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

[MyAmusedOpalCrab]

I keep seeing advice from wealthy people that is completely out of touch with reality - things like “just buy a house instead of renting” or “take a year off to travel and find yourself.” Even when they mean well, there’s a lack of awareness about how difficult things are for the average person. I’m not saying all rich people are like this but it does seem that extreme wealth can create a bubble where they forget what it’s like to struggle.

AIBU to think that most rich people genuinely don’t understand how the rest of us live? Or do you think this is unfair?

But all those things you list costing high earners are choices.
You choose to have a big house or live in an expensive area. You choose to have children and put them in childcare. Council tax again is relative to the size of the home you buy.
So sorry no it’s not remotely comparable to someone struggling on a low income. As a high earner you have infinitely more choices.

I think this is an important point. It’s less that “well off” people don’t realise, but more that they are not directly affected, and so don’t have to trouble themselves with other people’s struggles.

So you are talking about an influencer who didn’t give advice to a poor person to buy house instead of renting, take a year off to travel. Your op was misleading. It sounded like you discussed your problems with a rich friend and they offered you these shallow, unrealistic solutions.

Influencers talk to their audience who chose to follow. I agree there is a lot of shallowness on social media. That’s how it works now. You can unfollow them.

Please don't judge everyone like that. I'm one of those people and would never dream of lecturing anyone because I grew up poor and remember what poverty is really like. 1970's - Couldn't go to school sometimes because I had no shoes, go to bed fully dressed because we had no heating (not just no money for heating but no actual source of heat), go to bed hungry because there was no food, scraping together pennies to be able to buy one egg from the corner shop to share with my sibling. Free university got me out of that and I've never forgotten it. Plenty of people never manage it and never will. Not my place to judge anyone. I will judge the despicable economic system we live under though.

I agree. People on lower incomes get top up benefits and say they live in a council house they get cheap rent and no maintenance or repair bills to pay.

I do think it’s hard to understand if you’ve never been poor. You might not have as much money left over at the end of the month as you’d want, but it’s not the same desperate feeling of not knowing if you’ll even be able to afford basic food to keep you going until the next pay day.

I’ve been this poor before, I’m doing ok now but I don’t earn anywhere near the 6 figure salary everyone seems to want on here.

I have to say it does wind me up when rich people try and claim they struggle to get by. You could have bought a smaller house, or a cheaper car, or sent your kids to a different nursery. Poor people do not have that choice. It’s not the same and it’s insulting to the people who really are struggling.

I can’t speak for the really rich*, but many older people who are now comfortably, or very comfortably off, knew all too well when younger, what it was like to have hardly any money, to have to watch every penny.

And that didn’t just apply to ‘poor’ WC families - both mine and dh’s were MC skint, not at all unusual then. One of the things we had in common when we first met was that crisps, orange squash and chocolate biscuits were things we only ever had at other people’s houses, or at birthday parties.

Might add that we were both determined that our own children would fare rather better!

*I know personally only one, but he came from exactly the same sort of background. And I do know that after a minor traffic accident (his fault) that meant a young woman’s old banger of a car was a write off, he gave her a substantial sum, enough to replace it with a rather better one.

My friend in her 4.5 million mansion used to recommend Joseph coats to me EACH BLOODY winter

I'm lucky if I get a coat in the Next sale

She often complained about the struggles with a new born
When I went to see her once she showed me the nanny quarters in the top half of the mansion where she had two Nannie's (one for day and one for night)

Sweet divine !!!!!!!!

I'm more of a charity shop Asda girl but each to their own

I remember seeing a post on here from a formerly high earning guy who'd gone through some misfortune resulting in losing his job and having to look after his kids on his own, and not being able to farm everything out to hired help or eat out all the time and he kept saying 'I don't know how people do it' which annoyed me as the simple answer is - people do it by going without.

Yes, the gap is massive in your examples.

Who are these people? Do you know them real life?

I don't understand where you are coming from with this.

Why are you following podcasts if what you want is sensible advice?

What kind of advice do you need?

Clearly the 'advice' you're looking at it not targeted at you or your friends would know you can't just buy a house.

Why are you wasting your time watching 'influencers'?

Anyone can call themselves an influencer.

Where on earth are you seeing this advice?

If it's 'influencers' or on social media then don't believe a word of it.

Many people on benefits are getting more than someone working full time on the median wage. Their benefits aren't taxed and some equate to £40Kpa (gross.)

