Life at the Top? [Cost of a luxurious life style]

Factual Questions
41

Remember Mitt Romney and his seven houses (he didn’t even remember how many he owned). Obviously, he could stay at only one at a time, but you cannot just abandon a house, so he has to keep at least a small staff at each one. I assume he owns a yacht, which doesn’t come cheap and requires a crew. If he doesn’t own a jet (with all its crew) he probably charters one whenever he travels. I tried to imagine what all this costs and came up with a minimum of several million a year. I counted 1% of its cost per month for the rental value of owning a house.

On the other hand, I have a friend who is quite wealthy (not Romney class, but his net worth was about $100 million before he was an early investor in google) and he lives relatively modestly. He has a nice house, but only one, three Mercedes in the garage, a swimming pool, but on a lot that is well under an acre. His living room is large enough to contain four pianos and the largest projection TV I have ever seen. But he mostly eats at home (although he always picks up the check when he eats out) and, when I visited, his lunch consisted of a $4 bowl of soup from the canteen in the basement of the math dept.

42

I’m reminded of the novel Pride and Prejudice. The Bennets were actually wealthier than most of the population: they had an estate and servants, didn’t soil their fingers with manual labor or trade, were accounted gentry, etc. But they were considered churchmice by Mr. Darby’s standards

43

Funny how rich people first lose the ability to drive.

44

The one and only thing rich people can’t buy is more time. There’s 24 hours in their day just like yours & mine. And although they’re less likely to be killed in an industrial accident than, say, a coal miner, they can’t really extend their life very much if at all.

As such, timesaving and cramming as much living, whatever that means to them, is a big part of the lifestyle. They don’t grocery shop, they don’t wait in airports.

And they don’t drive because that wastes time. While being driven they can work or socialize or relax or … And when the car gets where they’re going, they step out at the front door and parking is just not their problem. Likewise when they’re getting ready to leave a quick call or txt has the car out front before they get there.

I see fatcats commuting in multimillion dollar helicopters every day. That’s the same idea, just writ especially large.

45

They can. They are just too stupidto doit.

46

What I’m saying with the links is that (1) Cryonics, or freezing the brain, has a non-zero chance of preserving enough information that future revival is possible. Rich people, if they sunk a few billion into improving the freezing techniques (progress is possible), could raise the chances from “maybe” to “works unless we are totally wrong about how the brain stores information”. (2) Certain rich people, such as a certain Mr. Jobs, knew they were going to die imminently, and choose not to dump their fortune into at least an attempt to save themselves. Stupid. (3) The “and then what” is that after we manage to freeze brains correctly, we build an emulator that can run one at full speed. This is another effort that a mere 100 billion could probably make a lot of progress, a trillion could probably make it happen.

Basically, rich people are idiots. If they all banded together and dumped their fortunes into brain emulation and brain preservation, they might actually see their 1000th birthday. They could make the “sacrifice” of living in mid-range mansions and time sharing their private jets. Is it guaranteed to work? No, but it might work, and death is a certainty.

And, such tech would benefit everyone else. Most likely, the improved freezing method could be made cheap enough for the common folk. It might take decades before the supercomputers that can emulate a previous dead person’s mind can be crammed into a small space and made cheaply, but this obviously does not matter to someone who is frozen.

47

Maybe rich people can’t buy more time, but they can certainly rent it. It’s not the driving, it’s finding parking spots, walking to where you parked instead of having the car out front… taking it to get washed, filling the tank, hauling the shopping out of the trunk. When you have so much money that you can pay someone to do that stuff, why not pay them to drive too? They you have time to call your friends (sorry, friend), read the latest financial news, call your broker, maybe even get a quickie in the back seat - rather than concentrating on driving.

Ditto for cooking, cutting the grass, cleaning the house, doing the laundry. It less time-consuming to have someone do it for you.

I remember one comment about Prince Charles that someone squeezed the toothpaste onto his brush so it was waiting for him at bedtime. I’m sure if he tried, he could do that chore himself, but it’s 15 seconds of his life each day that he could never get back.

48

Similar to this, I’ve heard of the job of sailing the rich guy’s yacht.

As described to me:

You bum around at this or that port in the Caribbean or Florida or wherever, living on the rich guy’s boat, maybe using it occasionally (to make sure it works). You get the call to sail it to some other port. After you get there, you bum around some more. Maybe he uses the boat, maybe not. Then you get the call to sail it back (or somewhere else).

Not a bad life if you like to travel and you don’t need to call the shots.

49

Allowances include paying your foreign taxes, too. My W-2 income isn’t quite $500k, but it’s a hell of lot more than I really make. My company pays my rent ($3,000), pays my driver including his overtime, gives me a COLA, pays my Chinese taxes, grosses up my US taxes (called equalization, makes me whole), home leave, SOS Membership, global health insurance, and so on and so on. Those will children have their private school paid for to the tune of about $20,000 per year, per child. Foreign experts are damned expensive.

I pay my own domestic helper, which is something I wouldn’t afford in the USA, as it’s only 1100 RMB per month. And when I mention I get a COLA in China people are often surprised; after all, China is a “low-cost country.” Yeah, not when a box of Lucky Charms costs $11.00, and most of the made-in-China stuff is actually imported from the customs-free zones.

50

A redditor who knows various wealthy people (millionaires and billionaires) wrote this blog post about varying degrees of wealthy and how they live.

https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/cnnmca8

30 million in net worth seemed to be the bottom to live a truly rich person lifestyle.

