My Reaction to MoneyTalksNews.com’s “7 Downsides of Being Rich”
~ Thursday, August 31, 2023 Blog Post ~
*Updated on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, with 2 Twitter links on Prince William’s New York City visit this September 2023 and 16 Prince William pictures added*
Being middle class, I’ve always been fascinated with “moneyed” people, particularly their recession-proof and inflation-proof existence. I’m referring to the world’s rich and famous people, like Prince William. Britain’s heir to the throne is my favorite superrich person that’s why I used his image above, which is this blog post’s featured and thumbnail image.
Since I hail from a middle-class, well-educated family, it has always been an ever-comfortable lifestyle for me, although it is not like my family’s net worth is US dollar-denominated and with ten figures.
When I was younger, my parents would purchase children’s books for myself and my older sister every time we go to the mall, which was usually during weekends to hang out and unwind.
My only sibling and I would read about princesses, castles, kings, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis V of Windsor; and popular fairy tales such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Secret Garden,” “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” and other stories that feature royalty and well-to-do characters.
Thus, as I grew up, I became quite curious about how superrich people live. What is it like to sit atop cash piles with 10 digits or more? How does it feel to be a US dollar or pounds sterling multi-millionaire or billionaire? With all the literary exposure, curiosity, and research, at this point, I have become well-versed with millionaires and billionaires’ lifestyles.
It undoubtedly feels terrific not to have any financial worries, or to have problems but with money and poverty being the least of them. Yes, you can picture the cartoon character Scrooge McDuck in your head diving into his gold pile in his Money Bin in the Disney cartoon series “Duck Tales.”
Nevertheless, life is not perfect, even for the superrich. They are also not untouchable. They bleed when cut. Above all, they are also mortals like me. I found this video from MoneytalksNews.com titled “7 Downsides of Being Rich.” I completely agree with the presentation.
Indeed, Mr. Elon Musk and Mr. Bernard Arnault’s gilded lives are totally not a walk in the park, despite having been atop the Forbes Billionaires’ List and Bloomberg Billionaires Index for a long time.
Based on MoneytalksNews.com’s video, the following are the seven disadvantages of being wealthy. I copied the captions verbatim.
(Here is the link to the clip: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/7-downsides-of-being-rich/vi-AA1g03Xe?ocid=socialshare)
1. Wealth attracts fake friends.
They come around when they need money or favors, not true friendship. Be wary of moochers who disappear when you stop giving handouts.
2. Your wealth brings unfair haters.
Success angers those jealous or afraid to take risks. You face false greed stereotypes despite kindness. Some just dislike your wealth out of insecurity.
3. Wealth makes you a lawsuit target.
With money comes frivolous legal claims. Even if honest, the rich attract people wanting a piece of the pie. Be prepared to defend against baseless suits. Hire an attorney to protect assets.
4. Hiring help requires careful vetting.
Some employees may be untrustworthy or crooked. Do research and background checks before bringing anyone on. With wealth comes responsibility for your staff’s actions.
5. Wealth can bring “money guilt.”
You may aim to give more to charity. But know you aren’t responsible for saving everyone. Don’t let guilt drive donations. Do what you can, but don’t try to fix the whole world.
6. Higher taxes
With more income comes a larger tax bill. Prepare mentally for owing more. It comes with the territory. Have an accountant handle your complex returns.
7. Maintain lifestyle
Millionaires feel stuck on a “treadmill,” anxious about losing family’s way of life. They work long hours, keeping up with peers. Some never feel rich enough, always striving for more.
I totally agree with these seven drawbacks of being well-heeled. Furthermore, I gathered that superrich people may not suffer from money woes, yet their physical wellness, mental and psychiatric states, personal lives, and relationships are typically not in order.
However, we cannot blame the “self-made rich” and the “inherited rich” types for those are the cards they are dealt with. As a middle-class person, I learned a lot from the one-percenters, specifically regarding how to grow one’s savings and investments.
