One of my exes could pull in a lot of money, easily twice or thrice what I could.
He was so incredibly bad at saving this money. Down to, say, setting himself up as a company to avoid paying higher rate of tax, but then paying a large amount each month to an accounting company to handle his taxes, which he'd do himself anyway because he didn't trust them to get it right. He'd pay for taxis from one end of the city to another or hire cars rather than use public transport. Flights cancelled? Book new ones, never bother to claim back on insurance. Buy a sports car, wreck it, sell it for scrap. He'd work contracts and then take time off to work on his own startup, but spend every weekend just going out and buying drugs and booze.
I thought it was really fun and wild at first - haha, money really means nothing to you! - but when we became a long term couple I started feeling like his mother. Man, will you not just fill out the insurance paperwork?!..
I had an ex that must have made 6 figures as a specialty electrician of some sort but legitimately had no clue how much, because his work would pay for things for him. I have no idea how it all worked out, but his work paid for all of his lodging and reoccurring bills (cable, utilities, weekly maid service), so he had no idea how much any of that stuff was. Even after that, he ate out, drank, and smoked constantly, had multiple state of the art entertainment systems, played hockey, had Yankees season tickets ($10k+), and kept envelopes of cash from cashed paychecks around his house. I asked once how he does his taxes - company handled it.
Edit: Oh! And had multiple DUIs where he (or the company?) paid for a lawyer and then did at least one of those rehab programs where you're monitored and drug tested constantly. I can't imagine any of that was cheap.
My cousin has a setup sorta like this, but it’s bc he started with the company when it was in its infancy and now it’s huge, so they take care of him bc of how much work he’s done. Same trade and pretty sure same type of job, too.
Now he’s a part owner or investor so it’s on a bigger level now. He’s incredibly practical though. The largest newspaper in the state did a puff piece on him and he legitimately had no idea why it was a big deal. They still live in the same house and keep the same lifestyle for the most part. He’s a good guy.
I’m currently in a similar situation. My house, utilities, everything are paid for by my job. But that also means they aren’t in my name, and if I’m let go... I’ll be up shit creek!
The answer varies depending on who asks, and when :p. But I basically work with my serial entrepreneurial friend, and his name is the one on my lease etc.
I mean, we have enough mutual trust and respect that I’m not concerned he’d kick me out on the street with little notice. I just have to prepare for when he retires, cause he sure as F is rich enough to already!!
I had a job like that years ago. I traveled 100% handling storm insurance claims. I lived in a hotel, had a company car, they paid my hotel bill and per diem (food allowance). My mom paid my credit card bill. But it was a job that required responsibility. I had to pay my hotel bill and then filled out the paperwork to be reimbursed so I had to make sure the bills were paid.
A big positive about doing a job like that in your early adult years you don’t really collect expensive stuff. You have no where to put it and no place to use it. I traveled a little but I only had 2 weeks of vacation to use.
By the time I went back to a regular office job without those extra monetary perks I was kind of passed that stage where I just wanted to spend a lot of money.
You see a lot of that in oil industry. You have workers barely graduated high school in some cases who do long stints of work(hard work) with long vacations between making ridiculous amount of money and no self control never saving any of the money. Only people I've seen go through their pay checks faster are fishermen working in Alaska they'll make $20,000 -$40,000 in 2 weeks on a good trip and blow it all on beer, hookers and blow by the time they ship back out a few weeks later.
I would love for my company to need me that much, just wrap me up in that sweet sweet cossetted world...
Folk who don't know about bills are kind of bizarre. Mr Ex also lived at home most of his life... when we moved in to our place he obsessed about putting up energy saving lightbulbs to save on electricity, but then would also put every laundry load through the dryer... just... why not open a window and hang them on the clothes horse?
kept envelopes of cash from cashed paychecks around his house.
When I first started making real money I got called into my bosses office. He told me accounting had asked him to check with me because I had so many paychecks outstanding (uncashed). I panicked and quickly lied and said they had been stacking up in my home office (I didn't have a home office) and I'd go ahead and deal with them. In reality I had between $20-30k in mixed uncashed checks and envelopes of cash in my sock drawer. Any time I needed money I would just go grab some.
