even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

I mean, in some ways I get it - the area that I come from was in days of yore called "bread & lard island", because the story goes that the people who moved there would spend their money on their nice big house and live off nothing but bread and lard in private. I understand that there is often a disparity between appearance and reality. I also understand that rents/house prices in major metropolitan areas are obscene and something really should be done about it. But I don't feel sorry for these people at all. They have plenty of choices, plenty of options, and if the worst things that happen to them include having to cut bits off kitchen roll or use a voucher to save some money, they can honestly just go fuck themselves.

It's a relatively minor quiddity but I can't wrap my head around thing like a $250k inheritance meriting less than a sentence. $250k is change your life money!

They bought a $735,000 co-op and used an inheritance for the down payment, so it's not like they have a multi-million-dollar mortgage to pay off. Even if their co-op fees are like $1500 or $2000 /month their housing costs should be a pretty small fraction of their take-home pay. Something is obviously missing from the story.

Their horse habit.

it's really worth reading til the end. her way out of this suffocating sitch? buy a cottage in the country! now why didn't I think of that??

it's the really the perfect twist

this is the prize winner for the year so far. it's gonna take something remarkably tone deaf to beat this.

top three moments for me:

"he was eating nuts in his underwear..."

“I’m going to cut you, white bitch!”

"playing outside with our beloved dog Tuck Noodle..."

I should really read the Observer more often!

I tapped out after "Instead we silently watch our paychecks turn to vapor as we pay for our high taxes and uncomfortable home."

And whining about an hour long commute? Fuck, come live in Australia, plenty of people -wealthy people even! - commute for much longer than that to get to the city for their jobs.

How can this story even be real?? Bottom of the 1%, mortgage under a mil, mid-30s (so at least a large part of the student loans are paid off given their income) - they must be tucking away an awful lot and sharing with family or something. But like investing half your giant pay check by choice does not make you technically poor... Or at least doesn't give you reason to write a piece bemoaning your so called sorry state! So funny and weird

I hope her name's in the Panama papers

country house mentioned
guessing the mortgage is one piece of it but the building fees on a monthly basis are equal to (or even greater than) the mortgage payment
would put money down on them paying for at least one garage space for a car, maybe two cars? and then a car payment or two, maybe paying for a spot to park near work (would think a law office would cover that, but idk)
they offhand mentioned lots of school years so it's completely possible they still have student loans
pretty sure the "clearance plus friends & family discount)" means lots of impulse buys at banana republic, not that expensive, but throwing both those on there ("and I even have two discounts!") implies they are switching up the wardrobe quite a bit
buying things at a discount via coupon packs, suuure. but how about aspirational lunches with coworkers in the law profession?

"bread & lard island" is wonderfully named

back when suburban houses started getting unnecessarily large the running joke was that it was a nice house in a good school district, but it'd be nice to have some furniture to sit on

I think real estate developments caught on and there were these "buy a house in our development, get $2k to spend at local furniture warehouse!" advertisements

Oh god I should have posted the link a (frugal) cousin of mine liked on FB recently - it was some Canberran lady writing a smug blog about how she's going to pay off her mortgage within like a year by being frugal

Oh and selling off most of her ten ... TEN.. .investment properties.

>:|

WHO HAS TEN INVESTMENT PROPERTIES BY THEIR 30S.

Btw there is no major law firm in the city that's anything close to an hour by subway from Carnegie Hill. The furthest would be maybe half an hour.

honestly, i buy clothes every ten years and wear shoes until they fall off my feet but if i lived in manhattan and had money to spend i could spend A LOT of money without even trying. i spend a lot of money now in the woods and i don't even have any money.

point being: if i made 500K a year and didn't have kids and lived in NYC i would probably be broke too. cuz trips to record stores in london every weekend...

but she makes a point of mentioning the stupid frozen pizza...i think we just have to take it on faith that she is lying about stuff and hiding stuff.

