Rich people. They’re just like us, only they’ve never had to wonder how anything tastes like, and yes, of course that also includes human flesh, let’s be real here. So not like us at all now that I think about it, which Judy and Daniel would know all about having worked for a bunch of crazy rich people in the past, some of whom could’ve been Asian, I guess. In any case, this is what they’ve learned from their jobs:
4. The Richest People Can Be The Biggest Penny-Pinchers
When your bank account has so many 0s that it looks like a transcript of your jaded wife’s orgasm as she’s cheating on you with the gardener, it means you can officially stop sweating the little stuff. Basically, if it costs less than a used car, rich folks can treat it like their fourth child and literally never think about it. But according to Daniel, who worked for a private bank servicing three wealthy brothers, that’s not how things usually turn out:
“I witnessed HOURS on the phone from overseas to argue over an $8 charge at their country club.”
“The wife of the older son called in a FURY insisting that an ~$8 charge on their private country club account MUST have been theft because they were not in the United States that week. She called both myself and the country club to dispute it (and this when calls from Brazil to the US cost more than $8 for 10+ minutes of talking) for hours to have them send the original receipt and confirm the purchase … In the end, it turned out that she had forgotten her student son was in Miami that weekend and he bought himself lunch. That was it.” In her defense, she probably just forgot that a human being had once been willing to procreate with her.
Her behavior could possibly be explained by some studies which say that becoming rich is like putting on a reverse invisibility cloak: it makes you stop seeing the people around you, especially when you’re speeding past elementary schools drunk in your Lambo. And when you cease to see real people and their problems, you start to think that maybe life is just an endless parade of unicorn blowjobs for EVERYBODY so you contextualize any tiny inconvenience as a personal attack on you. In short, you not only become an asshole, you become a stupid asshole, unaware of how stupid or asshole-ish you really are.
“It was the holiday season,” Daniel recalls another incident with his employer’s family, “that I received a package from one of the wives. I opened to find a really nice Coach brand leather planner and was quite touched until I realized the actual calendar was from two years before and I think had some things written in it … The thought that they practically made more on interest overnight than I earned in a year and couldn’t be bothered to actually get me a gift (or even a card) was very insulting.”
And you might be thinking: “These people earned that money through hard work. They can do whatever they want with it.” Yeah, about that…
3. Most Rich People Don’t Actually Earn Most Of Their Money
They say that nothing tastes better than something you’ve earned yourself, so just try to imagine the hell that most rich folks live in, being the only people able to afford to eat money but not able to enjoy it. Truly, they must dream about the sweet embrace of death every single day.
“It would be one thing if these people had in any way earned their wealth, but it is 100 percent inherited in these cases,” explains Judy who worked as an archival and imaging specialist at a large finance and holdings company servicing the very wealthy. “Most of their money is locked up in trusts and offshore accounts, just sitting there, accruing interest and dividends. As soon as it gets to an uncomfortably large sum, the wealthy person’s accountant(s) carve off a section and give it to one of their heirs.”
But, hold on, as my grandma used to say: before you can lock a bastard up in the spider basement, you first have to get them in your car. So how do these millionaires get the money to hide away in their accounts? From a long-dead relative who probably first made it centuries ago betting on Slave Asbestos Eating contents or something. Much like the spider basement, the inherited wealth well is deeper than most people think.
“The thing you have to understand is this money goes nowhere.”
“At least, it doesn’t go back into the economy. It gets moved between family members via trusts, and when the accounts get large enough to pull down taxes, the account is split into other, smaller accounts that don’t require taxation, which is how small children come into ownership of simply ludicrous amounts of money.”
To be fair, though, others have also tried to make money by legally adopting their ex-husbands to get a bigger share of their family’s trust, like Susan Gore, heiress to the Gore-Tex fabric fortune and frequent sayer of things like: “Man, I wish Game of Thrones had MORE incest in it.”
2. A Lot Of These People Have No Idea What To Do With Their Money
Rich people and farmers actually have a lot in common: they often watch animals have sex (prove me wrong, fuckers) and they spend a lot of their money on bullshit, as Judy has learned:
“I often found myself saying out loud: ‘He transferred that much to his nephew to invest in art for his college dorm? You could buy a house with that!’ or ‘Yeah, sure, I guess it’s still technically a charity if you provide free antique vase appraisal to the people of Manhattan…'”
“I mean, I don’t know any underprivileged youth who have vases, but…”
It was pretty much the same with Daniel’s employers: “The youngest son had a Rolls Royce because of course but he never used it. The Rolls Royce was so heavy that sitting parked actually deformed the tires. I did not know that was possible! It made a noise because of it and because of that and the radio not working correctly we took it to be checked. For an oil change (12 quarts of oil, if I recall correctly – the engine was massive), new tires, and repair to the radio he paid $4K,” just so it could continue sitting there collecting dust.
And what good is an obscenely rich car if nobody knows you have it? It’s like having a dead sex slave. Yeah, you can still technically get inside it but it’s not as fun without poor people watching you do it (and crying.)
“[I also handled] the purchase of museum quality books that were purely for show,” Daniel continues. “There were a few American classics (like Moby Dick and Tom Sawyer) that to my eye were uncut first editions. I marveled at them noting that they were quite literally museum quality and condition. I was then told that essentially they were just purchased to impress people; there was no interest in the cultural or historic value.”
Then again, Daniel can’t know that they were never used. Maybe his ex-employers occasionally rolled them up and smoked pot out of them?
1. Millionaires Sometimes Entrust Very Sensitive Information To VERY Shady Companies
If you are obscenely rich or work at Big Swinging Dickbag Financial Company Inc. (first established in 1890 by B. Swinging Dickbag III), chances are Judy or one of her coworkers knows pretty much everything about you. Yes, even the fact your custom-made condoms could double as sleeping bags for cashew nuts.
“We’d process stock trades and purchases, brokerage accounts forms, trust accounts and trust agreements, information on charity foundations, wills, offshore accounts paperwork, tax forms of all types, 401(k) and IRA forms, birth certificates, death certificates, articles of incorporation, as well as copies of everyone’s ID, phone number, passport, addresses etc.”
Here’s the interesting part: all that insanely sensitive information is about as safe as a dog at a Huckabee-Vick wedding. Judy elaborates:
“We would look over these documents so that we could scan and digitize them into .pdfs. We would code them according to date received and document type using a proprietary software written by someone who, no joke, has since disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“This means that the software won’t work on anything newer than Windows 7 …”
“It also can’t be updated to fix its many bugs, and can’t, for whatever bullshit programming reason, have new users added to its database … Did I mention that, as an added security measure, the system would, at random or at the request of Security, delete veteran employee logins and provide new ones with new credentials?”
Basically, it’s a slow countdown until this software is completely unusable. And once it can’t be used, it’s a domino effect: Nothing gets archived, which means there’s no records, which then means rich people can’t move their money around, everything comes to a grinding halt, and the Earth gets all sticky from every socialist on the planet ejaculating simultaneously out of pure joy. So, you know, keep an eye out for it cause it’s coming. Much like the socialists.