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We can't tell folks how to spend their money. But we can definitely have an opinion on it. Especially when they're flaunting their extravagant purchases for all to see.
So after our team at Bored Panda came across a couple of Reddit threads (one and two) where platform users have been describing the worst "rich people problems" they've witnessed, we decided that you, dear pandas, would be interested to read about them as well.
At a time when 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, these stories serve as a stark reminder of the vast disparities in our society.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
During college I worked at a place selling very high end patio furniture in the richest DC suburb. One day a Washington Redskin comes in and buys a custom patio furniture set for his deck and pool area, total cost for 10 pieces was over $24,000. He paid cash and I set up delivery for 6 weeks later because the furniture had to be made at the manufacturer. Three weeks later he was cut by the team. I called when the order came in and he said "oh, I'm in the Caribbean now, think I'm selling that hous3, think I'm going to retire...you like the furniture?" Me: "yeah". Him, "you can have it, thanks for being a fan". 14 years later and I still have that furniture and the fanciest patio setup in my middle class neighborhood!
MellonCollie 9 months ago
That is a lovely story though, nothing like the entitled cr*p in some of the other stories featured here!
RELATED:
#2
I went to a birthday party in 3rd grade. Every girl in the 3rd grade was invited. So 80 girls were picked up in limos, taken to build a bear where we could choose any bear, then we all got manicures and pedicures, we went to Red Robin for dinner, and limoed back to her mansion for a sleepover.
I will never attend a party that fancy ever again.
#3
Quirky one:
I have a regular day job, but I also teach English as a Second Language to Gulf nationals, in particular Saudi families. I receive a lot of gifts, but one boy I tutored came from a family who owns some of the most expensive racing camels in the Gulf. The father buys and sells these animals that are over six figures. When the son graduated, the father allowed me to choose a camel that would be mine, and designated as not for sale. I have a racing camel in Saudi Arabia that lives probably in better conditions than I do.
#4
My boss once had me drive him to an exotic car dealership to pick up his new Bentley... 3 days after my paycheck had bounced.
#5
I work for a wealthy man and he once had me fly on a private jet to the other side of the country to pick up 6 perfect heirloom strawberries that cost 100$ per six pack. They were placed in Chinese silk hand molded box so each strawberry wouldn't be jostled during the trip.
He ate 3 gave me the rest for my trouble... Not gunna lie. It was the most amazing strawberry experience I have ever had. They probably cost him 25k all said and done between flights and my wage.
Edit: here are some of the answers to all of your questions.
How did i get the job? It just sort of happened. Was teaching the kids ski lessons, started working as a nanny, transitioned into personal assistant role. Given title Director of Fun by family.
Do I make enough money? I only work 4 months a year and travel 8 months.... so yes.
Was the family nice? super awesome family, really nice, slightly out of touch with reality.
What did the strawberry taste like? My lips parted as I slowly brought the impossibly red berry to my mouth. It's scent was too powerful for something that small and the aroma filled my head until nothing else remained. Gingerly placing my teeth on the seed covered tip I took the smallest of bites. The explosion of flavor was overpowering and each time my teeth broke the flesh of that perfect berry an impossible amount of juice gushed out. As I sat there slack jawed with juice crippling down my chin my employer looked at me in disgust and said "you can go home now" (hahah the last sentence is a complete lie but honestly the strawberry was incredible)
Edit2: obligatory thanks for the gold!! However if you could fly it to me on a private jet with some strawberries that is my preferred way of getting karma.
Kaedyn Walsh 9 months ago (edited)
I watched a video on YouTube where a guy went to Japan to a strawberry farmer and he had the most costly strawberries in the world. Iirc it was approx 12000 usd (twelve thousand) for 4 or 6. The visitor bought one and you could tell it was a strawberry from another reality, how amazingly delicious it was. The farmer had strawberries of all costs, btw, so any person could afford them. Strawberries don't natively grow in Japan so it takes special soil, greenhouse and tons of attention.
#6
In high school, my friends parents paid me $50 to hang out with their dogs in the basement for two hours while they had a party on the main floor. I got to hang out with dogs, play video games and they brought me down some of the catered food. I would have done it for free.
Jesha 9 months ago
Not really obscene, though. Probably partially doing a solid for the kid and it would keep the dogs from being all up in the adults' business. That's not an ostentatious display of wasteful wealth. I mean, given OP was friends with their kid, there is a very real chance mom and dad genuinely liked them.
