I once went out a few times with someone who was the Spanish version of a trust fund baby. I also was friends in college with several people from rich families - which is very much a different animal.
Background on the first one: my mother had a period when she decided to enliven my social life. I was living in the same town, Dad had recently passed away, and she insisted in arranging “playdates” between me and other single women of similar age, whose also-widowed mothers she knew. Apparently, “you’re the same age and you’re both the daughters of widows” is a perfect basis for friendship in the alternate universe where Mom lives.
I’m a Chemical Engineer, have devoured fantasy and science fiction books since before I stopped re-reading Perrault’s Complete Tales, have played pen and paper or PC RPGs for some 24 years, and discovered my vocation at age 3: I wanted, and want, “to go places without my parents”. To travel, to be independent, to learn about other ways of doing things and other peoples and other cultures. At the time I had set foot in half a dozen foreign countries and lived in one for 4 years.
All these women had law degrees, wouldn’t touch Tolkien or Verne with a 10-foot pole and had never been more than 100km away from home except to go to the beach - and when they went to the beach, it was to a place that every summer gets invaded by people from “back home”. I know families who have each other as neighbors at home and have each other as neighbors at the beach, something which would drive me nuts.
Aaaaanyway. One of these voted Socialist because “they’re the worker’s party and I’m very much a worker” (son el partido del pueblo y yo soy muy pueblo - it’s one of those things that are difficult to translate). A worker? The girl hadn’t done a honest day of work in her life!
She literally vivía de las rentas, made a living from the rents/interests she received. Along with a trust fund, she had five flats in a nearby big town/college town, all of them fully paid by the time she got them, either as inheritance or gifts from relatives. She had always had them rented out through an agency, except for the one where she had lived alone while she was in college (cleaning maid/cook included and paid for by Mom and Dad, of course). She complained that she had been a farmer’s insurance agent since she turned 18, but for some reason nobody had bought any insurance from her in the last 2 years - I wonder whether her father’s retirement from the office that handled agricultural permits had anything to do with it, what does the Dope say? While her father had that job, her yearly income from “selling insurance” for one week a year was about 8 times the yearly minimum wage.
Girl had money and I assume she still does; brains, what God gave to a doorknob.
My college’s students roster had several names which would be familiar to you in the years I was there. Heirs and heiresses whose lastnames are associated with drinks, soaps, dairy products… some of them used to think toilet paper refilled itself (but eventually learned how to change it), three little idiots in my class got terribly angry the year that their mothers forbade them from renewing the entirety of their wardrobe (“you’ll renew half, keep half, and the half you keep is the half you will use to go to class, because those chemistry labs are hell on fabrics”… and me hearing that while wearing my favorite skirt ever, bought in 7th grade); one was surprised to hear that it was only her socioeconomic class that had “debutantes”; they all intended to make a living from their studies, realized they’d been born in privileged positions, and in several cases had chosen that specific major among several which they found attractive because it would be useful for the family business.