I’m not expecting financial advice from podcasts. The point I’m making is that the tone of public discourse - from podcasts, social media, comment sections, even newspapers, is often shaped by people with privilege who speak as though their reality is universal. That matters because it influences how we talk about class, work and struggle.

I’m not asking for tailored advice. I’m highlighting how disconnected some of the mainstream narratives can be. Saying “just buy a house” or “take a career break to discover your passion” might sound empowering to some but for many people it’s tone-deaf at best and deeply alienating at worst. If we never point out that disconnect, it just keeps being normalised.

I think a lot depends on

• How rich you are
• Whether you've always been that well off or not
• Whether you've ever had contact with people less wealthy than you.

One of many reasons why I consider the public school system to be iniquitous is that it shields many children from any understanding of what it's like to be badly off. That's not badly off as in 'I can't afford new shoes for three months,' it's badly off as in 'I can't afford to both buy food and cook it.'

Have any of the people on here complaining that politicians "aren't like normal people" ever bothered to stand for election?

On the other hand, there are choices that people make - their un-compromisables, that also cause trouble.

My sister refuses to rent anything but a house, within walking distance of her kids school and her job. Also she refused to look any further than our home town for that job, and once she had an office job, she refused to work evenings or weekends. She gets by, but with nothing spare after rent and bills.

I chased every opportunity after I left school, moved counties or countries with nothing but a suitcase and lived out of my car a few times (when I had a car), and now I have a well paid and flexible job - with the downside being in order to cover school runs, I often work evenings and weekends. My kids and I have lived in everything from tiny flats to multi-level detached houses, we've had everything from air-con to open fires for cold/heat, and walked a couple of miles to school or to shop in more than one place - and now have a long car commute instead.

I've definitely seen a lack of flexibility of thought causing the lack of money in my family. So I don't think that it's always money that's the issue, but sometimes people are set in their ways and unable to compromise other areas of their life and that has a knock-on effect.

I don't think the school matters in that regards. Teaching a child to be grateful for what they have is always going to come from fundamentals learned from home rather than school although there's plenty of room for overlap.

Rich is quite a subjective term, but i do see a lot of people who propose solutions that involve an expense. I always think if the problem is no money, then a solution that costs money is unlikely to be a winner.

Then they cant figure why someone might not have that money up front, even if it would save money long term. Or why they cant just get a better job aa if the only factor in getting a better job is wanting one.

Many of the comments on here indicate that people who are also comfortably off don't understand poverty either. If you are earning £100k+ and still feel poor its because you have made choices on where and how to live. Where you shop, holiday, what car you drive etc. Being poor is not having choices and that's a massive difference. I thank my privilege all the time the fact that I can choose whether to do house repairs or go on a nice holiday. What makes me so sad is how that lack of choice affect the next generation. Crap school often equals crap outcome. Lack of parental time and money equals less opportunity and so the cycle continues. We live in a massively unequal society.

I think Mumsnet is quite middle class, with not many low income members, so in some ways the ignorance to how others manage is understandable.

I think there is a general non understanding on here that some people can't save, can't have an ' emergency fund' of cash in the house, can't over pay their mortgage and can't ' top up their pensions'.

These are all things that get regularly mentioned on here.

The big driver I see on here and in real life that creates the gap between ' struggling' and ' comfortable' is inheritance. Chuck in a £100k slice of a house sale from a deceased parent, and suddenly everything looks different.

It may not be enough to buy a mansion and stop working, but it could pay a mortgage off, which for my family would free up £750 per month. Suddenly you've got the ability to go on holiday and have savings, and have the lifestyle that most mumsnetters think everyone has.

Well, that isn't going to improve with the VAT I'm afraid.
Dd has luckily found her tribe at her private school, but they aren't all super rich and often have had to make sacrifices for school. Sure, not the kind of sacrifices someone with no GCSE's who can't get a job and is living on UC might have to make but the majority aren't families who own islands or have off shore accounts. We are probably the poorest because I am a single parent with no family but I know people at the local grammar who are far richer, yet make all the jokes about the local private schools. The grammar has 0.5% FSM.

I can understand, I’ve been dirt poor.

Who's 'We'?

I actually do know what it's like to live in a care home, my mum has Alzheimer's. I can tell you that it's shit and I wouldn't be so inconsiderate as to go in her care home and tell all the residents how lovely it is for me to have complete freedom and that I can wipe my own backside. Sometimes you have to read the room and these rich people often don't.

I refer you (and everyone else) to Terry Pratchett's "Boots Theory Of Socio-Economic Unfairness":

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.