Besides on houses. I’m not talking about the poor. I’m talking about people who have a lot of money and won’t spend it. The lawyer who drives an old jalopy. The CEO who buys his shoes from Marshall’s. The family who lives in the mansion on the hill who want give the pizza guy a $20 tip.
Many do, others prefer to accumulate it.
Anyway, isn’t buying stocks, mutual funds, REIT’s, etc “spending money”?
On STUFF and on people 
What’s the use of working your ass off and not see any fruit that you produced.
If they over tipped the pizza guy, they might not be able to keep up the payments on the mansion.
Some older Americans have been through some really bad times. Once they finally started getting money again and life got better after WWII, they still always felt they could lose it all again and so they saved and lived thriftily. The number of people who lived through the Great Depression in the 1930s is getting smaller, but most of them passed on their frugal ways to the grandparents of today.
Since the Energy Crisis in the 1970s and the passing of many of survivors of the Depression, people have become less thrifty, I think.
But we’ve become more self-centered from the 1980s onward. Today, instead of “It’s mine now, but I might need it if times get bad,” the guiding idea might be “It’s mine and I don’t want anybody else to have it.”
So… the idea is that if you have a lot of money you should just p*** it away by seriously over tipping pizza drivers and buying more junk? That’s exactly how lottery winners end up right back on welfare two years later.
Receiving 3, 4, 5-figure checks in the mail because of a lifetime of prudent investments is “not seeing any fruit”?
Oftentimes these are people who spent their lives planning for the future, living on a tight budget to build a nest egg - and then once they got to the future, their habits were so ingrained they couldn’t easily change them. My parents are this way. They pinched pennies all their lives and retired with a fat nest egg. Although they have traveled all over the world in the past decade or so, they still drive very used cars, and my mom has a glass of wine before they go out to dinner instead of enjoying it at the restaurant with her meal (this assumes they even go to a restaurant that serves alcohol; often they go to fast food restaurants instead because they can find coupons for those places).
In other cases, e.g. the lawyer-who-drives-a-jalopy, maybe he just doesn’t give a shit about nice cars. Same with the CEO who buys his shoes from Marshall’s: if they have what he likes, then buying something outrageously expensive from a custom shoe maker is both conspicuous consumption and a pain-in-the ass.
It’s not “spending money” any more than putting money in your bank account is “spending money.” I realize investing and depositing aren’t exactly the same thing, but I think the OP is talking about the instant gratification of buying consumer goods and/or services rather than the deferred gratification of investments.
Isn’t the US the biggest consumer market on the planet? We spend TONS of money.
I agree. I always thought the problem in America was people spending beyond their means, not spending too little.
Not giving the pizza guy a 100%-plus tip isn’t not liking to spend money. It’s just not being crazy.
$20 isn’t enough for a pizza tip? I never order pizza for delivery (thank you, Papa Murphy), but I certainly wouldn’t think to tip as much as the pizza cost.
And I’m not rich, but I have a decent amount in the bank and no debt. Because I don’t order pizza delivery, sometimes shop thrift stores, and have learned to look at something at least twice before buying it. If I still like it on my 2nd visit to the store, then I’ll consider putting down my pennies.
StG
Sounds to me that the OP is really asking “Why is the accumulation of wealth such a big deal to many Americans?” But I could be wrong and he’s asking why we’re deleveraging as fast as possible for the past four years, especially in comparison to the Eurozone, excepting Germany.
As for American households, the deleveraging is not yet complete.
I don’t order pizza because it is a waste of money to spend $14 plus a few bucks tip for a pizza that would take 45 minutes to arrive, compared to the Whole Foods frozen pizza that costs like $7 and is ready in 18 minutes that I like quite a bit.
With the money that I am not blowing on delivery pizzas, I spend on golf and vacations in exotic locations.
Are you seriously expecting to be ‘way overtipped’, for delivering the pizza, just because there is an expensive car in the drive, or it’s a really posh house?
Wealthy people would soon be poor people if they overpaid for everything because they’re ‘rich’, don’t you think?
There’s a lot of times when the additional cost doesn’t give a proportionally better value. A $100000 car is not 5x better than a $20000 one. It’s better in a lot of ways, but it’s primary function (transportation) is not greatly enhanced by the added cost.
I save and invest my money because having money in the future is more important than having stuff now. Having money in the future allows me to have options. I can send my kids to good colleges. I can retire earlier and live better. I can afford to pay for unexpected expenses without having to take out high-interest loans.
I have enough money in the bank to easily buy any car I could want, yet I drive a 20-year-old car. Why? Because I care about transportation. As long as my car is getting me where I want to go, I don’t want to spend money just for the purposes of getting a different car. Sure, a newer car will be nicer and impress more people, but those reasons aren’t strong enough for me to give up my future money.
Plus, after a while it’s all just stuff. I get tired of having to learn how the new widget works differently than the old widget. I don’t get all jazzed out because the new widget is 10% bigger or faster. When you don’t have the pressure to always be chasing the latest thing, life is more relaxing.
Rich people get rich and stay rich by being cheap as fuck.
Maybe because the pizza guy was an hour late and reeks of weed?
Actually, when it comes to pizza delivery tips, it’s the opposite. Wealthy people tipped me proportionally far less than average, and I was stiffed (zero tip and/or small change) most often in wealthy neighborhoods. Of course, they were also the farthest from the pizza shop, taking up much more of my time, too. Also, I found the same tendencies amongst their offspring – go to the really nice campus housing that had been recently built with air conditioning and free wifi, and the tips were shit, but the students in the crappy off-campus housing who were working their way through college tipped pretty well. My sisters who waitressed reported the same thing. The person in the luxury car is going to run your ass off and tip pathetically, if at all, and will often treat you like dirt while they’re at it.
In the cases of being ‘way overtipped’, getting a surprisingly huge tip, it was nearly 100% working class folks who did this. It was very rare. And by this I mean over $5. I never got $20 I don’t think unless it was for some huge order for a business (and usually the really huge orders of 30+ pizzas stiff the drivers anyway).
I’d guess it comes down to lack of empathy as wealthy people are less likely to have worked shitty jobs for tips in their life, especially recently. Plus, some wealthier folks have a real sense of entitlement about what they feel they have coming to them.
You don’t get rich by writing a whole lot of checks.
Is this even a question? People I know who have ‘gotten rich’ (versus those who were born rich) have done so by being cheap as fuck.
Seriously, you don’t get rich spending money.