ROB wrote:Ahh, but for people like you, it's not how much you earn, it's how you earn it.
A guy earning 30k a year off his independent investments (property preferably) is far more worthy of respect than a hack who gets his hands dirty in the mines earning 100k and spends it on bling, right?
I disagree. I respect people who earn their living by working hard far more than I respect people who live off independent investments, especially from inherited money. How a person spends their money is their own business. I've never been into conspicuous consumption myself, but as long as they can keep supporting themselves and their family and pay their fair share of taxes for the common good
as well as waste it on crap, that's fine by me. If they're going to blame me for managing the money we've earned well, and enjoying the (quite modest) benefits of it (because of course we have given and continue to give a lot of the surplus away, rather than spend it on bling - or diamonds or other pointless display), that's quite a different matter: and that seems to be flipflop's very tedious, silly and poorly targeted game.
And I am certainly not saying you should give away anything. A point you seem intent on sidestepping or intentionally missing.
So what was the point of suggesting it in the first place?
By selling the boat, Penta could conceivable feed about a quarter million people for a year.
That's no small thing.
I just find it hypocritical when someone who is obviously much better off than most people harps on and makes snide comments about other people's charity.
You use that as your justification, and the much stronger "go off on tirades against entire groups for not giving enough to charity". I think you're imagining this. Show me where I did.
But most stats on private debt in the US and UK should be enough to tell you that most people never learnt these lessons. Probably because they didn't have the advantage of wisdom such as that given to you by your parents. (And from what you have told me, your parents weren't exactly dead end chavs, either).
Hell, that you even know there are "rules about borrowing" automatically put you ahead of 95% of the population when it comes to knowledge about wealth accumulation.
I don't think that's true either. Or certainly not until the last 15 or 20 years. Most people used to know perfectly well, until they were bombarded with offers of credit, with credit cards, store cards, mortgage offers that were too good to be true. This borrow borrow borrow consumer culture is very recent in Britain at least. It started, I suppose, under Thatcher, with the selling off of council houses and the subsequent collapse of the rental market, forcing people to borrow above their means to get onto the housing ladder, and then the huge house price boom where people saw rapidly growing equity in their houses and were encouraged (irresponsibly) to borrow on the (always notional) value of their house to fund consumer purchases. Complete insanity. And the whole thing changed for young people, many of whom don't seem to have grasped the basics, as you say, with the charging of fees for university, the huge expansion of places with accompanying near abolition of student grants and the introduction of student loans - so they started out in life with huge debts at the same time as they had to borrow even more (in an unsustainably high house price market) to get themselves somewhere to live. Now, indeed, they're all fucked.
And no, our parents weren't dead-end chavs, but they earned what money they had, they didn't inherit anything; in fact in Mr Penta's case they earned very little, and when his father died nearly 20 years ago he left only debts, and we've been supporting his mother ever since (when our own circumstances weren't too good either). A lot of that generation were fucked up by the war, their career paths badly disrupted: but goodness, did they know how to "make do and mend". (Only with great difficulty did we persuade my mother-in-law that it really wasn't worth washing and re-using cling film - tinfoil, fine, but not cling film.) My mother, on the other hand,
was extravagant, and very keen on "keeping up appearances" (and an alcoholic to boot), and with 3 daughters to keep at private schools, their finances were also always stretched to the limit - which meant that, as the second daughter and with an older cousin at the same school, I never once had a single piece of new uniform, apart from underwear, and until an aunt started buying my clothes for me when my parents lived abroad in my early teenage years and then I learnt to make my own, pretty much all my home clothes were hand-me-downs too. In fact, I used to make a lot of clothes for my younger sister as well, so she didn't have to go through the same thing.
So no, though I certainly wasn't seriously materially deprived or ever short of the basics, I wasn't a spoilt little rich girl, with everything handed to me on a plate, as some people seem to think. And the very best thing when we got a large chunk of money when we sold a company, was not worrying how we were going to pay the bills at the end of the month. But when I have to buy myself new clothes, I still find it hard not to limit myself to whatever's on the sale rail. No designer gear for me: I can't bring myself to waste the money. And I am happy to report that last year, at the very top of the housing market, my father sold the house they bought 34 years before for nearly 60 times the price they paid for it. So it paid off for him in the end, though my mother didn't live to see it (and would have pissed it all away if she had).
Shes never interfered with me. I have no complaints about her.
Same here.
Mega ditto.
I met her once and I found her to be a nice lady. Not kookey in any way.
Penta has always been gracious, kind and very sane in all my interactions with her.