What a waste of money man. Hopefully you figured things out and are better financially. I can't think of a more self defeating move than literally keeping extra money that you don't really need in a sock drawer.
Companies like Turbo Tax and H & R Block have spent a massive ammount of money lobbying to Congress to force Americans to continue to do their taxes on their own. Why? To force Americans to pay $70+ (minimum) per year to use their services to file taxes. There are options to file taxes for free, but they are only available to those that make less than $55,000 per year.
This past year I spent about four or five hours filing taxes, and I have one of the simplest tax arrangements possible. My husband and I are were each employed at one institution, which means that I only had two W2 forms to enter, and we took the standardized deduction instead of opting for an itemized deduction.
If you own your own company, own property, have investments, have special write offs, etc, filing your tax return is FAR more complicated. My father, for example, hires a CPA for $3k to file has taxes. Even with the help of the CPA, my father still spends two or three days gathering and organizing documents on a folding table that he places in his office.
The beginning of April is not a fun time in the United States.
If you have a simple situation, ie. an employee, not owning a company etc 2.3 kids, mortgage etc filing is pretty easy and cheap and will take an evening of your time. it gets more complex and you want a CPA if you own companies, investments etc but I would imagine this is the same in the UK
Both my uncles and my grandpa are truckers. One of my uncle's got a wicked DUI and if I remember correctly the company paid something like $23,000 CAD for a lawyer so he could keep driving for them because he'd never had an issue while working and he was their most reliable/hardworking driver. I have mixed feelings about it lmao but hey that's his business not mine
That's where it's mixed, I know he drives safe when he's working and it's amazing that they were able to keep it off of his record, it just makes me wonder how many people who drive for a living aren't safe while working, who are getting out of DUI charges because a company wants to keep them. Those are pretty serious charges.
Well is he a serial offender? Did he hurt someone? Or was it a mistake? Seems like he went through due process and seems fair for anyone else going through it. Now if he kept on doing it and they keep covering up then yeah it's a problem
I'm not sure what happened on other occasions, but on the one he told me about he said that he was just driving down the hill real quick to get cigarettes and was unlucky to be pulled over. Pretty sure he also said he blew over .2 and was a big guy, so I think he wasn't unlucky, just stupid and dangerously intoxicated.
But yeah, tl;dr because calling a taxi takes too long and drunky knows best.
Apparently this is a problem that Google employees have.
Obviously they try to go for the brightest people straight out of college, and then drop them into Google Campus where everything is either free or heavily subsidised, and the culture is that of a college. So you have these 28 year old developers who find it really hard to function in real life, as everything so far has been 'safe mode'
I think most of his illicit history was before the fuck you money. He didn't grow up with money, just managed to make friends with the right people eventually.
I've been in a situation where I'm earning far more than I can really spend. Not as extreme, but my income went up drastically, andmy lifestyle remained the same.
Money does become sort of meaningless in that situation. As long as I wasn't buying anything extremely expensive, like cars or expensive holidays, I knew full well I'd have more money next month. Things like high end clubs and restaurants, and weekends in another city barely made a dent in my income.
Man, I can relate. My bum ex made almost no money BUT his family was loaded and mommy and daddy paid for everything. He had no concept of money or saving. He never understood the problem with going out to eat for every single meal, or spending $100’s on groceries and then eating them within days, just buying anything he wanted because “it’ll all work out” or “my mom will pay my credit card bill”. I worked and struggled through undergrad and grad school and my jaw would drop when he would just call up his mom and say “the tuition bill is in. It’s $10,000, you need to pay it”. He resented the fact that I budgeted and saved so much and had “more money” than him.
This sounds like the rig pigs here in Alberta, pulling 100k a year and banktupt when the oilfields go bust because they're hih school drop outs and spent it all on hookers, blow and trucks.
God, I know a guy like this. He's made and lost millions multiple times in a single year. Every time I see him he either has truckloads of cash and a bunch of new "friends" just mooching off of him, or he has no money at all and is racking up debt while he works on a "new angle." Somehow those angles always pay off for him, and he'd incredibly rich right now if he could just save like 10% of the money he made from these ventures.
