your crappy job like this guy.

107

We know he likes depositing his genetic material on very possible orifice he trips over, including ones whose owners might be employed by him or have a relationship with his best friend and the forgetting that he left something behind. He likes that a lot.

What is it someone said? He can’t remember how many children he has had, so he can’t be certain whether at least one of them might actually not dislike him.

108

I had to look up Elon Musk’s family situation. I didn’t realize he had 10 kids from 3 different moms. Of course, Elon is worth $200 billion. He could spend a billion just having people raise his kids for him.

Meanwhile I’m stuck walking my two onetuplets to school myself like a jerk!

109

I don’t think I’ve seen this viewpoint mentioned: some people do X obsessively not because they enjoy it, but because not doing it makes them feel sick/disgusted/bad. I’ve been reading about phycology recently and came across this. I don’t have the expertise to properly describe it, but some people are motivated by a visceral feeling of disgust if they don’t endlessly pursue something.

I’ve seen this behavior mostly in non-rich people, but I don’t see why it can’t apply to at least a percentage of them. A lot of neat-freaks display this way of thinking & acting. In their minds everything’s crawling with germs and dirt and they don’t feel right until they’ve scrubbed & organized it all away. They don’t enjoy the cleaning process, it doesn’t earn them any income or a status boost, but it’s a relief after they’ve accomplished their daily ritual of creating some order out of chaos.

You can spot that style of thinking in money-making as well; those who harp on being hyper productive just because… it’s feels wrong not to do so. The opportunities are just sitting right there… why wouldn’t you take that contract / make that investment / harvest that field? All those wasted opportunities people just let float past. Such people are motivated to avoid mental discomfort rather than seek pleasure in what they do.

I knew a retired farmer who told me the story of how his wife had to force him to stop farming. He still lived on the family farm and had 2 grown sons who also lived there and had taken over most of the operations, but he still did some things because… ?.. they needed to be done (at that moment, in this order, by him, the right way, etc), that’s why! . Finally one spring in his 70’s he was getting dressed to go out and start plowing the field when his wife had to yell him down to leave it for the kids to do. In his mind:

It’s springtime,
I’m a farmer,
This is a farm,
That’s a field,
It’s needs to be worked up,
The tractor is sitting there,

= why would I sit on my butt reading the newspaper and watch the work not get done?

Superimpose that mind-set onto a rich person:

I’m an investment guy,
I have excess money sitting around,
I see an opportunity to double it,
Nobody else is doing it right now,
why wouldn’t I take advantage of the opportunity?

A way to think of it might be like bringing home a bag of ripe cherries or other perishable food you really like (analogous to working for a lifetime), eating your fill of it (analogous to planning/investing/retiring with just what you need), and the feeling you get watching the remaining food slowly spoil and rot day after day sitting on the counter (analogous to not working and watching opportunities you’ve previously worked to have access to now go unused or wasted). It just feels wrong to not do something about that food sitting there.

And for a certain percentage of those who just can’t let an easy money-making opportunity go, it probably feels just as head-shaking to not keep making money. Especially since they’ve worked themselves into that little privileged niche of having access to the best opportunities and contacts everyone else wishes they had.

110

You know, there is a possibility that the person is trying to create generational wealth so their family is taken care of 2, 3, 4, 5 … generations out. Some people may think they should hand out $100,000 to every homeless person but there is nothing wrong (IMO) with ensuring your family is taken care of for the next 100 years.

111

I’m just curious… the one “rich” person I know well is my uncle, and he’s happy as a clam. He built his own construction company from the ground up, and has been very successful through the decades by hard work and some luck. If I had to guess, he’s probably got a total net worth in the 5-15 million range including his company, and probably brings home a couple of million a year in profit.

FWIW, he loves what he does. He’s in his 80s, and still shows up to work and seriously works. Not because he has to; he could have retired 30 years ago easily. He does it because he enjoys it more than whatever hobbies he’d be doing at home. That’s not to say that he doesn’t do anything else, or that he prioritizes work ahead of say… hunting trips, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc… but that day-to-day, he’d rather work than sit at home and watch TV or whatever else a wealthy 85 year old might do.

I suspect a lot of the billionaires are a lot like him- they’d rather work because they enjoy it, than go do other stuff all the time.

I feel like your previous experience with poverty have made you a bit more sensitive to and aware of financial insecurity. Most people (IMO) aren’t perpetually running scared- they know how much they make, and the smart ones sock a good amount away for adverse events. But that doesn’t mean that they actually worry about it on a regular basis.

