To think most rich people don’t understand how the rest of us live?

... but that's Mumsnet for you!

Paycheque to paycheque has different connotations too though. My parents did - but that paycheque was going on food/mortgage/necessities - dad did all his own car maintenance, decorating, mum cooked everything from scratch, we'd only have 1 pair of school shoes and one pair of plimsolls/trainers from the market etc. Coats/uniforms were second hand or hand made, we'd get a hand-knitted jumper every year for Christmas from nan (when that was embarrassing, because it showed you were poor, not cool and artisan like it is now)

Whereas mum's sister would have said they lived paycheque to paycheque too - but her and her husband were both heavy smokers, in a council house (back when rent was low). Their kids had new bikes, I always remember she insisted on Andrex toilet roll and branded breakfast cereal.

Their paycheque to paycheque was that as soon as money came in, they spent it on something they fancied - an expensive puffer jacket, or fancy trainers. My parents paycheque to paycheque was carefully budgeted and as time went by they managed to get ahead and put away some savings and pension, whereas my Aunt never did - but that was entirely personal choices.

I agree with you, and think it’s the reason people tend to socialise with people in the same bracket as them. I’ll grudgingly admit I’m in that category, in a ‘bubble’ and if you heard me talking to my friends you’d think wtf? I am not conscious of it as that’s normal for me. I think a lot of my generation (I’m 50’s) had it so easy with property etc but in my kid’s generation there’s such a huge divide between the kids that have family help, and the kids that don’t.

Sorry, this is just wrong. He had a disabled mother who was out of work as a nurse for long stretches of time, and his dad worked in a factory. He went to a grammar school which then became an independent, his parents didn't pay for any of his education. First in the family to go to university, one brother with learning difficulties who sadly died recently and two sisters, one of whom is now a care worker and the other I think worked in a garden centre.

This is clearly a 'modest' working-class upbringing and extended family - same is true (or truer) of David Lammy, Darren Jones, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner (although appreciate she's gone now) and many other Labour politicians.

You can disagree with the decisions they make, but claiming they don't know what ordinary people's lives are like is just incorrect. It's easily the most working-class government we've ever had.

Is there anyone on this thread - dapart from OP - who has heard a wealthy person say to an impoverished one: "just buy a flat"?

I know a couple who are very rich. As in millions. They're the only properly rich people I know. I dont see them that often. I was having lunch with them once when the woman asked me if I knew anything about a particular kitchen appliance she was thinking of buying. I was about to launch into a great big long speech about value for money versus function etc etc when I realised it would mean absolute nothing to her as she could buy a hundred of them if she wanted to. I then realised that almost nothing I could say would really have any meaning in her world. It was a weird experience.

Well, no mortgage or kids here, but precisely.

Higher earners have it a lot easier-they live in nicer areas and send their children to better schools. They can claim decent tax relief for pensions. They eat nicer food. They often have better career progression. I know all this because we are in a 100k plus household. When I was younger and didn’t, I struggled a lot more to balance the budget.

OP I don’t think your examples have to do with wealthier people being out of touch. Messages like the ones you described are designed to be monetised - for example, finance gurus telling you poverty is a choice are looking to engage unhappy people with their content by offering hope, public figures might have an agenda of enraging struggling people so then the political parties that prey on that can come and collect your support (cue Reform). Messaging in the public space usually is there for a reason, not because they don’t understand how things work

I know what you mean OP. I have a rich acquaintance that I met through a hobby. She doesn't work but her husband has a very good job in finance. They live in a big house in a nice area of London, all 3 of their kids are privately educated and they take multiple holidays a year. Yet she's constantly moaning and complaining about very trivial things on social media.

When she moved house (from one multi-million property to another), there was a lot of hand-wringing about how stressed she was, they recently went on holiday to a luxury resort and she posted a long rant about how the photographer she'd hired to take holiday snaps of her family on the beach 'didn't connect well with the kids' so they had to re-do the shoot. She complains about having 3 young kids but they have a nanny...I've had to mute her because she's so tone-deaf to how ordinary families live.

