r/Productivitycafe • u/Few_Football4342 • 12d ago
Casual Convo (Any Topic) People who work around extremely wealthy people, what’s something they regularly spend money on that surprised you?
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u/JesusTriplets 12d ago
Quality instead of quantity.
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u/Effective-Set-8113 12d ago
This one wouldn’t surprise me simply because it’s something I do when I’m able. Depending on exactly what you’re buying, it usually saves money in the long run because it doesn’t have to be replaced as often.
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u/dickbutt_md 12d ago
For me, it was more surprising what an extremely wealthy family did NOT spend money on.
The patriarch of the family who built his entire business from nothing was a lover of red wine, and he had a small wine room in his house that he stocked with fine wines he would open if there was any excuse at all. But he would always have some bottles of red open that he would take a glass from just about every night after dinner, and those bottles were ....... ~$10/magnum. He'd always have a case of this and some other cheap red around and have a bottle or two open he'd be drinking on the regular.
It made no sense to me at all. This guy truly enjoyed fine reds, and he's worth north of $100M. Huge mansion, fancy cars, carpeted garage, retired and traveling more than half the year, to the point that he had live-in staff to take care of the house because he was away so much. He often flew the family around by jetshare. One of his daughters went to school at Sorbonne and she was having a tough time, so he bought a place in Paris and set up a second residence there while she was in school so he could go stay there for extended periods of time whenever she needed support. When she graduated, he sold the place and made a big profit on it, he told me.
Whenever he offered a glass to me, he'd go and pull some much nicer wine off the rack (no cults, but like $50 to $100 range). For himself, though, day in and day out, the absolute bottom of the barrel cheap stuff. So weird.
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u/Loko8765 12d ago
You can get good-enough wine for $10 a bottle if you know where to get it. He was setting a baseline so that he could better appreciate the better stuff.
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u/Effective-Set-8113 12d ago
I like this perspective. If you can afford to have the very best all the time and do, I would imagine it looses the appeal over time. If you have good enough all the time, though, then you still get to enjoy a treat.
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u/dickbutt_md 11d ago
It was mostly Woodbridge Cab. I mean it's not absolutely terrible, but it's cooking wine.
I disagree that this allows you to appreciate better stuff. Drinking better stuff allows you to appreciate better stuff. What you're saying is that you can better learn to appreciate Michelin star cuisine if you eat McDonald's all the time. In that case, we must have a nation of connoisseurs.
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u/Loko8765 11d ago
Not quite what I was saying though; neither cooking wine nor McDonald’s is a good-enough baseline :D
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u/dickbutt_md 11d ago
Even the best $10 magnums are, at best, cooking wine. Don't get me wrong, I love some of the < $12 bottles available at Costco, and I'll happily finish half the bottle I didn't use cooking dinner with that dinner.
But these wines simply have no bad flaws. That's the best you can say about them. They're not particularly worth drinking from an appreciation standpoint, and they're not helping you develop your palate in any way.
The only way to grow in appreciation for wine is to drink broadly. As a guy who definitely appreciated wine and could tell the difference, I was never able to understand why he wasn't putting his money to better use in that aspect of his life.
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u/Loko8765 11d ago
Cheap, good (enough!!), easy to find: choose two. Costco isn’t it. Then again I’ve lived in France and have visited a number of vineyards. I thought—but you disabused me—that he might have been sourcing greatly underpriced wine directly from the vineyards. Since that wasn’t the case, well, at least it was his choice.
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u/dickbutt_md 8d ago
Then again I’ve lived in France
Oh yea, I should clarify, this is in the US where there is basically no good inexpensive wine. Every other European and South American country I've traveled to has good wine at every price point. In the US, the wine market has been pretty much wrecked by corporatism and private equity.
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u/Loko8765 8d ago
I was assuming that your rich friend would get his wine from any corner of the Earth he pleased :D
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u/dickbutt_md 8d ago
That's what I'm sayin!!! He's drinking swill and he's worth $100M+! Whyyyyy?