I mean, I’ve never been poor, but I’ve never been particularly wealthy either. I’ve never had that “I have to hoard and pinch every last cent, because the bottom could drop out” kind of feeling. At worst, I’ve had less saved than I was comfortable with, or had less income than what would afford me the lifestyle I wanted. But never some sort of constant paranoia about what could happen.

I think that’s a good point. Why shouldn’t people want to create generational wealth? That’s how most families move from poverty to working class, and from there upward.

112

I guess I don’t really get this “generational” wealth thing, as far as I can tell it’s just a handout to future generations who may or may not deserve it. Which would be the opposite of the what the person generating the initial wealth stood for in the first place, creating your own wealth. Sure, the first generation of kids may “deserve something” but future generations that you don’t even know? That’s just ego to think that your future offspring are automatically deserving.

113

Well, I would argue it’s pretty ingrained in terms of evolution to ensure your genetic legacy endures. Not saying that’s the way it always should be, but I imagine there’s a biological instinct to take care of your progeny (I say as I plan for my two year old’s college education.) My kid is growing up with a lot more privilege than I had, and it’s hard to know how to strike that balance between making his life too easy and just preventing some of the biggest burdens that tend to affect someone’s well being over a lifetime. Like my kid is never going to have to worry about keeping his heat on in the winter. He’s never going to have to pay for gas by scouring the front seat of his car for loose change. And we are trying like hell to make it so that he never has to drop his life and go into debt to take care of us when we’re old. I think it can be a problem to just dump a bunch of money on someone incapable of being a good steward of that money, but we’re hoping to equip him with the skills needed to manage whatever he inherits someday.

There is really something to that Rich Dad, Poor Dad thing. People who have lived in poverty or close to it think differently about money than rich people do. My husband wasn’t exactly rich growing up but his father comes from a very wealthy family. So his grandparents paid for his private high school and college at what at the time was the most expensive public university in the country. They set him up with some investments. And his father taught him things about money that to me almost felt like speaking a different language at times. So he came into adulthood knowing how to make money. And understanding how easy it is to make more money once you have it.

Me, on the other hand… When I first met him, I had no intention of paying for my future kids’ college because I was taught that children should be financially independent from the day they turn 18. (In my case, sooner.) To get support was shameful. Also debt was always, always bad, unless it was school debt (Oh, Mom, if only you had known how much the cost of education would increase, you would have never given me that advice.) I attended the same university as my husband with a slew of scholarships and financed trying to fit in with other students’ upper middle class life with credit cards. I was a mess. And I can’t blame my Mom too much, she at least tried to get me to save money. But even at her best, she didn’t understand money the way rich people understand it.

So there are extremes, right? There’s tossing out your kid on their 18th birthday and there’s ensuring they never have to struggle for anything. If you pass money on, you kind of have to be a wise king or queen, preparing future generations to manage wealth and the requisite power, without taking it for granted, squandering it, or using it solely for selfish ends.

I read recently that 73% of people receiving student loan forgiveness plan to spend the extra money on vacation and eating out. Obviously they can do whatever they want with it, but that surprised me. Because my plan with it is to use the reduced principle to get farther ahead on the loan with the same payment. But I had to be taught to think that way.

It gets easier with time, I guess. I’m still not over the “all debt is bad” belief. But I finally figured out I don’t have to do either/or, I can save/invest AND pay down debt if I feel like it, and my husband has been amenable to this despite his preference for investing. I manage our household finances. He manages investments. It works. I obsess over our budget a lot, but I love the program we use (YNAB) so it’s almost recreational. I will say YNAB has brought me a long way to feeling like we can handle life’s unexpected challenges. We’ve had some major hits over the years and bounced back quickly because YNAB makes it so easy to accommodate a constantly changing financial situation.

114

IMHO people born into wealth can be just as ignorant about finance and money as poor people. The only difference is they can afford to be. I don’t know if your husband really “entered adulthood knowing how to make money” or simply entered adulthood already set up to make money. And as you demonstrated, poor people often, by necessity, need to nickel and dime to make ends meet and when they do come into a bit of extra money or credit, they tend to put it towards the trappings of economic status.

The reason for this is most people have a very abstracted understanding of “wealth” and how to create it. If you “work hard” you’ll get “rich”. Or maybe you just have to get lucky. It turns “getting rich” into a moral assessment based on behaviors instead of actual activities.

i.e. kicking your kid out at 18 doesn’t teach him how to read a balance sheet or pick investments or save up a downpayment for a rental property.

