I work for the 1%, managing the home of a quirky billionaire. He bought his home for $26 million, then gutted it completely & spent two years rebuilding the interior & landscaping. He works from an office over his bedroom overlooking the ocean, and has a masseuse rub his shoulders and back every afternoon for hours. Also: He now charters private planes exclusively, but when he used to fly commercially he would buy two first class tickets so he wouldn't have to sit next to someone. I love him.

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My family is rich but both my parents grew up poor so they've never really flaunted it. The only time I ever remember my dad doing something was at a church auction. There was a go cart and my sister and I like 5 and 8 went to look at it and I sat in it. Immediately a church guy ran over and yelled at us to get off and I cried. My dad quietly wrote a check and handed it to the pastor. All I knew is we got the go cart And dad said I did t do anything wrong. Five years later my mother tells me she was furious because he gave the church two hundred thousand dollars to buy everything and to fire that guy.

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My dad's friend somehow got a contract with a few NFL and other sporting, movie, concert venues to be their ticket supplier (his company makes the actual tickets). The guy is crazy rich. He has a collection of wine that was formally owned by celebrities he bought either when they die or go bankrupt. Imagine going to your dad's friends house where he informs you something like "Tupac had a s**t taste in wine". I think he has in the ballpark of 100 "formally owned" wine bottles.

suitology , Dmitry Limonov Report

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I feel like something small that people don't know about rich people is that many of them see therapists a lot. Not just because they're having an issue or something but because they have either nothing going on in their lives because theirs no need to go into work or because there's so much going on and it's hard for them to handle. And they're kind of really experienced, expensive therapists that don't just sit their and listen and as "and how does that make you feel?" They're like personal trainers for your thoughts and make you really work harder to make your life a little better. Like a life coach!


But yeah, this is nothing like the "they fly in private jets while s******g on golden toilets" like you see in the rest of this thread. Their's still some normality in them and they have problems like the 99% too.

Source: Parents are close friends with some ***big*** people and hear/know about this stuff.

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My sister's friend comes from a very wealthy family. Even though she works a normal corporate job, she definitely uses some of that wealth for fun. At a sister's party, she and I started talking. She loves to travel, and used every possible weekend for a trip. On a four day weekend, she'd travel to Peru, or Tokyo, or some place like that to check it out

She told me once how she flew from Toronto to Paris, had lunch, flew to Istanbul for dinner, and then flew to Dubai the next day for a spa retreat.

She was actually a really sweet person. From her stories, I became less enthralled with her being rich and the stories with that, but more about the perspective she gained through seeing so many cultures and people.

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Never doing a road trip. Never doing the standard TSA, because their plane is in their own hangar. Never packing a lot of luggage because if it's more than a week, they just buy more clothes. Never doing laundry on vacation. Just ship the dirty clothes home and buy more.

The woman has more clothes than goddess.

SilverVixen1928 , Karolina Grabowska Report

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Building an extra wing onto the mansion to display 30,000 mounted dove heads.

haironburr , Jean van der Meulen Report

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I also worked on a house that took over a year to build - 3 floors, 20 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, cinema and putting course in the basement, etc.

I almost fell over when I found out that the house was only this family's weekend retreat when they FELT like golfing at this particular course. It was likely they'd use the house 5-6 weekends a year.

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Many have their own private financial management company they set up just to manage their family's personal finances. I worked for such a company for a family who earned their wealth from a well-known global company.

Their private financial company had about 12 full-time employees including portfolio managers and investment researchers, CPA, accounting staff, data entry etc. In addition to portfolio management, we did the payroll for the household staff for all of their homes and paid all of their household bills, credit card and other personal bills for them. They also had a handful of traders assigned to them who worked on the floor of the NY stock exchange.

There is also private banking for such families. I would deposit checks that came in say for selling stock etc into the family's accounts every day. This was before most of banking had gone electronic. I'd go to their public bank but there was a special entrance into a secluded private banking suite. They always had 3 tellers just in private banking and no one was ever in line. I could quickly get everything taken care of without mingling with any plebs.

One of the brothers decided he wanted to vacation in southern France one year. He mentioned that to a friend. The friend said you must go to Monaco. Short story is the brother and his wife stayed at the Monaco royal palace for a week and mingled with Prince Rainier. When they got back, the wife showed me photos of their vacation which included the children and grandchildren of Prince Rainier swimming in the palace pool as they all lounged around enjoying their newfound American friends.

anon Report

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Going to be buried but a girl in my high school spent her sophomore year on a "Suite Life On Deck" cruise ship school. She went all across the globe and visited multiple different cultures all while receiving a top tier education...on a boat.