#7
I used to be an Optician in a very high end Optical shop. I had a customer spend $15k on glasses in 1 hour. He was wearing overalls covered in paint and dirt, no one else wanted to help him. I approached and began to help him when he decided he wanted to look at Cartier glasses. The Cartier case is ALWAYS locked and the key is in the owners office. So I politely excused myself and on my way to retrieve the key, my co-workers where warning me to be careful, he just wants to steel the eyewear. My co workers where all dumbfounded when I walked to the back to ring up his order on the credit card machine, as I asked "how do I ring up $14,995"?!?Managers mouth dropped to the floor. Turns out customer is Andre Rieu. Best commission check ever. And I still hold the company record for highest sale, so I'm told.
Mrs.C 9 months ago
Waiting tables in the mid 90's and a guy came in just before shift change wearing dirty overalls, ratty farm hat, torn up t-shirt. The guy taking over for me wasn't on the clock yet and refused to clock in 2 minutes early so I could head out. I took the guy's order (steak & a beer), got him 1 refill, and he left me a $100 to cover his $20 tab. Not in the same paygrade, but the same lesson nonetheless.
#8
I had an obscenely wealthy kid in my graduating class. His parents bought him a brand new Range Rover on his 16th birthday and he crashed it into a school bus. They got him a new one and he crashed it road racing. They got him a new one and he got a DUI and finally the police took away his license (thank the lord).
UKGrandad 9 months ago (edited)
I have a friend who was manager of a VW/Audi dealership in the north of England back in the 1980s. The owner of a major bakery (not Hovis, but that size of business) bought his son a brand new Audi Quattro when they first came onto the market. The car was his 18th birthday gift. Within a week then boy had rolled the car and completely wrecked it. His dad took him back to the dealership to get him a replacement car. The boy thought he would be getting another Quattro but his dad had other ideas. He picked out a base-model VW Polo - the smallest, slowest, most basic car that VW produced - from the used car lot, and told his son that it was was either that or nothing.
#9
Family I know bought the $3 million house next door so they could knock it down for a tennis court
#10
One of my students gets dropped off to school in a helicopter.
#11
One of my dad's friends from high school is unbelievably rich and a collector. He owns a legitimate Stradivarius. Eventually, he decided he wanted to learn how to actually play it, so he signed up for lessons and brought a f*****g Stradivarius with him down to the local music shop to meet his instructor and have his first lesson.
I can only imagine the look on his instructor's face...
#12
A woman on a Delta flight in first class, loudly complaining to her seat mate that she had to 'fly commercial' because her family's private jet was being repaired
#13
I went to Chipotle with a friend and they willingly paid for us both to get guacamole.
#14
My rich friend has had to respray his car multiple times because a peacock on his land keeps seeing his reflection in it and attacking it like crazy
#15
I met the CEO of the company I work for and I complimented his watch. The first thing he did is take it off a day let me wear it. Come to find out after doing a little research, the watch he was wearing is a Patek Phillipe that cost 1.75 million. That watch alone cost more than every asset in my family for the past 4 generations.
#16
Back when the recession hit, one of my very best friend's family was very distraught, because they had to sell one of their three private jets.
#17
Guy from my town bought a helicopter. He had fallen out with his neighbour so decided to call his pilot at 4am and hover over his neighbours house all night to annoy him.
BoredPossum 9 months ago
I think you need permission to fly, every single time you want to fly, in my country.
#18
They bought a new yacht because the wife didn't like the beds.
malaixa 9 months ago
Ah, the quintessеntial extravagancе of the elite! It seems even the most luxurious yacht is subject to the discriminating tastе of a discontented spouse. One can't help but chuckle at the thought of sailing away from discomfort in such style. Truly, a tеstament to the boundless whimsy of the wеalthy.
#19
We owned a karaoke service in Las Vegas. Got a call one day at 730pm from a party planner we often worked with.
They wanted us to be at the Venetian in 1.5 hours for a 4 hour event. "Price is not an issue"
We gave them a decent last minute deal ($2000).
Turns out this was for a private gambling club. They had a special room with the big table games set up.
Minimum buy in just to attend was $500,000 actual cash on hand and another $500,000 line of credit.
Minimum bet was $5000 with no max. Most bets were $20k or more (a stack of 20 $1000 chips.
I forgot to mention, there was also a $1,000,000 membership fee (one time, lifetime) to get invited to these kinds of events.
The smallest chip in the room was $100, and that's what they used for tipping.
I made over $3000 in tips that night, plus my pay of $2000. In 4 hours.
Rumor was that one guy lost $3.5 million. In 4 hours.
Gabriele Alfredo Pini 9 months ago
And this is the absurd: to you that $5000 will be a big help and a tragedy to lose, for him that $3.500.000 are just the cost of a bad evening
#20
My last job before college was dealing with what they call the 1% now. We had a call from a customer who had spent a five-figure sum for items for her house, and realized the house she had it sent to was not the house she wanted to decorate with them. After being informed the order was already in transit she just reordered everything and had it rush delivered to the house she wanted it for. She was totally cool with it.