And given that your credit card spending helped you fit in with your upper middle class schoolmates so you could ultimately get an “MRS degree”, was it a bad use of debt?

Which is why I think authors like Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) are good for giving the average person a good understanding of basic finance and accounting (and economics, tax law, real estate law, contract law, negotiations, etc) and how to actually build and maintain wealth.

115

So let me be clear about one thing, in case it’s been lost here. I have a career, I have used both of my degrees, and we both started with little. I supported him most of the way through grad school… with my degrees. We are together because we fell madly in love, and still are madly in love twenty years later. Income wasn’t really a factor in our decisions to go into helping professions. And I did not go to undergraduate school or graduate school just to get fucking married.

116

I’m not judging, but it’s hard to paint a complete picture of you and your husbands relationship with the “family money”. Your description of your husband’s family sounds very similar to the mega-wealthy Roy family from HBO’s Succession (hopefully not THAT toxic). I would imagine that if you come from a family with that much money, it can be difficult to distance yourself from it. You say “income wasn’t really a factor”, but isn’t your husband a doctor with his own practice? By all accounts doctors make pretty good money. And you described his family setting him up financially (which there is nothing wrong with). And you guy on expensive cruises with the family where you need to buy a lot of expensive clothes.

Again, having no idea if it applies to you, but all that money can create a huge influence, even if people don’t realize it. It’s nice to say “I don’t care about the family fortune, I’m going to do my own thing”. But does that mean you are going to live in a shithole apartment while tending bar to put yourself through grad school? Are you going to forgo the family cruise this year because you can’t afford thousands of dollars for new gowns? Are you really going to pass up the opportunity to receive $10M?. $50M? $100 M? if you just do XYZ for the family?

That’s what is so insidious about lots of money. It’s one thing to say “I don’t care about money” when you don’t really have any. It’s quite another to be like “here’s a big pile of money, are you sure you don’t want it?”

117

Like most things, it’s complicated. At the time he was growing up, my husband’s Dad had opted out of the family business, so my husband was not raised in a fabulously wealthy household. He was the black sheep son of a black sheep son. His mother was a social worker. But he benefited greatly from his grandparents on several key items that set him up for success. He had school all paid for, a car, some modest investments. His father was also at one point a financial advisor, so he taught him about financial management. That’s what I mean by he was set up to make money in way that I was not.

When it came time to choose his career, he went for psychology, the thing he was most passionate about. His grandparents did not approve of this, because it wasn’t sufficiently lucrative. He did it anyway. He did it knowing that his grandparents had disowned people in the past, including his father, for not doing things their way. Then he married – natch – a social worker (They have never been anything but nice to me.) We took out loans for graduate school. We aimed always for a comfortably middle class lifestyle. It turned out to be harder than we thought.

Eventually, he earned his family’s respect by paving his own way. There was a very long period of time when we lived out of state while my husband worked on his Ph.D. We hardly saw the extended family at all during that period - maybe at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I didn’t really get to know his family until we moved back to our home state, thirteen years into our relationship.

We’ve since benefited financially from being in the family, more than we ever expected. (His father, after divorcing his mother, went back into the fold and retired rich.) But we are not rich. We are building wealth, but it will never be on the level of his family. And we are fine with that.

More money would be great. Sometimes I fantasize about living without a mortgage payment (we are still working on a down payment.) But money is not everything. It’s certainly not worth living a life other than the one we want to live.

As for the toxicity in my husband’s family, it really depends on the person. Unfortunately I once judged the family as a whole as toxic without really getting to know individuals, but that changed. There are about fifty people in what I would consider his core family and they are not all the same, they are not all rich, and some of the ones that are, are still pretty cool.

118

It’s not like Buffet and Gates are giving their wealth to Goodwill, United Way, or the Salvation Army. They both have set up Foundations and donated their wealth to the foundation, for which they received an extremely large tax deduction that can be carried forward if they can’t utilize it currently. They then have put themselves on their respective foundation boards for which they are paid to be on, and the majority of the activities of these foundations are to invest the money that was recently donated to them. Then a certain % of the investment gains that the foundation earns are used to fund whatever “world saving cause” they have chosen.

Articles make them sound more noble than they truly are.

119

But still, isn’t that better than them hoarding their money or buying another megayacht? The Gates Foundation is tackling real-world problems in developing countries that nobody else is working on. If they get a tax break and salary because of it, so what?

120

My point is that they aren’t really donating “$100 billion” to tackle these issues, which is what people focus on. They are really donating the earnings off of the $100 billion.