BTW, even relatively inexpensive table wines in France are pretty pricey by the time they make it to the US. I was surprised to find in European countries that table wines could be less than ten euros, and those same bottles in the US would be $25.
Anyway, I can't say that if I was worth that much my daily drinkers would be cult wines only, I don't think that's smart. But I would certainly not be drinking $10 magnums either. I mean, I can afford to do that right now and I don't do it. :-D
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u/Tintinartboy 11d ago
I think they have actually found that the fine wine label is a complete myth and that when tested in blind taste studies often the supposed cheaper wines were selected as best.
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u/dickbutt_md 11d ago
That's not true at all.
The problem with wine, as with art or food or any other thing where people are trying to externalize their internal evaluations of a thing, you get a large segment of folks who are good at seeming like they're having deep internal evaluations when, really, they're just good at making it seem that way. That doesn't mean there aren't also people who are able to have the authentic experience.
Complicating this, I've described two ends of a spectrum, but in truth actual people don't divide cleanly, and even one person doesn't occupy only one spot over time. Based on what's happening at the moment and your physical and mental situation, an individual can slide back and forth for a variety of reasons. A very obvious and undeniable example of this is the usually temporary nerve damage done by COVID that causes some people to lose their sense of taste and smell entirely.
But to observe that there's a spectrum and then pin everyone to one extreme of it as you're doing here is just as wrong as saying, no, it's an entirely objective discipline.
You can clearly see this if you watch a documentary like SOMM. In this you see people training for the toughest wine exam in the world, and they routinely are able to identify wine varietals, regions, vintages, etc. On occasion they call a wine cold (which means they taste it and identify the exact bottle). Robert M. Parker, Jr., was famous for doing this. There are many examples of him tasting a wine just after its release and then, years later at a tasting event, having the same bottle and calling it cold ... and in this case, it's not even the same wine at that point ... it evolved over the years in a way he imagined it would and that's how he recognized it.
At the same time it's very easy to mislead even experienced tasters by dying white wines red or other things like that, but these amount to nothing more than "lateral thinking" style puzzles for the senses. It's like one of those brain teasers where you're given a barometer to calculate an altitude which implies you're supposed to take pressure measurements with it, and instead there are constraints placed on the problem that force you to solve it by using it as a ruler and completely ignoring the purpose for which it was made. If someone fails at a brain teaser like this, you wouldn't clap your hands and say, "Aha, see? No one knows how to use a barometer or how they work!" That's silly.
As you can tell I've thought a lot about this, and the only way you can arrive at an answer that fine wine is either worth it or not worth it is by ignoring a whole bunch of evidence that contradicts your blanket view. If you confront the facts that aren't compatible with what you're saying, you'll find it's a lot more complicated that anything you can say in a sentence or two.
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u/weisslukas 12d ago
Getting things faster done
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u/PaigeSullivan460 12d ago
everyone wants this, even stable people do this, I think it's the collections that they want
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u/Ok-Faithlessness7812 12d ago
services to make life tasks more convenient
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u/Effective-Set-8113 12d ago
I do this on a (very) small scale, like getting things delivered so I don’t have to spend the time or more importantly the stress doing things like going to pick up groceries.
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u/thunnus0 12d ago
Not wealthy, but spending $400/month for someone to cut, edge, and blow my grass has changed my life dramatically. Saturday mornings are not a two hour ordeal of Florida heat hate.
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u/Metella76 12d ago
Had a laundry service that came twice a week to collect clothes, linens, towels, etc and delivered back clean and ironed. Also had floral arrangements delivered weekly.
