Ok. I have a trust fund. And I have managed to avoid “drugs”, “alcohol addition” “dating strippers” (that I know off) and “totaling cars”…err scratch that last.
So we trust fund babies must not be treated with discrimination.
Yep…trust fund assholes are just a different breed than project assholes or middle class assholes. Or not, they are the same breed with money - and they get more chances.
My sister ended up in an exclusive rehab center and we had to spend “family week” there. There were people - trust fund “kids” who were on their seventh or eighth trip through rehab - at $50k for six weeks. A middle class kid gets one trip through. A poor kid just gets thrown in jail.
My husband’s uncle owns a fairly large chain of discount stores. He refuses to hire family because he insists that they pull their own weight, not look to him for a free ride. He’s made it abundantly clear that he is not a “connection” to be exploited. His daughter works and goes to school, which she pays for, and if she quits her job, she’s got to find another one, just like anyone else, because Daddy’s not going to bail her out.
I was lucky enough to grow up comfortable. My Dad is the son of immigrants. He never went to college, but had the work ethic, and alot of luck to be successful. He was the same way with me. I never got a dime from him as a kid, and I worked my ass off to get a full ride in college.
While I’m not a trust fund baby, I did manage to retire in my mid 20s. From there I went to culinary school, and had a successful career as a chef. Its been 6 years since I worked full time. I have a great family and life. Now that I finally had my knee replaced, I might get back in the game if the right opportunity presents itself. If it doesnt, I wont sweat it.
Wait until your friends marry those strippers and want to keep dragging back to the same club they met at.
Interesting observation: I wonder if ex-strippers make good wives? They probably have seen it all, and know all about life-maybe they are worth a look?
Lots of people here are talking about people who were rich temporarily and blew it all in a few years. If you truly are wealthy, you can’t blow it in a few years unless you’re 1) on expensive drugs 24/7 or 2) truly make horrible purchases nonstop. Most people in this thread are just relating stories about people who come into medium-sized sums.
But delphica nailed it. Confidence and security are the result of real money, never having to worry about where your next dollar is coming from. It can manifest itself at huge levels - like, the kids of tippy top hedge fund guys or the children of Standard Oil - or even at the level of kids whose parents don’t have to budge to pay for college, new cars, or monthly stipends. When you don’t have to worry about day to day things, you are raised with a natural confidence and are extremely comfortable in your own skin. When people jump to keep your business. Cases of wine, cases of steak - when “thank yous” are large, unique - and expected.
People want to be around you, not just because of the money - many have tens of millions but live like the upper-middle class - but because of your confidence and your demeanor.
This, in my experience, is the biggest difference between how I was raised and how my SO was raised: the confidence.
When someone mentioned going to work to get social interaction and some purpose, it reminds me of former stay-at-home moms I worked with. They couldn’t be full stay-at-home moms. One mom certainly could afford to as her hubby was the primary breadwinner, but she said she went insane having to take care of the little tykes all day without an adult conversation. She said even the politics of the office she missed! So her compromise was to work just half the week there and do housework/errands/taking care of kids the other.
I guess with a trust fund, I would love that freedom. Such as if you hated your job, you didn’t have to suck it up to pay the bills, but you could just leave. You didn’t have to worry about salaries but moreso the quality of the job. SIGH! Or the pleasure of not working and dwelving into volunteer/charity work!
I know this is deviating from trust funds, but I think MANY folks would be willing to retire earlier if they had a pension or a windfall, I have aunts and uncles who were teachers and they all retired in their 50s. They were now free to travel, look after their grandkids, volunteer while still strong enough to do those things. Or even if they liked working to scale back and go part time. Just a lot more choices there.
I dunno if there are sociology majors here, but I guess the term for all we described was “structural buffering.” That if you crashed your car and could afford to buy a new one easily, or if you got sick and didn’t have to worry about spending medical bills, that money really helped out here.
I’ve known just one “Trust Fund” type. Not strictly trust fund, but came from a LOT of serious wealth. Served with him in the Navy - Mike was an enlisted Engineering Laboratory Technician (Read: RadCon Nuc) on a submarine I served aboard. Just a really nice, really relaxed guy. Nothing to prove, no one to impress - did his job, and did it damned well. Incredibly fit, rather handsome in a low-key way, married to a truly wealthy, attractive woman whom offered to “let him go to the gym all day” when he finally got bored of his hobby in the Nav. Would have loved to have hated him, but he was just too nice a guy - Silver spoon and all.
Strangely, though, that particular boat had a lot of unusualy wealthy sailors aboard. Almost as wealthy as Mike was his boss, Donald (MMC(ss)). Don lost over US$400K on Black Monday and laughed about it. The man understood investing, and was good at it. He was also another down-to-earth hard-working rich dude.
Heh! I know from strippers. Hung out with them, dated a couple, lived next to a few. I was one of those guys at the club sitting in the back corner, sharing the beer from the pitchers that patrons were buying for ‘their’ girl(s). A close friend owned a club, and taught me how to not get treated as a ‘mark.’ Mostly, it involves hangin out a lot, drinking very little, and ignoring the girls until one decides to actually talk to you (as opposed to trying to hustle some money out of you).