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My sister worked for a man that owns one of the bottling companys for Coca-Cola. He bottles something like 5% of their total production, if I remember correctly. In any case, he is *hyper* wealthy. He has a massive estate covering something like 50 mi^2. As property next to his goes for sale he simply buys it, regardless of what is on it. If there is a house on the property he has it restored and then uses that to house his seasonal workers that he brings in to take care of the estate.

My sister was hired one summer to take care of and prepare his personal carriage that he would ride every morning. He had a paved trail system that wove throughout his property on which he would have someone take him around in a carriage each morning before starting his day. The driver would be housed and paid throughout the warmer months. My sister was hired specifically to take care of the horses (groom them, feed them, make sure they were kept up to date on health related items, etc.) and to help prepare the carriage. That's it. She got paid and was given housing for a summer to be solely responsible for this mans team of carriage horses.

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This one is pretty messed up. My classmate at university was from a wealthy Russian family that had deep connections to the government and oil industry. He was so ridiculously rich that I couldn't even fathom it.

Anyways he found a few friends of similar ilk and they started some kind of underground club where they would fly in really hot Instagram models from all over the world for "photoshoots". In return for buying them nice clothes and things like that, they would hold just ridiculous sex parties where some really messed up stuff went down. Think the kinkiest of the kinky and that is what they did.

The only reason I even knew about it is because I worked as a part-time limo driver and these guys would occasionally hire me to drive their girls around. Before you ask, I never got in on the action.

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Buying fully furnished houses. This is for people who already own a house (or two, or three...) and want another one. Say you already own a house in Malibu and another in Vail, but you'd like to add another little *pied-à-terre* in New York so you can fly there for an occasional Broadway play or gallery opening. You can afford to buy anything you want, but you want it to be ready to use; you don't want to spend all the time it would take to shop for furniture, linens, dishes, etc. So when a real-estate agent shows you a house, and you decide you want it, you don't just offer to buy the house, you offer to buy the house and everything in it, including the paintings on the wall and the gadgets in the kitchen drawers. If the paintings aren't exactly to your taste, you may want to replace them eventually, but at least you'll have a comfortable place to live while you do that.

JimDixon , Max Vakhtbovych Report

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Its not uncommon in NYC to hire special consultants to help get your kids into the best primary schools.

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I had just heard about a service called a Night Nurse. They live with you once your baby is born and take complete care of the baby all night. I heard it costs $150k for their services but after a month the baby is supposed to sleep through the whole night. Even though I've never heard of it, why wouldn't rich people pay to have someone else take care of the worst parts of parenting?

Edit: Wow this was super informative! I guess just to clarify, it makes sense there are services like this everywhere that don't cost that much, and I didn't go into a lot of detail, but the services described to me were for some Hollywood type people who "Are like George Clooney level" wealthy. These people also had separate full time nannies for each of their 4 children and a housekeeper that washed and ironed everyones' bedsheets every single day. I imagine whatever version they have of a Night Nurse must be pretty luxurious but it's awesome to know this doesn't have to cost a fortune!

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My sister is best friends with billionaire family. They own a well-known American company. The father in this family collects expensive cars, rare cars. So they just have an enormous warehouse filled with cars that they just....collect.

askingforafriend55 Report

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For the first time in my life I went to a Michelin star rated tasting menu restaurant in NYC. It was about 200 dollars a person. 2-3 hours of 18 dishes. Momofuku Ko. Amazing.

This one guy next to us was a regular and was getting the wine flight. He was hanging out there like some dude in a sports bar. My jaw kinda dropped. Literally goes their every week and does the wine flight option with his wife. His assistant makes reservations for him. That's like more money per year than I have ever made, on a weekly dinner per year.

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Well. It is time I tell my tale.

A few years ago I volunteered in dc at an organization that did ICT4D work, and the head of the group was a very wealthy man from Lebanon. He owned many horses and played polo but it wasn't enough. So he found out about Segway Polo, and he bought Segways and started a team in Lebanon. Now, Segway Polo started in Silicon Valley (duh) by Woz (Steve Wozniak) and he created the Woz cup, the World Cup of Segway polo.

So the Lebanese team wanted to host the World Cup but it wasn't easy for Americans to go to Lebanon so he decided to host it in dc. And myself and my coworkers at the org (there were three of us total in the dc office) were to run the event.