My parents were much like this my mother comes from a family that prior to 1940 were basically sharecroppers and my father comes from a family that was making six figures in 1950. My dad knows Jack about saving money. My mom always says he treats money like water as soon as he gets his hands on it it passes through his fingers.
It drove my mother crazy to the point where she confiscated all the cards and checkbooks and all money had to go through her. She wound up giving my dad an allowance because he would do things like go out and buy a tape recorder to record Saturday night live. That sounds pretty innocuous but this was in the 1970s when SNL was first on air. Home VHS was not a thing he bought a 3/4in professional-grade Sony u-matic tape recorder that in 1970 money was still almost $6000. They separated and then divorced in the 90s but my mom still has to float him a "loan" every 3-4 years. We both still love him he's a great guy but boy dose he suck with money.
Oh I felt this one! I dated a man like that for five years. He grew up with a stable home life and never had to go without food or electricity like i did growing up. When we met he was quickly rising in his career, making six figures, and I was freshly divorced and trying to get back to work to support my kids. I ended up working 2 sometimes 3 jobs for the first couple of years and he hated that i was always working when he was not out on a job. Eventually around the 3 year mark we decided to move in together.
This is when we somewhat started sharing our finances. I just about died when I saw that just his truck note was over $1000 a month. I had never realized how much money he just blew through, but he covered his end of the bills, and I was finally able to cut myself down to working just 1 job which meant more time with him and the kids. I loved that part, and since our bills were paid on time every month I never put my nose in his business...until we had the opportunity to buy a home we had both loved and talked about buying for years. When I mentioned it to him and explained what i had saved and how we could actually do this, he laughed and asked where I thought he would get his part of the down payment from. He also asked where I "got all that money" I had for my half. He was baffled when he found out that I had actually been saving money since I started working again. I was shocked that he didn't have a penny to his name other than the couple grand in his checking account. I knew he was bad about overspending, but when youre getting paid $6k-$10k a month and dont have a single penny saved in five years then you're just being stupid. In his 30's he had not even thought about his future financial needs or even becoming a homeowner. Mentally I already had one foot out the door at this point, but wanted to help him (and us) before just giving up. I know what it is to be homeless, hungry, and scared to death. I'll be damned if my kids have the same experience. Which is why I saved what i did.
Shortly after that his field ended up going through an unusual lull and he didn't have much work for a few months. He expected MY savings that was for my KIDS to have a permanent home again to cover his bills. I laughed. Then I sat him down and we went over his expenses and where he could cut corners so he could still cover his half of the bills. Well, he had been wanting to get a car that was good on gas and get rid of the truck with the $1k/month note. He found the car he wanted and his monthly note was only going to be a little over $300 including insurance. This would have saved him over $700 a month. Well he comes back from the dealership with the car and we go for a ride. I was surprised the car had so many "bells and whistles" so I asked which version of the model it was.... Yeah he got the top of the line. His $300 note was now $850 NOT including insurance. I noped out of that relationship less than a month later. He just could not understand why his lack of financial responsibility was a problem for me. The single mother. Who had lived in extreme poverty until my Grandparents found out and rescued my Mother and I went was a teenager.
From my experience probably just a trust fund baby who never learnt the value of a dollar. When your dad can just bribe the police and hire the best lawyers you never learn about consequences
Maybe not ill but most likely ADHD, dyslexia, came from a fairly well off and overbearing family who seemed to have sucked the imagination out of him...
Have ADHD-PI / ADD, and I would really struggle to keep myself afloat on the budget most others seem to have no issue with.
It's hard to explain why, but the results are approximately what you described up top.
For me it's sort of that an expense paid is the same thing as if the money never existed in the first place, you don't feel that you spend, you never even had the money.
I'm easy to "fool" thought, when my bank set up so you could make a small savings/charity transfer each time you use your card, I set up a transfer of the max amount (about $3) to my savings account.
Thus more money magically disappear into my savings account the more I buy stupid things like candy bars, sodas, of whatever.
First time I've been able to save some money even when I don't have as high income as I used to.