The sense of sheer comfort that millions or billions of wealth brings is undeniable. Discovering the world’s multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires’ lifestyles have also fueled my lifelong passion for finance more. They enabled me to understand many important money-related matters that help me with my financial future.
Among them are (1) the power of money or why “cash is king”; (2) safeguarding one’s assets; (3) wealth accumulation, management, and preservation; and above all, (4) the wonders and convenience that having disproportionate amounts of money to relish in one’s lifetime brings.
Meanwhile, here are two Twitter links about Prince William’s visit to New York today, September 19, 2023:
- https://twitter.com/TribesBritannia/status/1704236441679561045/
- https://twitter.com/isaguor/status/1704236950343786823/
Additionally, here are 14 more pictures of Prince William, Britain’s heir to the throne, from Twitter:
Reference:
https://www.msn.com/en-ph/video/news/7-downsides-of-being-rich/vi-AA1fTsHo?ocid=msedgntp&t=5
Cost of the crown: what we know so far about British royals’ wealth and finances (From The Guardian)
By Guardian staff, May 4, 2023
Read a summary of our findings about the personal enrichment of the royal family and origins of some of their wealth
The Guardian’s Cost of the crown series is an investigation into the finances and private wealth of the British royal family — and the vast apparatus of secrecy that obscures these from the public.
Buckingham Palace argues that the financial arrangements of royals should “remain private, as they would for any other individual”. But in the lead-up to the coronation of King Charles III, we believe more scrutiny is warranted.
Important questions remain about the personal enrichment of the royal family, and the extent to which it is born of their public positions. There is also a case for exploring the dubious origins of some of their wealth, and the blurred lines between what belongs to the royal family as opposed to the British people.
You can read a full explanation of why we are investigating the royals, and the questions we are seeking to answer. Below is a summary of our discoveries so far.
The king’s net worth
New research and analysis by the Guardian estimates King Charles III has a personal fortune of £1.8bn. Much of the king’s private wealth is derived from his and his family’s public roles as working royals. The palace described the calculation as “a highly creative mix of speculation, assumption and inaccuracy” but declined to provide alternative figures. Instead, we worked with 12 experts to value the king’s property, vehicles, art and jewellery. For more opaque assets such as shares we drew on the best available clues to make informed estimates.
Below you can read about the king’s assets in more detail and see how we valued them.
- The Guardian has identified more than 90 pieces of jewellery that made up the late queen’s personal collection — presumably inherited by Charles. They include diamonds, emeralds, rubies, amethysts, aquamarines and strings of pearls, and are worth at least £533m, according to estimates.
- The king’s country estates, Balmoral in Scotland and Sandringham in Norfolk, have been turned around in recent decades so their assets are fully monetised to help cover their enormous running costs. This includes commercially renting out many of the 300 houses in Sandringham.
- The royal family have a fleet of luxury cars to choose from, but it’s no easy task to untangle which of the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Aston Martins belong to them privately. Buckingham Palace said it would not comment on private matters.
- The late queen invested untold amounts of time and personal wealth throughout her reign in what she once described as a “simple philosophy” — to breed “a horse faster than other people’s”. Charles has sold off some of her horses, but we estimate that with her stables there are £27m of equine assets.
Royal financing
- Elizabeth II and Charles III have extracted cash payments worth more than £1.2bn from two hereditary estates that pay no tax, in addition to the millions they receive in public funding for their official duties. In 2022, they received £21m each from the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall respectively, despite a centuries-old debate over whether the two estates in fact belong to the British nation.
- The monarch, who receives about £86m a year in public money, is technically in line for an extra £250m a year in taxpayer money, according to the terms of a funding settlement introduced by David Cameron as prime minister in 2011. The king has signalled he does not want the extra money, but the arrangement underscores the extraordinary generosity of Cameron’s radical shake-up of royal funding.
- Buckingham Palace refuses to say how much individual royals are paid, but we have calculated how much working royals have each received — from the Freemason who got £18m to the princess who lives in 1.6 hectares of grounds in Richmond Park — and how many hours they have spent on public duties.
