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What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

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Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#501

Post by bluGill »

impossiblefork wrote: post #232
drewcoo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would be heartless not to. Those housekeepers need jobs and incomes.

It doesn't heartless. You can, instead of paying for a housekeeper pay for machines etc. made in the country in question, thus creating technical jobs there that might develop people more than housekeeping does.

The machines are more expensive than the housekeeper and the housekeeper doesn't have the education to make them.

In the US (and Europe...) labor is expensive so it make sense to have technical people design machines.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#502

Post by jjice »

bane wrote: post #488

Grew up poor, made it a little in life - could maybe retire now. The things I and the people I grew up with don't know how to do at all can be shocking. People who grew up similarly and ended up in middle class seem to be similar unless they put real time into it: - how to buy stocks, what ETFs are, what a 401(k) is, etc. - hiring people to clean your house, do yard work, etc. - traveling out of the country, or in ma…

I find this super interesting and something I've thought about a bit in the past. All of these things combined are relatively simple. You could give a decent breakdown of each bullet point within an hour each, with room to dive in deeper if needed. Now with the internet and all the great resources out there, the access is there for most people (in a place like the US) to learn about these.

I think the main problem now is that these are "unknown unknowns". People don't even know to know what a 401k or similar is and thus don't know that there's something to dive deeper into there. That missing piece is very hard to solve.

I've had it myself where I run into something in my career, for example, where I'm introduced to a concept I wasn't aware of that I now use to underpin serious decision making about something like application architecture. Had I never had the opportunity to initially find out about a problem/solution, it would've made it notably harder to get better.

All the things you lists are things I personally associate with familial education. Most of those things were taught to my by my family, having grown up in a middle class home. If my parents hadn't had the opportunity to learn about those, neither would I. It's a familial/potentially class (depending on the situation) based learning opportunity, purely based on the education your family was able to receive (whether formal or not).

School is also a place to inject these concepts (personal finance specifically), and I did have a great experience with the personal finance elective at my high school when I was in 9th grade.

Tangentially, I don't think that's a perfect solution (but still important) because teenagers will absolutely ignore/tune in the info out. When people say they wish that had learned how to do their taxes in high school, I agree in principle and I do think it should be taught, but I also believe most teenagers (at least around me growing up) wouldn't have payed any attention. It doesn't mean we shouldn't teach it, but educating a teen is hard.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#503

Post by ragazzina »

tough wrote: post #480
Lio wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Miele is a pretty well known standard french brand no? Miele are German in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele

ty fixed that lol sounds frenchy to me (the name tho)

It means "honey" in Italian.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#504

Post by RGamma »

madaxe_again wrote: post #424
lm28469 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> £100k/year Well first off £100 != $100 != €100 Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think literally "anyone on a programmer's salary" can make 1 million in 10 years. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm not saying you didn't do it, I'm just saying it's not "accessible", nor the norm, nor representative of the vast majority of devs. https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/ The median software engineer salary…

8% is an awful return in today’s markets. 30% is eminently achievable with foresight and an appetite for risk. I started investing a decade ago with about £100k, as that was all I could afford to risk, and have a return of between 20% and 200% year to year. Shit, you’ll get 15-20% cash-on-cash just running an Airbnb, which is what provides our day-to-day living income.

ZIRP/QE has ended.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#505

Post by tough »

ragazzina wrote: post #503
tough wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ty fixed that lol sounds frenchy to me (the name tho)

It means "honey" in Italian.

Oh that does make a lot of sense and maps easily to -miel- in Spanish or just -mel- from latin.

I love how similar all latin-based languages look like at the roots

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#506

Post by potato3732842 »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #176

The referenced reply is dull. It's very pretentious but just reiterates common knowledge, it doesn't convey any useful information. For example I wish someone told me about the existence of Miele kitchen equipment before I accidentally rented an apartment of a well-to-do woman. She renovated it for herself but then rented out when circumstances changed. Similarly it took me a long time to realize just how much better…

>The referenced reply is dull. It's very pretentious but just reiterates common knowledge, it doesn't convey any useful information.

This is a textbook example of why you can't get a serious answer to anything nuanced on a vote based platform. The low common denominator stuff that is easy to agree with gets everybody clicking the right-think button and to the top it goes. Anything with nuance or controversy gets buried.

Even this comment I am replying to probably wouldn't have wound up where it is did it not pay homage to the god of groupthink by cheerleading for Meile, though any other brand the upper middle class likes would have fulfilled the same rhetorical purpose.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#507

Post by throwanem »

fragmede wrote: post #495
throwanem wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird. Is it? I'm on my second iPhone 13 mini, this one being the replacement after the first died of a drop. There are two more stored in the attic, each preconfigured with the accessories I like and with a SIM from my provider in the box. So if anything happens to this phone, as soon as I get home I just break out #3, restore…

> Scale the dollar amount up a few orders of magnitude But that's what makes it "weird". Most people can't afford to do that. As you point out, it mashed a certain amount of sense, but we're in the midst of an housing crisis. People who have enough money to own, not just multiple houses, but so many cars that they got tired of different cars so they just bought more of the same? Weird because I've never done that. Ho…

I didn't say that it wasn't grotesquely flagrant consumption, only that I can follow the reasoning behind it. And I have made no admission of which I am aware.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#508

Post by [deleted] »

throwanem wrote: post #401
TacticalCoder wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was invited for coffee at a friend's friend. He seemed a pretty regular guy, very friendly: kids playing in the pool. Nothing out of the ordinary except as many house employees as adult guests (and house employees where calling guests by their name). I happened to know the artist Jeff Koons: not a big fan of the "inflated balloon dogs" but I do like his ballerinas. Well... Turns out the dude had one house destroyed…

> But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird. Is it? I'm on my second iPhone 13 mini, this one being the replacement after the first died of a drop. There are two more stored in the attic, each preconfigured with the accessories I like and with a SIM from my provider in the box. So if anything happens to this phone, as soon as I get home I just break out #3, restore…

[deleted]

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#509

Post by moralestapia »

m463 wrote: post #169
florbnit wrote: post #135

It’s funny how emotional responses questions like this become on part of the people answering everything but the question. If some one asks in a sports forum what the best exercises are that pro tennis players do that novices don’t know about you wouldn’t expect the majority of answers being in the line of “Tennis players never experience true love! If all you have is tennis you’ll be depressed!”

Sometimes the question is really asking something else. In this case, it might seem to be "what trick can I use that ultra-wealthy use?" or "how can I be prosperous on a budnget" but it really is "what is it like to be rich?"

Sometimes the question is really asking what is asking ...

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#510

Post by bluGill »

analog31 wrote: post #88
SoftTalker wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.

Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.

That cell phone cost as much as modern smart phones despite not adjusting for inflation as well. That was just to pay, they were so expensive per minute to use that most who had one avoided using it if they had other options. Which is to say real estate agents had them and they tried to keep all calls to under the first incoming minute free.
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