So I ran the Woz Cup in 2013, and I met people from all over the world, and it was so much fun. I learned to ride a Segway, and let me tell you, falling off those sucks. But also, the players all own multiple Segways ($$$$) and travel for it ($$$$$) and its ... interesting.

And I ended up dating a Segway polo player, but that's a different story entirely.

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Know someone who's daughter is a personal hair dresser to super rich royalty in Middle East. Pretty much travels the world to hair dress one person. Good money and very luxury lifestyle. Everything paid for. No idea what that person does when she takes a break back home to Uk to visit family..

belgarion26 Report

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Taking a private jet to the Bahamas on a whim. All because you feel like going to the beach for the weekend. My husband's uncle is very wealthy. I'm always so jealous seeing their adventures on FB.

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Friend installs high end kitchens. He gets flown to places like Hawaii to put in $200k to $300k kitchens that will never get used because the staff uses a different kitchen. He also does not hook up the gas as joke to see town many years it is before he gets called back to fix it.

SapientChaos Report

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I work in landscaping and we have customers who have very wealthy clients who get seasonal landscaping. Thousands of dollars for brightly colored annual and perennial beds all to tear it out in a couple of months. Once had a customer who installed 3x 15' spruce trees in a big planter just for the summer, probably over $10k.

Then the seasonal decorating, like $25k for Christmas lights. Then the maintenance contracts - clients who hire regular landscapers to come weekly and maintain their landscape for a cool $100k/year or more.

evlbuxmbetty Report

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I ran a Music Lesson Consultant business in DC. When a rich person wants their kid to take piano lessons, they don't look up music teachers. They ask their handler/manager/staff specialist to contact a consultant to find the best teacher for their kid. That's what I did. Rich person's peon called me, gave me $500, I did a Google search and found a PhD music teacher on a listing and then enrolled the entitled brat. I still find it unreal.

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Buying luxury versions of consumer technology, like Vertu mobile phones.

aBeardOfBees , Kārlis Dambrāns Report

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Polo. Poor people don't know how it works.

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Well if Hollywood is to be believed, and I think it is, there is a fair amount of people hunting going on.

anon Report

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I used to nanny for a billionaire family with three homes and two jets. They had weird hobbies:

Horse jumping -- each kid in the family had his/her own horse, and had at some point participated in this sport. One of the kids was so competitive in it that the family would attend her competitions in Europe, which included flying several horses and a team of groomers over in special hired jets with horsey-related amenities on board. I spent hours per week attending these competitions with them, and it's the same thing every two minutes: girl with an awesome a*s rides a horse around a ring, jumping over hurdles that advertise for John Deere/Fiji/Mercedes. They sit at tables on a pavilion, drink wine, and wait for their kids' names to come up alongside a horse called "Scapula Princess Madonadon" or something. Afterward, everyone raves about what a great time it was. (I was told Bruce Springsteen would sometimes make an appearance because his kid rides, but never saw him there).

They spent their weekdays at one home, and their weekends at another one out of state. This required taking a private jet twice a week (and taking me along to watch the youngest kid). No suitcases though -- they had all the same exact clothes and such in their weekend home.

Elsewhere in the thread somebody mentioned the new-release movies on home theater screens. They totally did this, often on opening weekend -- they'd get the hard drives in the mail during the week, and wait for the encryption keys to be sent. Their "home theater" was about what you'd imagine (and battling the ender dragon in multiplayer Minecraft on it was pretty satisfying).

All the family's pets were registered as emotional support animals so they could be taken on commercial flights -- which the family almost never took, because of the private jets. One of my weirdest tasks on the job was carrying a federally registered rabbit through the TSA metal detector.

Their four dogs had two groomers, two walkers, and four different specialized diets. Their youngest kid had two nannies and two schools. The unemployed stay-at-home mom had a personal assistant who was somehow always busy. They had two chefs, a house manager, a groundskeeper/mechanic, four housekeepers (for three homes), two drivers, an untold number of pilots, and (at least) two personal assistants. I think sometimes they just liked hiring people and giving them highly specific, arbitrary tasks to perform.

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Purchasing rugs as investments. Seriously. Rugs.

I went to a friend's house and his dad told me that the rugs in the house all cost over $30k each. The value of the rug actually increases as it becomes thinner and the color wears.

Shinkaru Report

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The hidden catering kitchen in the very large covered patio area. The normal-sized motorboat (and driver) that goes into the very large pool and gives people sunset rides at parties.