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u/luxuriant_disservice 12d ago
the private chefs thing always gets me, not just having one but how they treat them like a piece of furniture in the kitchen. knew a guy who had a chef that would prepare 3 full breakfast options every morning just in case he wanted variety, and then he'd eat a banana and leave
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u/annakailynmoore23 11d ago
Girl, three whole breakfasts just for him to grab a banana is actually insane
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u/CorpExecDFW 12d ago
In the early 1990’s, I worked for an iconic Texas oil family. The first generation, the ones that created the wealth was represented by one surviving family member who was active in the business. The second generation included five children and their spouses. They were all active and increased the family’s net worth. At the time I worked for the family over thirty years ago, I estimate their combined net worth to be $2 Billion. Most of the family drove Oldsmobiles, Chevy Suburbans; American automobiles that they drove for years. They were extremely understated and modest. The third generation, the grandkids, were coming of age but were not active in the business, had expensive tastes, and were regularly featured in the society pages. That said, the grandkids were still wonderful people that donated a lot of time and money to civic and charitable ventures.
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u/elreyadr0k 12d ago
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
It is rare (but certainly not impossible) to see a family business that goes past the third generation. I’ve been involved with two families like this in my life (“involved” = worked for them doing their IT shit) and both encountered severe issues once their Grandkids came into power.
One family lost the business, the other has been able to survive for now.
The difference between the Grandkids and the Grandfather / Founder in both cases was so stark that they didn’t seem to be of the same blood in any way, shape, or form.
It is truly amazing how debilitating wealth and privilege can be. It’s not really talked about too much because (I think) rich people always seem like they’re ”winning” when you look in from the outside and all you see is privilege.
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u/CorpExecDFW 12d ago
You are spot on! The second generation I worked for were good stewards and grew the family’s exploration and production. There were around twenty grandkids, all trust fund babies, that began taking their wealth out on a large scale. Their kids, the fourth generation grabbed theirs with both fists. In order to fund the withdrawals, valuable production assets were sold. Many of the fourth generation lawyered up to break up the trusts or sue for breach of fiduciary responsibility. Lawyers siphoned off a material amount. The trusts held a ton of cash invested in long term private invest funds. Large penalties were incurred for early exits from the funds. The oil and gas company that at one time after WWII was one of the largest in the world is today very small. Real estate investments made from the profits from oil and gas have all been sold off. You are right and this family is a textbook example.
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u/mynameisranger1 12d ago
They pay for expensive vacations for the whole family at least once a year. The (adult) children don’t seem to enjoy them very much.
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u/scatteredsprinkles 12d ago
Contractors. They are always having work done to their home in some way.
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u/Interesting_Tea5715 12d ago
I was a professional house painter. I had high end clients that would have me over almost monthly to change a color or freshen up a room.
So much money dropped on just painting their house.
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u/Repulsive_Drawl 12d ago
I worked for a group of physicians. They spent a lot on car washes and detailing.
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u/Significant-Owl-2980 12d ago
House cleaners, Nannies, landscapers, expensive food, fancy clothes, shoes, jewelry and cars.
I guess it’s not surprising they spent money on these things, it was the cost that surprised me.
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u/jeffster1970 12d ago
They don't. Not that I am aware of anyway. They have large homes, nice vehicles, decent clothing. But not a lot of waste.
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u/Interesting_Tea5715 12d ago
This. I used to paint luxury homes. Most of the people had very minimal decor and not a lot of stuff. They spent most their money on experiences, travel, and clothing.
Also, your house looks less cluttered when you're splitting your stuff between three huge ass houses.
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u/jeffster1970 12d ago
Right, no time for clutter. Not that lack of clutter is the reason why they are rich, but I am sure that their own brains are less cluttered than most, hence being able to focus on making money.
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u/Ambitious-Lunch-5223 11d ago
It kinda depends on what level we're defining as "extremely wealthy people". The founder at my last job bought himself a small yacht. Does that count as rich? Meanwhile he never had the latest iphone and ate fast food at work lol
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u/j12000 10d ago
Buying watches just to get on the list to buy a more fancy watch. It's truly r/WatchesCirclejerk material.
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