However rereading your post, I’m sure you can live a fairly decent ‘rich person’ life on far less than that. McMansions in the midwest are only 300-500k or so. You can hire a cook and a maid to come in once a week for under $500/month each. An escort is under $200. A used luxury sedan is 20k.

You can probably lead a pretty nice ‘rich person lifestyle’ on 150k a year.

51

I knew a guy in Miami who had just moved into town for a job in accounting and been offered the additional job of housesitting the boss’ house and his cars. He said when the boss told him he was actually supposed to take the cars out for rides he wasn’t sure whether to jump or faint so he did neither.

At a lower level, housesitting was actually quite a common way to get housing there (lots of snowbird homes). Later I stole the idea and got a housesitter myself - great arrangement for both of us: my friend whose income was very low didn’t pay rent, I knew my house was cared for, we never needed it at the same time as I only went there on vacation and then he went home, and since we had similar ideas about order and decoration there wasn’t any “who moved my glass” drama.

52

Hmmm… I tipped our private Tibetan guide for Lhasa 600Y (RMB?) for 4 days and worried that I under-tipped him - and 200 for the driver. If 1100 is a bottom end monthly salary I don’t feel at all bad now…

53

She’s part time and works for two other families, too, but she’s overpaid per the local families in the neighborhood. Most of us foreigners pay the ignorant, special foreigner price. The locals don’t mind, unless we steal their housekeeper.

Tipping is uncommon (almost unheard of) in China, and I probably would have tipped nothing. But now that you made me think about it, I guess I would research Tibet specifically, due to the China/Not-China thing.

54

One thing that struck me from your link was this quote:

“IMPACT. Your money can literally change the world and change lives. It is almost too much of a burden to think about. Clean water for a whole village forever? chump change. A dying child need a transplant? Hell…you could just build and fund a hospital and do it for a region.”

I’ve helped with some fundraisers and at one particular event we were happy getting donations in the $100-$200 range or we would have an event and net maybe $500 but then we would have another event where a single door might give $10,000! Thats like over a years worth or doing car washes, poker runs, golf tournaments, and marathons.

55

You tipped your driver $100 USD for 4 days worth of work? Even in the US, that would be considered a generous tip.

56

To me that is the best thing about being wealthy (or politically powerful), if you have any dreams that aren’t possible in the current world, you have the resources to make them possible by hiring brilliant people to work on changing the world to match your ideals.

Example: Paul Allen’s mom develops Alzheimers. So he creates the worlds biggest NGO neuroscience research organization, headed by Christof Koch who is one of the world’s most brilliant neuroscientists.

Another example: A bunch of billionaires and head of billionaire companies (Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Dmitry Itskov) decide the fact that humans age and die of old age is no good, so they start funding anti-aging research.

As a non-rich person I have hopes and dreams, and I have things I’d love to see the world accomplish. But there is nothing I can do about it since I have no power or influence. The luxury items and leisure of being rich sound nice but the ability to change the world seems like the best part.

57

That can be both good and bad. The Warren Buffets and Bill Gates types of the world do a good job of it but many others don’t. The Wolf of Wall Street has a quote about this:

“Jordan Belfort: See money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better food, better cars, better pussy, it also makes you a better person. You can give generously to the church or the political party of your choice. You can save the fucking spotted owl with money.”

He was making $49 million a year selling scam stocks to suckers at age 26 years old when the real events that inspired that movie quote took place to put it in context.

58

Our guide - 600Y = $100 for the guy that basically escorted us everywhere, made sure entrance fees were taken care of, had pretty good English, explained all the things we saw, escorted us through the Potala Palace (Dalai Lama’s winter cottage).

Plus, when will I be back there? Not for a long while, if ever. At the time, they had only just allowed tourism again after some unrest, and IIRC they stopped again a little later due to more unrest - so I doubt the guy saw much business doing tours. And… he was all ours.

The driver got a tip of 200Y = $32 for driving us to and from the airport, and various attractions for 3 days.

(Our other main experience was Egypt, where the tip economy is so messed up that a guy working at a 5 star hotel unloading bags can probably make in a day what a school teacher makes in a month. )

But yes, in the third world, and even in more developed countries like China, bottom end labour is very cheap. Even in Canada, there is a program where you can “import” domestic help from abroad (typically, it seems, the Philippines). One requirement is that they are live-in caregivers (i.e. nannies, care of elderly). Since they live in the home, and must stay with the employer typically for 2 years, and the employer can deduct reasonable food and lodging expenses, this is a bargain for moderately well off family; such an arrangement probably works out near the same as regular day care for 2 or 3 children. Of course, it’s open to abuses that hit the headlines every so often…

One of the other perks of being rich, I imagine, is people who find these sorts of angles and make all the arrangements for you - so your domestic help magically appears, their paperwork and pay is taken care of like the rest of your finances, and you just enjoy their services. Another important task for the household manager.

59

That’s a very generous tip. For my two years in China, I lived on around $250 a month. I think my group tipped our guide and driver in Tibet $100 for a 10 day trip, and they pulled off some really special stuff (and had a heck of a sob story-- it’s a tough life out there). You made their day, for sure.

China doesn’t usually tip-- it was heavily discouraged during Communist times and the idea behind it stuck. But I think the tourist industry is pretty used to it, and as rough as thing are in Tibet I don’t think anyone is going to complain.

Fun fact- Tour guides in China can only be officially licensed up to age 35, after which they are considered to old to give a positive image. Also pay attention in customs and immigration. You’ve never seen so many tall, light skinned people in your life. These positions have special appearance requirements to ensure visitors get a good first impression.

60

Not really out of line for a full days work in the US. I tipped a guide at the Gettysburg battlefield $20 for a two hour private tour of the park.