Rich people are literally just lying about being good at money btw
Things like overdraft fees, late fees, parking tickets, fines, subscription renewals, legal fees, penalty fees, sales and discounts, lawsuits - these are things that all cease to matter in any material way once you have enough money
To Jeff Bezos, a parking meter, a plane ticket, and a private jet all effectively cost the same amount of money: none
My wealthiest aunt credits her fortune to her financial acumen. Last year, her husband died (making her even wealthier), and as she was grieving her children stepped up to help her out with things.
Turns out she is terrible with money. Like, she had multiple copies of the same subscriptions, was overpaying to keep multiple homes maintained, and generally can't budget to save her life. Also, so many things that she assumed were "perks" of her credit card program were actually just her husband paying for upgrades behind her back.
But it doesn't matter because she already has enough money to make problems go away. She can afford to be stupid with it and still think of herself as smart and poor people as dumb.
I can't stand this shit. This is the kind of rich person behavior that simultaneously makes me envious and angry.
I don't care that they have more stuff than I do, but I do envy that they have more slack. That they can afford to forget things, to be inefficient, or wasteful, and it doesn't matter.
Which is fine by me if you are properly grateful and understand that's what's happening, but good lord it drives me up the wall when people who are terrible with money castigate the poor for being bad at money. When the person who has a bunch of duplicate subscription services they forgot about lectures the destitute about how irresponsible it is to order Doordash, I get enraged.
"Do as I say, not as I do" has infuriated me since I was a child and that irritation has never left me.
I do wonder if there is some kind of repressed self-hatred there.
Like a kind of guilt that if you had all this wealth and privilege without "earning" it that would somehow be immoral, or a lingering sense that it's only luck that you are where you are, so you try to build this synthetic world where actually you did earn it and the reason you're better off than other people is that you deserve to be.
This is also why I can't stand Republican approaches to medicaid and food stamps and all that shit, they are so obsessed with taking away slack from the destitute.
A long time ago, I don't even remember what social media I saw this on, but I saw somebody talking about how they grew up really poor, but had gotten a good job, and how incredible it felt the first time they bought a book because they felt like buying a book.
Because there are a lot of people out there who are going to overdraw their checking account if they spend that $8 on a paperback without carefully looking over their budget.
And I can relate to that. I cannot tell you how much it improved my mental health when I got to the point where I could buy a latte or a paperback and not have to worry that I had completely destroyed my budget for the next month.
I know at least one person who spends as much money as she gets without realizing it, but when I got the freedom to buy a latte if I felt like it?
It got easier not to buy lattes. Because it was my choice, because I could think about putting the money away as savings, not as a choice, and because I knew I could change my mind later, the decision seemed less momentous.
I mean, can you imagine if people sometimes shopped less because of a direct material need, and more as a psychological effort to exert control over their lives?
Why, if that were the case, things like restricting what you can buy with food stamps might actually be counterproductive. But fortunately we live in a world where all economic activity is rational attempts to meet material needs, so that's not a problem.
