25 Times Rich People Proved How Out-Of-Touch With Reality They Are

#1

My last boss. He owned FOUR homes, outright, no mortgages. He drove a brand new Tesla. He had the nerve to ask someone at the company who made $10 an hour part-time to pay for his lunch because “there’s only a few $100s in my wallet now”.

#2

I needed a bicycle to get to a new job. Found someone online selling a really nice bike for cheap, so I got in touch. Took two trains to their house to buy the bike, and when I got there, it was a mansion. The bike was in a garage full of supercars and classics. They asked me where my truck was to load the bike on. When I told them I was riding the bike home, they laughed, and before I knew it, everyone in the house had been called to the garage to hear how I was riding the bike 3 hours home in the dark. No one offered me a lift; they just acted blessed at how they didn’t have to do such things.

#3

“We all have the same 24 hours in a day.” Not if you have to cook, clean, shop, wash up, do laundry, work 9-5, travel in traffic, budget groceries, etc…

#4

Back when I was in my early 20’s, my beat-up old car broke down in my job’s parking lot when I was about to drive home. I was getting paid $10 an hour as a pastry chef at a catering company. This was barely enough to cover my rent. I was obviously pretty distraught over my car breaking down. My boss (company owner) ended up saying to me, ‘Why are you so upset? It’s just a car! Just buy another one!” I couldn’t even respond; I just looked at her like she was crazy.

#5

I was an assistant making just over 50k a year, and I heard someone on the board of directors say, “Of course he [mayor of a city] stole the money. You can’t live on 90k a year!”

#6

Being told by a guy who has not worked a day in his life and living off of inherited money that poor people are poor because they don’t invest their money right.

#7

“It’s ok to pay the staff late, don’t they have savings?” An actual rich person talking about paying the household staff. Edit: I was managing the staff and handing out paychecks. The workers were personal care attendants. It was really hard for me emotionally, but harder for people with no savings. I didn’t have enough money to cover their pay.

#8

Worked for a couple of dermatologists, over dinner they were discussing their own salary take-home, and how many years of pay they missed out on with schooling, etc., compared to their housekeeper, who was paid at a rate of $30/h with no school “time off” and how she was really making out better… Oh my gosh, the audacity. In front of ME, the NANNY to their three kids… who was getting $17/hr. Lesson learned. I couldn’t quit fast enough.

#9

I’m a type 1 diabetic, and medical costs are insane without insurance. This happened in 2012, when the ACA bill was going through Congress. My boss was against it, and I told him how getting on insurance would help me. He grimaced and said, “That is YOUR responsibility. You should get a job!” I worked for him, and he made sure not provide benefits for the employees.

#10

I had a rich friend who was acting like she was “slumming it” because she worked part-time with me and her parents lived in a different state. She had a car already, but they bought themselves another new car and gave her their “old” one. She literally said, multiple times to different people at our work, “It’s nice of them, but honestly, they just cursed me with more of a payment because now I have to get insurance for it, so it’s not really a gift because I have to use my own money on it.”

#11

“It’s just so easy to just drop a grand at Target, y’know?” My Starbucks coworker in Calabasas (Kardashian-land), after he spent $983 on toys for his 4-year-old nephew’s birthday. I don’t know why he worked at Starbucks, except maybe his rich family finally forced him to get a job?

#12

A coworker asked me what bank I used for my safe deposit box. I said I didn’t have a safe deposit box. She said, “But where do you keep your jewels, then?”

#13

A very rich coworker (she was working in nonprofits more as a hobby, she did not need the money) once complained how hard it was because her housekeeper had the week off, and she had to run errands herself all week. As nice as she was to me, I could never take her seriously after that day.

#14

Living outside Jackson Hole, this sister of a friend told me how hard it is to live there. You have to fly in your help (cleaning, yard work) from Salt Lake. I had no words.

#15

I wanna say 12 or 13-year-old son of one of my clients literally expressed confusion to me when I asked them where I could get more paper towels from when they ran out in the washroom of his parents however many million dollar yacht. He said something like “It’s always there, what do you mean?” he was so disconnected from the process of I guess cleaning and restocking that he just thought that stuff would always be there and never run out lol the look of genuine confusion on his face was just something else. Thats not the first time I experienced that either, talking to the kids of extremely wealthy people is always a trip.

#16

“How could your family accountant let that happen?” When talking about how growing up, we couldn’t pay the bills and had our water/electricity shut off multiple times.

#17

My boss at the time made between 5-10x more than I did. We were talking about big purchases like a car or house, and he said something along the lines of “well, you’ll get a great deal since you’re all cash purchaser.” I just kind of smile and nod, knowing that, on my salary that he was aware of, I was not even an all cash purchaser of groceries.

#18

Used to travel for a glamping company (glamour camping) where we would set up huge canvas tents for fancy weddings and parties. We woke up real early one morning to a bunch of calls from some rich LA socialite about how the tents were wet – no other explanation. We rushed over, and it turns out she had no idea what the concept of condensation in the morning was. I can’t control nature, sorry, lady your not getting your deposit back.

#19

A rich person once said to me, “Why don’t you just buy a second house for your vacation getaways?” As if owning one house wasn’t already a huge financial stretch!

#20

A company event where people with investment properties told us that you just need to save hard to get that deposit. “Just don’t go out to dinner with your spouse as much, or just go to the pub every other Friday”. Ah yeah, so reducing restaurant dinners from 0 to 0 and the pub tab from 0 to 0. Still broke. My colleague left the zoom mid way through. If it were in person, he would have broken the door on the way out or come across the conference table at them.

#21

My sister is a therapist, and she used to make incredible money at this bougie therapy practice that only accepted customers who weren’t using insurance in a very wealthy neighborhood in our city. Her specialty was troubled teens. Almost universally, her clients were children of parents who’d drop them off and be like, “Fix them.” And when she’d review with the parents what needed to change at home, they’d be like, I don’t understand; I’m paying you to fix this. It legitimately does not compute when they encounter a problem that money won’t fix.

#22

“How do you only have one dishwasher?” Imagine their shock when I told them the apartment that I had just moved out of, which I lived in for 14 years, didn’t have one at all.

#23

“Why did you take your car to get ‘looked at’? Just get a different one. I don’t know why you waste your time with repairmen like that.”

#24

Had a wealthy ex-girlfriend try to convince me that her parents giving her $5,000-$10,000 every month for “fun money” was the same as a parent buying their kid a Coca-Cola because “all parents want to help their kids, they just have different amounts of help they can give”. Talk about delusional. We didn’t last long.

#25

While working for a valet parking service in the Santa Barbara area years ago, a woman hired us for a jewelry showing she was having at her giant house in Montecito, and while we were waiting for guests to arrive, my boss informed me that when the guests get in their cars to leave, that I needed to be sure to close their car doors or else they would just drive off with their doors open. As they’re so used to people closing their car doors for them.

Shanilou Perera

Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.