I always picture the basement of her one house having the duplicates sitting there, worth far more than what I made at that job in a year.
#21
I was helping an owner rent his apartment, which is an investment property. It's a 2,500 sq ft condo with 4 balconies and 360 degree views of midtown east in Manhattan asking for $15,000/month.
Rented it for 6 months upfront with option to renew to someone who has ties to oil families in the Middle East. The person never moved in.
#22
Lived in the international dorms in college. First week of school move in happens and you get to meet a bunch of people. One of the people I met was this girl from Singapore. She's pretty cool and whatnot, but after a few weeks she realizes that to get around she needs a car, as public transport BLOWS. So, naturally, she calls her parents to tell them that she needs a car. No biggie.
She tells them that she needs a Mercedes S class. hmm, okay. Nice. But remember, she's from Singapore. If you know anything about Singapore it's that cars cost anywhere from 6-9x what they do in the US. Casually, her parents wire her enough money to get an S class..... in Singapore.
Girl gets $650,000 wired to her account, not knowing that it cost 6x less here. She goes to the dealership then comes back in a hour with no car. I asked her what happened, and she says "oh, it's getting delivered". Sure enough, 2 days later a brand new car shows up, except it's no S class. It's a Lamborghini Murcielago. Touche, well played.
I later find out she doesn't know how to drive, so she hired a chauffeur to drive her around. She would sit in the passenger side of her own lambo and be driven places. What made it more hilarious was that the chauffeur would actually wear a black jacket and hat.
EDIT: Eventually she got a drivers license and was able to drive the car herself. I think the chauffeur was around for 2-3 months though. After moving out of that dorm, I didn't really keep contact with her, but I assume she went back home just like every other ballin' international student.
#23
I install elevators in Australia. We call them lifts and all of our customers are domestic (not commercial). I was on service for a month while they found a new leading hand for me to work with, last one quit no notice. While servicing a lift the owner offered us a coffee. I let the guy in charge make the decision and followed his agreeing that a coffee would be appreciated, yes please. We follow him upstairs for the coffee and he's got two bowls filled with lindt chocolate and Ferrero Roche to go with the coffee, not biscuits like we're used to sometimes being offered. Not particularly obscene but it did nothing to prepare me for the next. He points at two bottles of wine on the bench and says "Now, those are for you two, one each. I like to look after the tradies who do work for me". We were there for all of 2 hours. He does this for every tradey who comes to his house. I looked it up. The wine was worth at least $110. Absolutely insane from my perspective. None of the areas near me are particularly rich but this guy owns an estate agent and it's working for him. edit: I know it's not obscene relative to the other stories here. The question was the most obscene I had witnessed personally. I don't rub shoulders with rich bastards like the lot of you so this happens to be the top of my list. Sorry. Biscuits in australia are sweet: http://www.arnotts.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Assorted_Creams_275x210.jpg I get it. He didn't own an estate agent, he owned a Real Estate Agency. There's a type of metaphor called a synecdoche, where you refer to part of something by the whole or the whole of something by the part, like calling a dish washing employee a kitchen hand or calling your sword your steel. He owned the business, the employee is a wage slave, he owns the employee. The grammar N'a'z'i's can f**k off now. Cheers
#24
My hometown of Hobart is a working class city right at the end of the world in Tasmania, where nothing much ever happens. In the past not many people came here except a few hikers / outdoors people to admire the natural beauty of the place but nothing else was really going for the town. A guy who made hundreds of millions of dollars gambling opened his own private $150 million art museum, and has turned the city into a major tourist drawcard. Best of all, locals are allowed in for free whenever they like, and free parties/festivals are thrown year-round. In under 5 years he's single handedly transformed the entire city.
EDIT: thanks for the replies and interest everyone! Here's a piece about David Walsh and MONA: http://www.afr.com/opinion/columns/david-walshs-wisdom-beats-the-odds-20131213-ij8gn
Also, You can find out more about my beautiful hometown here http://www.discovertasmania.com.au/about/regions-of-tasmania/hobart-and-south/hobart.
Paul Gerrard 9 months ago
Mona is the gallery. Read up on how he made his money...gambling. Tax office sued him for a fortune in undeclared income. He said it wasnt income but winnings so tax free. High court agreed.
#25
I saw this guy at a bar who got a call and just got up and left: He hardly even touched his beer and most of it was still there in the mug.
Carol Aguilar 9 months ago
this ranks up with the friend who bought the guac at Chipotle. Stunning wealth to be able to do things like that...