Flying the family (3-4 generations, about 30 people) first class from US to Greece, renting a crewed yacht for a month to celebrate an anniversary. Nice people, too. Sat next to them on a plane.

mel_cache Report

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My family was invited to a 4th of July party every year by this very rich club owner in Atlanta. This guy always went all out. He had a gun range with very exotic firearms (not really my thing, though I did see the former police chief of Atlanta blow his thumb off with a 50 caliber colt revolver five feet from me), all you can eat and drink for free, massive water fountains on his ranch, helicopter tours of the ranch, hundreds of animals (nothing too exotic), water park rides, and a huge fireworks show. The best part for me though, was that he hired a couple of professional jet skiers to do tricks in his mansion-side lake in full view of all the attendants. It wasn't like an event or anything, they were just f*****g around all day while everyone else milled about.

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A really rich celebrity's kid went to my school. My school is about an hour by bus from a major city. ALL of the pictures on this kid's Instagram are in that city, none in my school. It's insane how much time she spent there and how often she would have had to go back and forth. To be so rich that you don't even stay in the dorm or apartment you're in -- you go hang in NY penthouses at 19 for fun....nuts.

babelincoln27 Report

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Referring to people as "the help".

DarkPasta Report

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I heard Chelsea Handler on Stern yesterday and she talked about how there is an invite only hookup app for models and actors/actresses/producers/social elite.

anon Report

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Buying a car. No, really—fly off somewhere for a long weekend and buy a f*****g car for while you're there. Then ditch it at the airport when you fly home. Not sell it—park it and walk into the hangar. Maybe one of your accountants will notice it at the end of the quarter and sell it off.

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The elevator in the 3-story Manhattan brownstone. Another time, my mom's boyfriend who came to pick me up from a play date was told to "go around the back to the servant's entrance."

mel_cache Report

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Ordering 7 new bookshelves for the 2,000 new books I ordered.

anon Report

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Late to the party, but just frivolous money wasting.
I work at a sports centre where it costs roughly $4.30 to come in and get a wristband to use a basketball court casually.
A super-rich international high roller came in from the nearby casino, wanting to pay. No worries, that's $4.30 thanks...
He paid me $50 just to get me to get the wristband for him. ON TOP OF the $4.30.
Paid me $50 just to all about 10m

BatesVibeSquad Report

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I was working on a house renovation and the owner was a Russian guy with money to spend. His new basement "spa" bathroom included a "grotto" with a 10 person custom made hot tub.

To fit the tub insert into the house, it was so big they had to cut a portion of the wall out (walk out basement) and build temporary supports to keep the house from collapsing. Once installed, he decided he didn't like the look of the tub and wanted it thrown out.

My boss offered to pay him so he could take home this custom insert and the owner *insisted* it get cut up into pieces so nobody else would have it. My boss said the whole tub + installation was over $100,000.

scottroid Report

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Throw-away here, I work for a billionaire. During the very early stages of the financial crisis he and two of his billionaire friends created a contingency plan whereby if things got bad enough and the world economy collapsed beyond recovery they were going to PURCHASE THE COUNTRY OF NEW ZEALAND to escape what they believed would be mobs of starving people.

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Apparently there exists a service in theme parks that for $1000/day, an official guide takes you around and fast passes every ride for you.

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Spend more than a million dollars on a mobile app. No, not just the guy who embezzled $5 million dollars from his employer and spent $1 million on game of war. There are multiple people that have spent in excess of $1 million on that game... look up Ctesse or stayalive

pokerstar420 Report

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According to a New Yorker piece, the super rich in Silicon Valley are building bomb shelters. Canned food, water, generators - full on shelters for when the financial systems collapse.

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Borrow jewelry from the jewelry store.

Scrappy_Larue Report

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Buying cars in foreign countries to avoid paying taxes in your home country

A lot of the Chinese exchange students at my school do this, they'll buy luxury cars here just because it's so much cheaper than in China.

One of them got his car vandalized or something and instead of getting it repaired, he just bought a different car...

JakeWasAlreadyTaken Report

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"Bone collecting" aka "Grave robbing" It is apparently a very common thing for wealthy people to pay to collect bones from the graves of people they didn't like so that they "literally own" that person.