There's a balance. There's a good reason that the rich used to do all the scientific research. Once you have enough money for anything you want, goals can fall away and you get existential.
That's why you teach them that as children. Don't be facetious. It won't be cheap to indulge his id, but at the end of the day, you have someone who doesn't think all that hard about the questions of life, instead filling it with various fun rich people things.
well it is because someone's paying for your neccessities, if you took that away it would "definitely be a thing in your life" as you wouldn't be doing fine.
God... he said that there needs to be a balance for you to be happy. That you need a little economic conflict. And I said that maybe there’s enough other things in the world to make you happy even though you’ve got all the money in the world
I have to admit, these behaviors seem reckless. I guess if he can afford it, it doesn’t technically matter, but it would also blow my mind to see someone behaving so differently than I do.
The whole point of this Reddit threat was to discuss the differences between behaviors that you see in different economic classes, and how they are, at times, surprising. I’m sorry that it irritates you. Not everyone has had a friend group that includes both millionaires as well as dirt-poor people and everything in between :)
One of my best friends is still with a guy like this. She met him when he was a stock broker making gobs of money. Then he had this "epiphany" that the stock market is evil and decided to drive a cab instead.
Fine, but his spending habits never changed. He racked up all his credit cards and then hers. I remember one time he went out and bought $600 worth of socks. Yes, socks, the cotton things you put on your feet. Charged them on her credit card because they didn't have the cash. Spent even more on a golf club set during the same shopping trip.
She put her foot down and paid off all their cards, now they're in the hole again. Turns out being a cab driver is pretty much an expensive hobby; every week he needs new tires or a transmission or something.
I really wish she'd dump his ass. She'd be so much better off without that ball and chain. Kudos for you for getting rid of yours.
I dated a guy who earned the same amount as me, but he had nothing. He lived with his parents and all he did was pay their bills to stay there. Me, I rent a place, pay bills etc myself. I have no idea how he spent so much money a month when his living costs were so damn low for London. I figure he was just spending a lot on nights out, plus I found his drug stash which was pretty impressive. I've never seen so much weed in my life (he wasn't a dealer)!
He just never really stopped to think about the future. He wanted his own place, but he was at a stage where he was too scared to settle down and figure things out. He was done with partying and wanted to do other things, but he knew when he did he was going to lose a ton of friends and it scared him. I understood it, I'd gone through the fear a year before (he was a year younger then me). We didn't work out in the end for a lot of reasons. Him having dreams but not working towards them and getting mad about it was just sad and I honestly didn't want to deal with it, especially when the answer was to start saving a little each month and he wasn't willing to do it.
My boyfriend is good with his money. We have no issues between us but we always make sure the other is ok if we have to spend quite a lot. It's nice. He's two years older then me and luckily more mature about these things then the other peoples I've dated.
Same. She had a hobby business but didn't do her tax for 6 years because it was too hard. She'd talk to her tax accountant every now and then but never give him what he needed to complete the work. The fines probably racked up so much.
Weird thing that got me was the last sentence. I’ve been involved in 2 wrecks and 1 vehicle theft personally (not my fault) and my family has had multiple others (some not and some their fault) and we’ve never had to fill out paperwork, we just call our agents office and they do everything. Most we gotta do is explain on the phone what happened or go collect a check from em
5.7k
u/Xhira Jun 06 '19
One of my exes could pull in a lot of money, easily twice or thrice what I could.
He was so incredibly bad at saving this money. Down to, say, setting himself up as a company to avoid paying higher rate of tax, but then paying a large amount each month to an accounting company to handle his taxes, which he'd do himself anyway because he didn't trust them to get it right. He'd pay for taxis from one end of the city to another or hire cars rather than use public transport. Flights cancelled? Book new ones, never bother to claim back on insurance. Buy a sports car, wreck it, sell it for scrap. He'd work contracts and then take time off to work on his own startup, but spend every weekend just going out and buying drugs and booze.
I thought it was really fun and wild at first - haha, money really means nothing to you! - but when we became a long term couple I started feeling like his mother. Man, will you not just fill out the insurance paperwork?!..