Well no because when they do pay that money goes on paying off the credit card and other bills - and then we have no money again. This is what it is like to live 'paycheque to paycheque' — when the money comes in it goes out fast and there is nothing to save after. Not everybody has a high income, and with CoL and mortage hikes etc saving is not currently possible for us.

This is one reason why I like the current Labour government marginally more than the previous fourteen years of Tories, who were mostly the wealthy elite, Boris Johnson being one of the worst offenders, and surrounding himself with similarly well-monied yes-men. This government represents people in general slightly more than the Tories did. They are aware of the optics of this. Remember billionaire Sunak saying "just hang in there" while people were struggling to pay bills? And Johnson wittering "I've paid the £50 fine, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease can we move on from Partygate?" What is £50 to a man with millions coming out of his ears, when some people were charged £4000 fines for alleged parties?

The champagne socialist-who-awarded-himself-a-50%-pay-rise-in-2001 Tony Blair said "we're all middle class". Yeah, right. Why weren't we all taking our families on holiday to the Seychelles like he did, when his children should have been at school, at the same time as his government was "cracking down" on families who took term-time holidays?

It reminds of the character Alastair in "As Time Goes By", when he loses his fortune, he says casually "but I've managed to hang on to a million or two".

See also the late Bob Crow, union leader earning much more than average, claiming to be a communist, while hanging on to his council house, and at the same time making it difficult for people to go to work and earn a living because of his strikes. No sense of how other people live.

And don't get me started on Farage, who is dripping with wealth, while claiming to represent ordinary people. "Great Britain can be all yours, if you will kneel down and worship me." Where have we heard that before?

I don't know about 'most' rich people but I have friends who are better off than me who don't seem to understand what it's like to have to be careful with money. If I was eating out with them, they saw nothing wrong with splitting the bill - but I'd ordered something cheap and no pudding because that's all I could afford. One friend said to me, 'It only makes a few pence difference.' No, it made several ££s difference to me. Why should I have had to subsidize their meals?

Overall I doubt many of us know the detail of how others live or work. We have been retired a few years and have carried on doing business. But I do not know how the up to date office works, I am sure it will be different to how mine worked when I left in 2004, and that had changed from how it was in the 1980s
I meet Asian people, in business and in medical situations but I know nothing of their family life.
Do the Chinese who were in HK or Singapore know much about how we organise our lives around hobbies?

It's just the way of the world OP.

I don't think im entitled to the understanding of rich people and have no need of 'valudation'. What on odd comment that has no relevence to anything I posted! I very much doubt anyone on this thread has the type of wealth that means they need not be concerned with issues that effect other people in society because they're untouchable. So to turn away from education is not only small minded, but also foolish.

"good proportion of them grew up in poverty, or at least very modest circumstances eg. Starmer" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
He was raised MC!

Grammar + private school

Of course. There are certain "mindsets" which are driven by the level of wealth you grow up in as a child which are hard to shake, regardless of your current income level, in adulthood.

I came from a comfortable (but not rich) middle class family: we had ups and downs financially but I never had to worry about having enough to eat or that my parents wouldn't be able to afford school uniform. We had holidays etc and my university fees were paid for. I didn't have everything I wanted, but I never really suffered as a result of lack of money.

My partner grew up in breadline poverty (but is now middle class). Our respective attitudes to waste are very instructive.

I don't beat myself up about throwing food away. I try to avoid doing it and don't do it wantonly but if I end up not eating every last scrap I don't lost sleep over it. It's not, in my view, worth eating food you don't want in order to minimise having to throw something away. I realise this makes me lucky.

My partner is obsessive about saving food and Tupperwares everything within sight, is very creative about reusing stuff if it doesn't get included in a meal and has a cow about stuff being thrown away if its good. Even though as a household we can comfortably afford to throw food away, it goes very much against the grain for him. And within reason I try to respect that.

And there are equivalent things higher up the income scale. My boss says she "can't function" without four foreign holidays a year. To me this sounds unbelievably spoiled and luxurious: I've had two in the past four years. But that's her "normal". Everyone's "normal" is different: I'm sure my boss considers me to be very lower class.

