One of my truly beautiful memories is of being a Freshman in college and getting a call from the student loan office. I had a check for $200. $200! I’d already bought my books for the semester and had a fully loaded card for food at the cafeteria. What was this $200 for? For anything I wanted the lady told me. Anything I wanted! I have never felt so RICH as that moment when $200 was dropped in my lap - I’d worked plenty and had checks for that amount, but never had it just appear like that. I went down to the historic district and had the loveliest day browsing all the shops and buying myself a few clothes. I remember I bought this one jacket that was in a really cool punk type of shop, black. The buttons were shank type and were not secured with thread but with a keyring. I wore the hell out of that jacket - thought it was soo cute.
That would be her, yes.
Hooray! I contributed to that campaign. Super psyched she actually produced a book!
Linda is pretty awesome sauce. I watched the campaign go viral and the insane and immediate backlash… crazy man. (she is on the twitters too, if you are on the twitters follow her! 
I grew up in a very food insecure household, she speaks the truth, being poor, especially growing up poor, never really leaves you.
Fucking right it doesn’t. At the minute, I can pay my bills and afford to walk round the supermarket buying things without keeping a running total in my head. I feel rich…
My mom in her retirement has become secure in a way she never was while she was working, and it’s been fascinating to see how long it has taken it to click for her that “Hey, I have money!” - probably about 10 years to run through a lot weird behavior like buying a lot of crappy jewelry from TV - before she started behaving in a way that was kind and generous with her money.
Its weird right? When I have money, I don’t want to spend it. When I don’t have money, suddenly I “need” to buy things, all the tings!
Money is fucked up, and growing up without it fucks you up forever! The only way I’ve been able to save money is setting up an automatic withdrawal to an account I don’t have a debit card for. The only way I can save money is to trick myself… that is messed up!
I’m really glad to find out it’s not just me that has to do this. So much in this thread I can relate to.
That’s the way everyone saves, no? Hide it from yourself.
John Cheese on Cracked.com said it best: “We have to spend this before it disappears.”
Do they? Cool. If so, it’s even better to know that I might actually be approaching some vague form of normality when it comes to money.
I think this is right on the money… but I wonder about the other side of that equation - do people who grow up rich enough to not have to think about their finances on a daily basis have similar problems managing money if they fall on hard times? Like would Paris Hilton be able to function if all of a sudden she wasn’t an heiress? I’m kind of curious about that…
I think there are lots of stories of “affluenza” and rich people suddenly becoming poor and not knowing how to cope in the real world. Even the Vanderbilts had some of that, they had the name and status and no money, I can’t imagine that…
And no, Paris would not be able to function, of that I am 100% sure. 
Ah, hah!
Off to buy book now…
In my college days both of my roommates were rich. Actually the first one was upper middle class. The second was rich rich rich. She was my best friend, she was cool as shit, gorgeous, smart, and she was loaded. I loved her like crazy.
No, there is no way she could have managed being poor. There was always an out for her. If she wanted beer, she had a credit card for gas her parents paid for every month that she could use to purchase beer at the gas station. When she went for her first job interview she went down to Saks and bought a good quality suit with her (mom paid for it) credit card. When we lost the apartment we’d rented the previous year because a potential roommate backed out at the last minute so we weren’t moving to a new three bedroom as planned, her mom tried to bribe the new renters to save her the trouble of moving or finding a new place.
Even though, sure, she adjusted to a fixed income in college she would never have gone for a long period without her special hair spray. There were so many fascinating things she did - like she’d buy all these expensive shampoos, then only use half the bottle. It was unbelievable to me, so wasteful! If somehow the family lost it all, she’d lose her sobriety in a hot second. It’s hard to imagine even who she would be - and she was the practical one in the family, not like her sister who was truly spoiled.
I’m curious if you guys ever talked about this stuff, like your different upbringings and how that shaped your world views. Where I grew up (and now at my current school), I’d say I encountered people who were maybe on the lower end of the upper middle class spectrum at the most (though if you could afford it, you sent your kids to the local private school), the wide swath of the middle class, and people who were working poor (I’d say my family was on the upper end of working class growing up - in part because my grandparents provided something of a helpful cushion), so I never had much to compare my status with growing up, since most people weren’t in the rich category (not even close, really, though I knew plenty of people who were doing okay).
Reminds me of - “And the chip stains and grease/will come out in the bath”
I think it was this super awkward thing that we didn’t talk about even though it affected our relationship a lot. We just negotiated after a while little ways she’d help me out with me keeping my dignity. Like she paid slightly more rent but she also had a little bit of extra room she could use in the duplex.
The college I went to had some very wealthy folks, like at one point I hung out with the people from Beverly Hills which was truly bizarre, like people who had landed from another planet they were so rich. I dated one guy who told me that you don’t buy clothes off the rack there, you go into the store, select what you want, and they custom tailor everything for you. Sweet! Remember, he was talking about doing this as a high school student.
One of the nice things about having friends who had so much wealth was seeing that they had problems that were just as serious and real to them as mine were to me. Of course they were different problems, but being very wealthy comes with it’s own set of issues, like does someone like your for yourself or for your money? And there are so many choices it’s paralyzing sometimes. Or you feel trapped by the expectations your family has for you, or by your family’s achievements.
The wealthy have absolutely no frame of reference for the very alien concept of actually needing a paycheck to pay the bills. May as well try to explain algebra to a lizard.
They also make more money in a day than a working employee does in a year, so ‘their time is very valuable’. If they sacrifice 5 minutes of their time listening to an employee complain about not getting a week’s pay, well that’s way more than a fair trade… benevolent on their part, even. Their moral obligations are to generate profits. They’re making sacrifices for the company and expect the employees to do the same, rather than being greedy and selfish. In fact, they’re even offering the employees some time off, while they will still have to sacrifice their time running the company. Why do poor people have to be so greedy and selfish and call you immoral even when you benevolently give them something as valuable as free time?
And most important of all — be born to rich parents! It’s easy!
