How Rich People Absolutely Are Screwing Us and How We Can Fight Back
By: Rocco Pendola
Tags: Investing, Personal Finance, Money, Billionaires, Parents

First, I didn’t “minimize” the fact that my Dad has two pensions.

One is small enough to be insignificant. The other is modest but meaningful enough to matter. And I discussed in the above-mentioned article and elsewhere how to mimic a pension simply by using a simple savings account or three.

Okay, I’m done being defensive.

Side note: As a writer, the best thing I have learned over the years is don’t be defensive. I used to respond defensively to comments on the regular. Now I limit myself to like once a quarter. This makes for better writing and a happier life!

Second, here’s the problem with Bruce Suitt’s second paragraph.

It completely ignores time, place, and experience. It ignores context.

It fails to take into account the dynamics that shape other people’s lives and how, even if they’re different and outdated, we can learn from them. We can take the perspective of others and adapt the still-relevant parts of their experience to our present way of living. To how we want to live now.

In combination with some of the other negative responses to the article about my parents, it highlights the toxic situation we’re in, thanks to the handful of super-rich people who — unfortunately — dominate so many of our conversations about money.

When I wrote about exiting the stock market — and subsequently leaving money on the table — a gaggle of readers simply couldn’t begin to comprehend why I would do such a thing. For all intents and purposes, most of their responses focused on getting rich.

The idea that you can forgo greed in favor of cash security amid low expenses simply didn’t resonate. While we can chalk a significant portion of this mindset up to little more than the American experience and view of money, these billionaires and the small number of Reddit warriors who made a lot of cash deserve attention, if not blame.

We’re not being directly screwed because other people have so much. We’re not being directly screwed because a super tiny percentage of the population got lucky and got rich quick.

This inequality doesn’t tend to impact those of us in relatively privileged positions. The impact occurs in a more indirect line.

We’re screwing ourselves by creating this crazy narrative in our heads after being inundated with stories of billionaires getting richer during the pandemic and so-called bandit traders allegedly getting rich quick on meme stocks.

This is not only a crazy narrative, it’s completely false.

This January Medium article from the Marker Editors might have summed it best:

If you park your $600 in the S&P 500, you, too, can be a billionaire… in approximately 223 years. Maybe a few years sooner if those $2,000 checks come through, too.

This is the reality, dude!

Once we embrace this reality and stop trying to be other people, we can continue on with the feasible and righteous business of getting our individual personal financial situations in order.

We all need to do one or more of the following:

Develop — at a basic level — healthier relationships with money.

Take our money situations from relative disarray to some semblance of decent or better.

Improve an already improving — if not already good or solid — relationship with money and personal financial situation.

We’re not gonna get there on any of these points if we look at the lingerie or underwear model in the magazine and attempt to shape our bodies in their likeness.

It’s wholly unrealistic. It’s toxic. It’s a recipe for angst, if not outright depression.

We need better role models for our money.

This is why I brought up Mom and Dad. I didn’t expect the snark and negativity. Granted, it came from a relatively small segment of the reading audience, but it still came.

Yeah, my Dad worked until he was 70. I lived with him for a significant portion of his working years.

You didn’t.

And I can tell you he was happy. Still is.

Even now — when I think I know everything even more than I did when I was a teenager — I would never prescribe a different way of living for him. He was and still is a product of his time.

I worked a couple summers with him at his job at the local housing authority. We had fun at work.

My Dad had this knack of working really hard and getting everything done — and done well — while maintaining this air of us fucking off all the time.

Do I want my Dad’s life or his retirement? Absolutely not.

At the same time, he doesn’t want my life. Not then. Not now. He could not have possibly adapted to the life I lead and the specific where and how I lead it. It would produce an anxiety that would prevent him from being happy.

However, this doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him — and probably your parents as well. It also doesn’t mean he — or they — can’t learn from us.

We must be self-aware and mature enough to look at other people’s lives and place them in the proper context, then take what we can productively carry and leave the rest.

We’re going to get a lot further with our money gleaning from 76–year old men and women than from modern-day billionaires who don’t give a damn about us. We’re gonna get glimpses of what to do from our elders as well as what not to do. Because there sure as hell is a lot about them, we should not emulate.

Even if you have shitty, deadbeat parents, you can learn from them. I take the cue from less-than-desirable old people all of the time.

As they become more cynical, jaded, and bitter over time, sitting in their chairs watching cable news and bitching, I’m like there — that’s exactly what I do not want to and will not become.

You’re not going to become anything worth becoming in life and with money, if you shape yourself in the image of the most extreme cases in society (e.g., billionaires), some of which the media absolutely over-hypes (i.e., day traders and social media warriors).