Strippers are just folks, mostly. Good, bad, and indifferent. The biggest difference IME from Jane Average is the ego - takes a strong one to last in stripping for any length of time. Also takes a fair bit of ‘dig me.’
Drug problems and abusive backgrounds are common, but not so common as you might expect. More than a bit of hard-eyed realism, more than a bit of opportunism, but nothing so very far from the norm - Just more concentrated in one place. A couple I knew made decent marriages, and made them work, most had some levels of relationship problems at one time or another (mostly from dating the kind of guys that hang out in strip bars), many were mothers, some very few were students, and only a few would ever save more than a token of the money that passed through their hands.
The ones I’ve met seem like they’re a bit of a handful.
I would say that’s consistent with my experience. Just make sure you gently urge the girl to not hang out with you all night at the expense of hustling the other patrons. Otherwise they tend to hit you up for a “tip” for being your “date”.
I wouldn’t say it is confidence as much as it is a sense of entitlement. And I don’t mean that in necessarily a negative way. It’s a sense that they deserve to be treated with respect. That they can pursue whatever direction in life they like. They don’t learn lessons like obey their boss or the cops or other authority figures without question otherwise you will destroy your life.
I think much of that confidence comes from a sense of discreteness. The lower classes have to hustle and draw attention to themselves. Wealthy people get enough unwanted attention because of their wealth.
In fact, what I’ve noticed in a lot of people I know from wealthy families is that they have a superficial confidence but there is an underlying uncertainty if you look for it. Like they are trying to feel out if people are going to accept them, want to use them for their wealth, or feel envy or resentment.
And I can see why they might feel that way. In college, I dated a girl from a nearby school that wasn’t as prestigeous as mine. People there would often treat me like I was one of the guys from the rich asshole fraternity in any college film. And I wasn’t even rich. They just assumed I was because of where I went to college.
Yup. And once money changes hands, you become a wallet on legs to them - the real-world relationship you were looking for just went out the window.
Don’t let the girl get in trouble because she’s spending too much time trying to bust through the wall of indifference - She will resent the hell out of that.
Best bet is to be friendly, aloof, and disinterested. I used to do my homework in the bar.
Going back to Mike (and to a slightly lesser degree, Don): There was a real egalitarianism present. They really didn’t give a fuck where you came from or what your heritage was - Only what you could do, how well, and how consistently. They even treated rudeness with a high degree of tolerance - Up to a point. You couldn’t tresspass on them; They wouldn’t put up with it. That may sound odd to people not familiar with military discipline, but discipline and military courtesy are at their core all about respect. And since Mike and Don respected themselves, they respected pretty much anyone who didn’t give them reason to NOT respect. I would have loved to have had their quiet self-confidence back then.
When the fuck did this thread become about strippers?
The OP asked a side question. Think it’s been pretty much answered, I 'spect.
My best friend’s fiance is a sort of trust-fund baby - from a family of very wealthy developers. I have tried to discourage her from marrying this guy - I think it is a big mistake. But she has become, as it were, addicted to the lifestyle - she went from living in basement apartments to having access, at least, to all sorts of stuff - a house in the Yorkville area of Toronto, a country place, access to a vacation property in France, and a fleet of cars. But none of it is hers, or even his. They all are property of the family.
Their lives are quite surreal to me, since they revolve essentially around currying favour withing the family corporation, controlled by the generation above them. If you are in favour, your access to resources is enhanced; lose favour, lose access. None of them actually have money of their own - this habit of control-through-money is one internalized by her fiance, who, when he gets money from the family, will not actually give her any - she must come to him for any purchases she may want to make.
The whole marriage thing is, of course, an attempt to curry family favour. I have no doubt that the pressure will soon be on to produce a kid - there are no legitimate family offspring of this generation, so producing a kid would really open the floodgates of favour.
Ick. That sounds like a real snakepit.
My thought exactly. In fact, she knows it well - we joke about it - but the fact is, the lifestyle is just too tempting for her to turn down, though she knows she’d be better off in the long run if she did - as it stands, she risks becomming just another snake, a risk which she’s aware of too.
The most bizzare manifestation of this family’s pathology is the country estate. The family owns a huge spread in the country - well over a thousand acres - and it is dotted with “cottages” of various sizes and states of luxury. They are all overseen by a ground crew hired by the corporation, who do stuff like plough the roads in winter, take care of the swimmin pools, etc. I’ve been there a few times, it’s very nice.
Thing is, it is a sort of ex-wife farm. In each cottage is either a family member or an ex-family -member - each of the men in this family have at least one divorce (in the case of the patriarch, no less than three) - and each ex-wife got, as part of the settlement, a cottage. So they all live together in a sort of disfunctional harmony - whether married or not, they still need the family corporation’s services.
Now it sounds like a roach motel - They check in, but they don’t check out.
That sounds like the setup for a hit TV series…
I wonder how much of that quiet self confidence is from believing they are actually better than everyone around them. Maybe “better” isn’t the right term. More like they are above the pettiness that people without money have to deal with. Although as Malthus demonstrated, they have their own sort of pettiness.
The closest anology I can think of is visiting my girlfriend’s family (not the ones with the baseball team, the other side of the family). The are sort of rural and poor and are always fighting and bickering over stupid little issues.