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I met a guy who was considering purchasing the entire Steam catalog but didn't want to go through the hassle of adding them all to the cart and buying them.

shalviy Report

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A lady walked into the yarn store I worked at and had a rough idea in her mind of a kind of sweater she would maybe like to make her dude. No pattern just an idea that it should maybe be loose and have cables. She spent $1,800 on single-ply hand-dyed cashmere for one sweater. The sweater didn't even exist! It still had to be made! We were all so excited to meet our sales goal that nobody told her that stuff pills like a motherfucker, not that she would have cared, probably.

glaarghenstein Report

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Not just the ultra rich doing it, but a new one on me...

**Valet garbage service.**

I was out in LA walking around a neighborhood (not gated). You tell it was the kind of neighborhood where people would have housekeepers.

It happened to be garbage day. Suddenly all these brown skinned people appeared. They went into the yards, got the garbage cans from where they were stored. Wheeled them out to the curb, then as soon as the garbage truck passed, they wheeled the garbage cans back into hiding.

I talked to someone who lived there and turns out it's part of the homeowners' agreement that garbage cans cannot be left on the curb at all and they paid an extra fee for this mandatory valet garbage service.

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My in-laws. Casually buying *SOOPED* up custom Porsches then waiting to make a solid investment exchange- for example, pay out 347k(ish?) and somehow (completely ethically, he just has a very entrepreneurial mind and attitude) manages to sell it for MORE than he purchased. Mad skillz my brotha


also, randomly deciding to take a trip (first class airplane, fine dining, fine lodging, you get the picture) half way across the world because why not

Edit: did I mention the custom cars were imported? so much customization that is had to be done in the homeland of the brand (germany), then shipped over to US. Talk about import fees!

My school car page in the yearbook being literally all BMWs, Mercedes, Rovers, Lexus, Audi, and the like (heck the parents let the kids take the parents' fancy ferrari/lambo/bently if the kids' cars were in the shop)

Ironically despite me not fitting in the socio-economic bracket it took me until like sophomore year (I attended since 4th grade) to realize that having a car page in a yearbook was *not* normal; not to mention that I never thought of the school as anything special since it was a -cheaper- private school compared to the other major players in the area. not-so fun times

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Fly with executive bulk tickets.

I was gifted a pair of these once. Damn. Different world with executive bulk seats.

These tickets come with 24/7 direct-line concierge, accessible from any country, and can do the craziest things you've never even thought about for a plane ride.

Here's an example of some of the perks of exec. bulk fares:

The tickets are good for any seat on any flight, any where, any time. I ended up missing my connection back home before I knew about the perks at my disposal. I called concierge and ended up with a free town car ride back to my hotel, which he had "taken care of" so I could stay another two days, and he had reserved first class seats on six different flights for me to have choices.

the tickets are infinite adjustable. Say you flew round-trip from NYC to London but you suddenly want to grab some paella in Barcelona and bring it to Boston to have a seafood face off. You can do it. One call and it's all taken care of. Suddenly you'll find yourself going from London to NYC with 24 hour layovers in Barcelona and Boston, with Town cars waiting for you at each stop.

private security lines, and I mean private. Didn't have to wait for TSA and customs is a breeze.

flight crews are just that much nicer. When you have an exec bulk ticket, they assume you are an executive of an airline (or direct relation). Therefore they put extra effort into things. It's weird and hard to describe but the niceness is almost overwhelming.

-BAGS! Your allowed to check basically as much as youd like. Flying internationally I was allowed 2x100lb bags, which technically violates European law for worker safety, but that didn't stop anything. My fiancee had purchased some larger items and we ended up checking 6 bags. I had expected the worst and had already gotten out my card to pay for the overages when the attendant just said "that'll be fine, have a pleasant day Mr. ***********"

I found out later that executive bulk tickets regularly sell for $8k-$15k per ticket. That's a lot but not extreme, until you also realize that *only a few hundred individuals in the industry are allowed to purchase them directly. * it's so elitist.

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Having a library at home with the shelves filled with thousands of Kindles. Each Kindle has only one book on it.

Scmadrid , @felipepelaquim Report

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Well my gold digging grandmother likes to spend a fortune on fancy food that taste like s**t. I kid you not I watched her spend $400 (not including the tip) at a restaurant (it was just her, my wife, and I) and the food was so f*****g disgusting I couldn't bare to eat it. It was that bad, on top of that the portions were smaller than a on-the-go salad in a bag. But she refuses to eat at Waffle House because "it looks like the food sucks". Yea that's why the parking lot is full all the time. Meanwhile the fancy place she goes to looks like it isn't even open.

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