There have been other articles in this genre where people
write really clueless things like "after the personal trainer three times a week, the dog yoga classes, and the ski lessons for the kids there's not much left over." Sometimes I wonder if it's actually people who didn't come from much money or a highly educated family and just never learned to manage money. But maybe that's being charitable.

Even if not lying, she is totally leaving a lot on the cutting room floor here. I'm genuinely curious about where their money actually goes! Even if they were spending $5000 a month on housing and $2000 on student loan payments and $3000 on savings, there's plenty left over if they're making $389,000 combined (according to cnn money that's the latest irs info on 1% income threshold), let alone more than that, with a 23.5% fed tax rate and 6.85% state tax rate. I think the discount frozen pizza line just really put me over the edge. Are they donating huge chunks to low income area daycares and food banks? Are they secret venture capitalists? Also, it's not hard or $$ to get someone to fix your freakin shower door.

If you read the comments there are people who do a pretty thorough work up of their finances and can't make sense of it.

Ah I didn't venture into the comments but that's good to hear! In a way

maybe their accountant is screwing them over

Husband is spending Spitzer money on hookers?

this is a really good cover letter for first-against-the-wall candidacy

i just really hope they have someone in their lives who made them feel bad about this

i can't handle this thread

according to this she had a $30/day cigarette habit for a long time, so that adds up I guess

http://observer.com/2015/12/from-awkward-teen-to-cigar-lounge-queen-how-cigarettes-brought-me-to-life/

i went to her tweet where she shares this column and all the responses are like 'omg so true, thanks for saying this'

My new crowd of women didn’t smoke, ordered Earl Grey tea at happy hour, and apportioned dinner checks precisely with a calculator.

Fuck, give me the cancer sticks.

earl grey tea is solid tho

i am in love with the wissotzky earl grey tea i bought at stop & shop last week. smells so good. have no idea what the deal is with wissotzky. probably owned by lipton.

not owned by lipton. my apologies to the wissotzky family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissotzky_Tea

oh yeah that's for sure good tea. I also recommend Ahmad. These are the brands they carry at my local Russian/eastern European grocer and I imagine that people who shop there probably drink more tea and have better standards for it.

a company once run by the founder of cultural Zionism, fyi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahad_Ha%27am

according to this she had a $30/day cigarette habit for a long time,

*I* had a $30 a day cig habit on $40k a year, and i managed fine.

(caveat: thats one pack here. smokes are EXPENSIVE)

*I* had a $30 a day cig habit on $40k a year, and i managed fine.

jesus wasn't that like more than your rent?

$30 a day? God no, my rent averages $300 a week.

shit be expensive here, man.

*sad urban nod*

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/husbands-who-always-fly-business-class-while-wives-travel-in-economy/

that's some pretty exquisite rageclick fodder right there.

think about that movie The Wedding Singer and how it communicated the fact that Drew Barrymore's fiance was a full-on knob by the fact that he made her sit in the aisle seat. and this is 100x times worse!

Why those women are putting up with such blatant disrespect for... oh wait, money.

jfc http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/i-named-my-mixed-race-daughter-for-a-slave-trading-town.html?_r=0

jfc

here's a good one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html

Mr. Hall, whose grandfather, father, uncles and son went to Amherst, archly calls himself “a powerhouse of nepotism.” But he has endowed a scholarship and says he welcomes students whose backgrounds are different from his.

“I get letters every year about the recipient of my scholarship fund,” he said. “The name will always be a name that is ethnically or racially — you can tell — not like Hall. And so be it. You’ve got to go with the flow to some degree.”

But, he wonders, “where did this supercorrectness thing come from?”

nytimes profile #31,564,978 of a rich white piece of shit

Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.

Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.

“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token five dollars.

In the category of supercorrectness, some alumni note that in March, a new director of the Women’s and Gender Center asked to be addressed as “they,” rather than “he” or “she.” “This is not a joke,” Paul Ruxin, who identified himself as “Old Curmudgeon class of ’65,” wrote to his classmates shortly before he died in April.

Another case of death by social justice. sad.

Funny, cuz alumni giving at Hampshire is breaking records every year