- The Guardian reviewed 18 properties which the king and close family members use, often for only brief periods. The cost of the staff required to keep these properties available year-round, and who pays for them, is unclear.
Links to empire and slavery
- King Charles has for the first time signalled his support for a review of the monarchy’s historical links to slavery, after the Guardian uncovered a previously unseen document showing the transfer of £1,000 of shares in the slave-trading Royal African Company to William III.
- The history of Kensington Palace, the home of a succession of monarchs and more recently the Prince and Princess of Wales, is uncomfortably entwined with the monarchy’s involvement in slavery. Across almost three centuries, 12 British monarchs sponsored, supported or profited from Britain’s involvement in slavery, our research shows.
- Documents show that direct ancestors of King Charles owned slave plantations in Virginia. A file details how one of these ancestors was involved in buying and transporting 200 enslaved Africans. His son later moved to England. A later descendant, Frances Bowes-Lyon, was the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
- India Office files detail how priceless treasures looted from India ended up in the royal collection. They include a legendary ruby, and a gold girdle inlaid with 19 emeralds that appeared in a birthday exhibition celebrating the then Prince Charles’s favourite works.
Gifts and private property
- The palace’s policy on gifts was created in 1995, and then updated in 2003. It does not address the vexed question of what happens to official gifts received before the policy was established.
- Two sets of stamps that were official state gifts from Canada and Laos appear to have been subsumed into the royal family’s private stamp collection, which is worth at least £100m. The palace declined to comment on whether this breached its gift policy, saying the stamp collection “is privately owned, and thus we would not comment on any of the issues you raise.”
- The palace is also refusing to explain why 11 pieces of jewellery that were official gifts are not held in a trove of national heritage. The jewels, which are potentially worth £80m and have been worn by Queen Elizabeth II, Camilla, the Queen Consort, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, are not contained in the royal collection, which holds items in trust for the nation.
- The king and late queen made nearly £2m from the sale of horses given to them by prominent figures, including a Dubai sheikh and the Aga Khan. The palace insisted they were personal gifts.
- Almost 400 pieces of art are owned privately by the Windsors, including paintings by Dalí, Monet, Freud, Chagall and Lowry. Many seem to have been given to the royal family as official gifts. Buckingham Palace declined to comment on their ownership.
- An elegant Georgian property in Edinburgh worth up to £1.8m demonstrates the opaque nature of royal wealth and raises questions around official gifts. The property was given to the queen in 1953, but held by the government, and used as grace and favour homes for decades. In 1996, it was given to the queen, and it is now being rented out commercially by the king.
Other revelations
- A green energy company set up by King Charles was investigated for numerous health and safety breaches after the unauthorised leak of more than 1,000 tonnes of global-heating gases. Methane, CO2 and traces of the toxic gas hydrogen sulphide were released after a gas-holder at the plant split open in 2020.
- The king’s brother Prince Andrew used a shell company called Bank of England Nominees to hide his shareholdings. This government-backed scheme allowed Andrew to keep his share investments secret while he was a trade envoy. While there is no suggestion of wrongdoing, the revelation raises questions about the government’s oversight of potential conflicts of interest.
- Items containing ivory have been displayed since the beginning of the year at Kensington Palace, the official residence of Prince William, who has spoken vehemently against the use of ivory. The items are part of nearly 2,000 ivory pieces held by the Royal Collection Trust, which manages crown-related items for the nation.
- Some of the finest Titians, Rembrandts, Rubens and Van Dycks hang in Buckingham Palace’s picture gallery. But these are a small sample of more than a million works of art managed by the Royal Collection Trust, the vast majority of which are kept out of sight of the public.
Cost of the crown reporting team: David Pegg, Rob Evans, Maeve McClenaghan, Felicity Lawrence, Henry Dyer, Severin Carrell, Manisha Ganguly, Rupert Neate, Greg Wood, Harry Davies, David Conn, Aamna Mohdin, Lucy Hough, Maya Wolfe-Robinson and Richard Nelsson.
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