#26
So, this is obscene, but not really in a hugely bad way. Many moons ago I worked at a cable company. This guy calls in because his internet sucks. Sadly, there was about f**k-all we could do about it as his home was out in the boonies. We could only get him internet through a wireless tower, and those things will have connection hiccups if a butterfly passes by. He asks us how much it'd cost to run a wired line to his house. At first, we assumed he was either: a) stupid or b) crazy Turns out he was serious. We got a contract put together in a few days and he paid for a new line to his place, which let us run connections to a few other houses in the area. I can't remember if it was a 7 figure or 6 figure deal, but that s**t wasn't cheap. So, hats off to crazy old rich guy in bumf*cknowhere. I hope your porn streams are still flowing like a river. EDIT: Since this keeps coming up; No, this wasn't for Joe Rogan. This was in Kansas, so the bumf*cknowhere was truly bumf*cknowhere and threats of wind were a serious issue on those wifi towers. Edit2: for the other thing that keeps coming up. It was a really small company. They weren't intentionally giving anyone the screw job on a line, they couldn't afford to run lines everywhere. If I remember right, at the time it served 2 towns plus the surrounding farmlamds, and that's counting the Wi-Fi towers. I can't remember the details on the contract the guy got for running the lines and future costs, but I'm pretty sure he was on the short list of folks with a VIP flag on his account.
Gavin Johnson 9 months ago
Most likely he offset the cost against taxes within a company that he owns because being out of touch at crucial times could financially impact on him, OR he’s got money, serious money and he’ll recoup the cost in a couple of weeks through interest alone.
#27
I worked for a gal who had a speaker go out in her Ferrari and she refused to drive any further under those circumstances so she pulled over to wait for one of her house staff to bring her the Porsche. True story.
#28
A party at the CEO's house for Halloween. Insanity. I thought I was going to get kicked out of the neighborhood because I was only driving a 30k car, not a 300k car. Anything you can think of, he had at this party - staff with signature cocktails at the door, a fully staffed bar for liquor, a fully staffed bar for wine, an entire table made of ice with ice shot glasses and ten different vodkas. He was wearing a costume made of leather that his wife commissioned for him, handmade in France. The 400 yard bridge to his private lake was strung up with extra lights, and the dock had a separate bar for those who wanted to sit on the lake.
#29
In summer of 1988 I was 16 and I went on a family trip to visit relatives in Cali, Colombia. One night, they took us on a drive around town to see the city at night. On the tour, we passed a six or seven story office tower under construction in a residential neighborhood that my cousin told me was to be the future home of one of the city's largest narcotraficantes, or d**g kingpins. While the house was under construction, he'd had **another** large mansion built directly across the street so he could keep an eye on the building's progress from his home.
Essentially, he built a mansion to live in while he watched his bgger mansion being built.
#30
Once won a VIP ticket for a moscow night club. don't ask. saw three kids test their 100k watches for water proofness by emptying 4k bottles of champagne over them. one of the watches wasn't. they found that fact very funny.
Edit:
1. RIP inbox.
2. 100k & 4k dollars worth. not ruble, not yen not the amount of watches or screen resolution of the bottles you silly c***s.
3. I answered the question on how i came to be VIP already. Just search for it in the comments. but i promise you really don't wanna know becaus its boring af.
What do you think ?
DRMAGDN 9 months ago
I have a soundguy friend who worked on the famous Aerosmith Get A Grip record with Eat The Rich on it. He is actually the burp at the end of the track.
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Cosmikid 9 months ago
Just wait until the stories about the new "Crypto- Billionaires" start coming in. You do realize - cryptocurrency is actually just counterfeit.. Purely printed, made up- worth nothing at all. They figured out now that it's electronic they didn't need to fake coins or bills, they could just fake the entire "currency system". Except at the moment people still believe it - and will give you real money for it. So - the crypto billionaires have fantasy money- and they spend it that way.
bElLa sTairZz 9 months ago
people are still giving real money for it?? D:
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DRMAGDN 9 months ago
I have a soundguy friend who worked on the famous Aerosmith Get A Grip record with Eat The Rich on it. He is actually the burp at the end of the track.
Load More Replies... Cosmikid 9 months ago
Just wait until the stories about the new "Crypto- Billionaires" start coming in. You do realize - cryptocurrency is actually just counterfeit.. Purely printed, made up- worth nothing at all. They figured out now that it's electronic they didn't need to fake coins or bills, they could just fake the entire "currency system". Except at the moment people still believe it - and will give you real money for it. So - the crypto billionaires have fantasy money- and they spend it that way.
bElLa sTairZz 9 months ago
people are still giving real money for it?? D:
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