You just have to apply a bit of common sense and empathy and not throw out pointless advice to people about their lifestyles without the benefit of knowledge of how they live or what they can afford. But anyone who is doling out advice like "you should just buy a house" is daft anyway.

I agree with this
A few years ago there was Govn money to insulate your loft
but you had to use a company to do that

Why would most people pay anyone to basically roll out insulation in a loft ?!
We costed out buying the insulation and laying it ourselves ( which isn’t exactly rocket science ) to using an installer and getting the subsidy
It was 50% more expensive with the subsidy

If Governments understood this they’d make it financially astute for all.

That said @Codyrhodesisaheel i thought the grant was £7,500 for heat pumps with average cost at £11k and average saving £1,400/yr. so worth considering

🤣🤣🤣 Starmer didn't grow up in “modest” circumstances; he grew up middle-class in a wealthy Surrey village in a nice, privately owned three-bed semi. His father was a well-paid skilled worker and his mother was a nurse until illness. They also had the wealth of education - grammar school and university.

Yes, this is a very good point.

I do think it is true that people don't understand how difficult it is for some people financially. There are some salaries that I simply can't "make work" in my mind and I have enormous respect for the people who do manage.

I try to be aware, but do find myself slipping sometimes with healthy food suggestions to people etc. Food is expensive.

I do, however, think - to a lesser extent - there is a bit of something similar in the reverse as well, in the sense that if you are comparatively well-off, people seem to think you can afford pretty much anything and they are very happy to mentally spend your money for you! I've had people suggest we take their dc away on holiday with no offer to cover their costs because we can "obviously afford it." I don't think they realise that we still have a budget for holidays and the like. It's as if at a certain point they just stop counting: 1, 2, 3 many, many, many ...

You see a lot of this thinking in political discussions around schools VAT ( eg: "Oh no-one will take their dc out of their school because of VAT: they're RICH"). There will be some people who have just afforded it and being able to afford more than others doesn't mean those people can afford ANYTHING.

BUT yes, I think there are a lot of people, especially on MN, who can be quite tone deaf about the struggle life is for some.

Very few people truly understand anything outside of their lived experience. What’s unreasonable imo is expecting them too, and being surprised and upset when said expectations aren’t met.

Thread derailment happens in all directions. It’s common for any thread about a poster on a higher income struggling to be completely hijacked by the ‘check your privilege’ and ‘how dare you complain’ contingent. Many posters are apparently incapable of just not replying to a thread that not only doesn’t apply to them, but doesn’t centre them either.

Struggling is relative, and it’s also not a competition. Mumsnet is a place where low and high income earners alike can vent and ask for advice on their individual situations. High earners don’t have to shut up or pander by paying ‘I know so many have it worse and i’m really lucky’ lip service if they want to speak on their own situations.

Mumsnet is also a forum founded and started by upper middle/ middle class women, that attracted and attracts a user demographic made up of a significant proportion of women from those socioeconomic classes. It’s never been a forum where only those struggling on lower incomes dictate the temperature of the proverbial room, or have exclusive use of the proverbial floor.

Well yes, even with a household income of 100-200k you can’t just take a year off just like that.

I think it depends what you’ve come from
People brought up in lower income families and even poverty that have climbed to a more well off lifestyle will be more aware than those who have never experienced it

We are, I suppose, better off than most but both dh and I come from very working class backgrounds and my parents growing up really did have no shoes, running water, electricity etc. I saw that every year when we went back to their family homes which still had no bathroom or water

However we benefitted from education and free University. That doesn’t mean we have forgotten our childhoods and past. It also doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly changed how we live or appreciate the struggles people have in life

It's not about sitting in a bubble.

The OP asked about being reasonable thinking rich people are out of touch with poor people.

Use common sense. What do you think? Why do you think you're entitled to the understanding of rich people? Are you that desperate for validation that you can't live a life without expecting Jeff Bezos to 'consider' you daily?

It doesn't do anything to advance your position and it's silly.