LogFAQs > #974533283

captpackrat posted...

It's more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. Terry Pratchett mentions it in his book Men at Arms.

I'm not rich and I live by that same mentality. I always consider the long term benefits when spending money. I almost never buy games at full price. On average, games cost me less than $15 USD a piece, and I'm not just buying indie games but plenty of AAA titles as well. I also own nearly two thousand games. I wait for sales.

I've been wearing the same pair of boots for well over a decade now, and they cost my grandfather $100 CAD (It was a gift). He had the same kind of mentality as me, at least when it came to clothing. This mentality was handed down to his son, my father, who in turn handed it down to me. My grandfather saw me wearing a cheap pair of boots (bought by my mother when I was a young teenager) that weren't waterproof anymore due to wear. He was a shoemaker when he was young, so those old boots were an insult to him.

I've never been in debt and I'm not a big spender. I buy things that will last me a long time. I still wear clothes I wore as a preteen. Because I was thinking in the long term even then, I made sure to pick larger sizes that I would grow into. There's also the fact that I was obese, and losing so much weight later in life expanded my wardrobe. Some of my old clothes also grew in size overtime. I only ever stop wearing an item when it's damaged beyond repair. I don't like being seen in public wearing t-shirts full of holes, so I only wear those at home. People tend to tell me that I dress well. I'm into cardigans, chesterfield coats, fedora hats, pinstripe shirts, etc.

I barely make anything due to health issues preventing me from doing steady 9 to 5 jobs, but my financial decisions allowed me to secure a good safety net. I currently make a little over $18K CAD a year and I have well over $50K in my bank account. I know people who make five times that much and who still live paycheck to paycheck. Life currently costs me $1K per month, although it used to be $750 last year. I can thank the 1% for that. I use some of the leftovers to buy games and other "uneccessary" stuff, then invest the rest.

If I was born rich, I would have certainly grown up becoming one of those asshole billionaires. I already have an asshole father who fucked me up. It took me forever to work on my behavior. I don't think I would have put the effort to not become an entitled prick if I was born rich and encouraged by the system to be even more terrible. Just imagine what would have happened to Donald Trump if he wasn't born in the 1%. He'd still be a dumbass, but no one would be giving a shit about a high school dropout who flips burgers. He'd be much less of a narcissistic asshole though.

adjl posted...

The thing is, those decisions simply don't affect them like they do us. I was talking with my girlfriend about the whole sub thing, and she mentioned how ridiculous it was to spend $500,000 on a father's day present (two tickets). For somebody with 1 billion dollars to their name, that's 0.05% of their money (1/2000). To scale that down, for somebody with $100k (which already puts them quite a bit ahead of most of America), that would be $50, which that person would never think twice about spending for a special occasion. It's a testament to the baffling scale of a billion dollars to realize that, but that's the reality of the situation (and most billionaires have more than just 1 billion).

I bought my father a $1,000 CAD gift once, which was worth 0.25% of the cash I had to my name at the time, not counting assets (mostly furniture, electronics, and games) I could sell. The fact that I'm more generous toward my asshole father than a billionaire is to their own speaks volumes to how ridiculously cheap those asshole billionaires are. If you're wondering about the gift itself, it was a 55" LED 1080p HDTV. I was tired of seeing him use a 19" CRT 480i SDTV.

TomNook posted...

People always confuse networth as being a vault of money that they dive into like Scrooge McDuck.

In the case of those idiots, the vault they dove into literally imploded.