“You Can’t Live On $90K A Year!”: 44 Times Rich People Said Extremely Out-Of-Pocket Things

"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...

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.”

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!"

"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?

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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.

I worked for a guy who only flew in his private jet. He moved staff payday to the 3rd and 16th to save himself a few bucks. Staff were literally evicted after 3 months for failure to pay late fees on rent.

"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.

Not understanding why we didn’t get more than one gift on our birthdays and Christmas. It was usually clothes.

I've known quite a few people to not realize the benefit they received by just getting a house, car, and the cost of a degree (sometimes including advanced) from their parents.
It's much easier to budget when those items are removed from the equation. Even more so when you can get some income from the house.

My college girlfriend's freshman roommate threw a fit that her daddy didn’t buy her a bunch of Thanksgiving presents, including a $2000 flat screen TV (and this was 2007.)
Who gets a Thanksgiving present?

I have a boss who makes 7 to 8 figures a year, owns a home, and is in the process of building himself a new 6-bedroom 6-bathroom home. He complains all the time to us employees about how stressful it is picking out tile for the bathroom or deciding on a kitchen backsplash, even though his wife doesn't even work, and that's literally all she has to do all day. He complains about the moving guys getting a little scratch on the floor that will soon be covered by carpet anyway. He even complained about staying in a hotel while the houses are renovated, saying his shower pressure is low. And most of all, he complains that building your own home is sooooo expensive, as if someone is forcing him to do it.
Meanwhile, I had to force him to bring my wage up to market rate for the job, and I work two jobs now. I have been sick at work for a few weeks now, and desperately need time off, but I have to fight with him and justify to him in order to get it.

I once sat next to a woman on a plane who justified renting her freshman daughter her own 2-bedroom, water-view apartment because, "She's a good girl, not a party girl, so she didn't want to do the share-house thing."
Like the rest of us, split the rent for the sheer thrill of it...

I occasionally drive minibuses for a private school in the UK, have overheard some very privileged conversations from the students but one that sticks out is: A tutor on the bus asked a student what he says when other students make comments about the very expensive watches he wears to school, to which he said his response is “my dad has the same 24 hours as your dad”. He then proceeded to go on about how his dad inherited a massive entertainment chain and various hugely successful companies from his grandfather.

Once heard my ex-boss say, "People just don't want to work anymore". Staff did ALL her work, her dad owned the business, she was in the office maybe 18 hours a week, actually worked maybe an hour a day, and complained constantly that she needed a vacation and she was overworked. Best part? Her dad decided to retire about 3 weeks after I quit, and she closed the business because she knew she couldn't do the job. She would cry to my coworkers that she couldn't run the place on her own. No surprise, princess. Did you think he was going to work forever?

I did some work on a multimillion-dollar house once, and the wife was making small talk by complaining about gas prices and how that extra $12 per tank really adds up. She didn't work and drove a BMW. Her husband "worked" from home and drove a Porsche. Pretty sure they both A) could afford gas, and B) absolutely didn't need to drive any of the places that they went during the day.

My old boss was verbally criticizing her new son-in-law, and said, “He won’t be any kind of decent husband, hell, he only makes xxx an hour at his lousy job”.
My boss clearly forgot that I was making less than that…

My ex-boss was whining about "having" to buy new furniture from an upscale furniture place here because his sister was coming to visit. Poor guy.

I worked with a guy who got a living stipend from his dad that covered all his bills every month. The money he earned from working went towards partying mostly. He once told me that his success (lived in a nice condo in a super desirable area, drove a new car, etc.) was due to his money management skills. “I only get the money once a month, so I have to be disciplined enough to only spend it on necessities. Other people would blow the entire amount in the first week. That’s why they don’t live in (insert name of well-known fancy building here)”.

I was friends with a multi-millionaire for a while. The sheer amount of times he told me he was "going broke", that he was poor, etc., etc., TO MY FACE, as I was struggling to pay for rent/grocery... Is astounding. I would call him out on it, and he never took it seriously. It drove me crazy.

I love the Derry Girls, and I asked my husband to watch it with me again because I found it really funny. After watching the 1st episode with him, he said, "It is funny, but I can't relate to their problems with money and food".

My now wife had a roommate years ago when we were first dating. Her roommate was 25 and had one of her dad's credit cards and could do whatever she wanted with it. She would order shoes/clothes literally every day online and then complain about having to split utilities/food. She easily dropped $5k/month on designer stuff.

I used to teach at a very expensive private school. This school went all the way through from kindergarten to high school. I had to give some students, who were about 9 years old, a ride in my car one time. A spoilt set of twins, in particular, couldn't understand why my car was so old and "poor looking". Adults are apparently supposed to have new, expensive cars. "My dad is an adult, and he drives a Rolls-Royce. He gets a new car every year. You should get a new car too. Why don't you buy a new car?". When I tried to explain that I was still in my first year of teaching and had only finished uni last year, so didn't really have money yet, the response was "But our dad has always had new cars. Even when he was at university". On another occasion, one of them smashed her brand-new iPhone on purpose to prove to other students that her dad would buy her a new one.

I taught high school math at a private school for wealthy kids. The lesson was about compound interest and how it’s calculated. A student raised their hand and asked why we know this. Naive me answered that you need to know when you get a loan to buy a car or a mortgage for a house. They looked baffled and asked me why I wouldn’t pay for it in cash like the last Mercedes-Benz I bought. I couldn't reply after that.

I've never experienced it personally, but I've heard several stories about rich people who flat out refuse to respond to anything said or asked by cashiers, repair people, drivers, etc., on the grounds that "They don't talk to the help."

“Why can’t you just get a new couch? It’s almost time for summer furniture anyway.”