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?

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.

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 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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Well, no mortgage or kids here, but precisely.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

... but that's Mumsnet for you!

Some people who aren’t well off at all but are very frivolous with money don’t understand either. They’ll say ‘…Oh book a holiday for next week and get away!’ whenever anyone in our group has a minor inconvenience.

This can be a cyclical problem. Many people struggling with life circumstances and finances aren't going to have the time/energy etc. to stand for election. The people who are more likely to stand for election have certain privileges that allow them the time and energy to do so. This isn't a dig at people who stand for election nor an assumption that they are all super privileged and find it easy, not at all, but it's simply a kind of organic issue that arises that the people who end up in power are there because they're able to be, usually because of privileges that are alien to many people they represent.

The only really wealthy people (ourselves included) I know well enough to properly understand for a discussion like this are actually all very aware of how the 'other half' live, because we've all been there and we've actually all stayed grounded in that reality after achieving financial security - whether that's been through work or luck.

I think there are two much worse kinds of people. One is not particularly rich by their own standards but extremely lucky: the stereotypical boomer who has done really well through happenstance. Big final salary pensions, riding the housing waves, high average career salaries in secure jobs (often with little by way of qualification) who cannot get their heads around the idea that even their own children, almost always far better educated than them, just cannot achieve the same standards of living from the same type of employment - and often cannot even land the same kind of income. Their idea of how Gen Xers and millennials 'should' be living is so far out of kilter with reality, and they refuse to acknowledge it.

The other is those who really should rein their spending in but don't, and cannot fathom why sensible peers won't keep up with them. Within our social circle we know quite a few of these: fairly middle income, they want to eat out together regularly at fancy restaurants, or take the kids to expensive activities every weekend. They dress their kids in designer clothes, and so on. It baffles them when we decline to join them on a £200 meal out and pootle around in Dacias instead of Mercedes SUVs. They spend every single penny that comes in, and a bit more on top for good measure, have absolutely nothing in reserve, and think it is completely normal.

Quite. The tube/trains are quicker (when not on strike)!

Isn't that (largely) the whole point about lifestyle etc influencers?

I once took an incredibly rich man (who'd lived in London for about 20 years and raised three children there) on his first tube journey. If you remember how Harry Potter had to show Arthur Weasley how to use ticket barriers etc in whichever film it was where they take the tube to the Ministry of Magic, that was this guy.

I mean, I'm not sure he'd ever been north of Oxford Circus either. His London and mine didn't resemble one another.

What i hate is the smug 'I have 0 debt, if i can't afford it, i go without'
Sorry but for some people that would mean going without food, accommodation and heating.

I always love the “can’t you just use your spare room?” 😂🙄

No, but when my car was dying, someone told me to 'just buy a new one'.

I think many rich people don't understand that not everyone has the mindset to create from nothing - they can see how people can get out of their position but when to talk to them is all your hear is barriers and how everything is someone elses issue.