I’ve decided I may not want to be rich anymore. Not because I wouldn’t love the lifestyle, but because I’ve seen the way new money lives and acts, and man, they are just awful people. I am talking scum of the earth behavior.
I have a dilemma, I’d love to have the money, but skip the “new money” sheen and just jump to “old money”, even though my money is “new money”, and not “old money”. I’d have to start as new money, since I’ve never had any money, and so I can’t skip right to old money in one step.
I like the way the old money crowd conducts themselves. Quietly. Out of sight. Stealth. So smooth if their lifestyle was a knife it’d be a stiletto, stylish, sleek, and easily hidden.
But I’ve never had money, so if I got money I’d automatically be “new money”, and I wouldn’t want to be associated with that crowd in any way, shape, or form.
Hunter Biden is “new money”. And you see how he couldn’t handle any of it. Running out and buying up sports cars, going to strip clubs, getting pole dancers pregnant.
Now would that be your first inclination if somehow eighty grand a month starting coming into your bank account through wire transfers? Really? You wouldn’t want to attempt to join the better country club, put the children into a nice private school, and fully fund their college funds first? Banging strippers, that would be your go to? Really?
New money is an embarrassment.
New money is the Bentley you just passed with the black rim package, the mirror tinted windows, the extra trim. You can really spot the Hunter Biden new money types because they always have to take it a step further, they have to do a “wrap” on the Bentley, as if it doesn’t already have the finest paint job in the world available on an automobile. They have to “wrap” the car in a liquid silver paper, blinding everyone they pass on a sunny day. Old money would never, ever, wrap the Bentley. Ever.
Did you ever sit at a table with a few people you only know tangentially from doing business, when a guy comes over and says hello to them all? And after he leaves you inquire as to who he is, they say he is their broker, and name some obscure brokerage you’ve never heard of, that exists right in your own hometown?
And afterwards you get curious, I mean you’ve heard of Schwab, and T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity, and the big names in money management, but the firm they mentioned is one you’ve never, ever heard about. And then you google them only to find out the firm was established in 1867, and you see words like “trust”, and “private equity”, and “fund management”, and realize that hidden from your middle class doltish life is an entire world where old money lives, where old money knows where and how to park the cash for stable, long term security and growth. The guy who came to the table usually has a nickname, “Chip”, or “Trey”, because they have three “sticks” at the end of their name. Being third generation inside the money firm.
Grandad had money with the firm, dad had cash parked there, and now your client, the grandson you are trying to sell products to, he has cash parked there. Not all the cash mind you, just the cash they never touch. Where the interest rolls over year, after year.
When you meet new money they look like a walking ad for clothing designers. Everything they own has a logo. The polo, the pants, the belt, the quarter zip, they are a walking billboard.
Old money shuffles in with well worn pants, not worn through and threadbare, but lived in, the word you’d use to describe them is “comfortable”. Old money has a perennial tan. And when you make an inquiry as to how the family is doing, if the grandson is chatty enough you find out that grandad is in Asia, he had the 1929 Model T shipped over for a “race” of Model T enthusiasts through the Khyber Pass. How nice.
I hate to be sexist but new money wives, well, uh, they are the worst. Think Tiger Woods ex. She was an au pair brought in from Sweden to take care of the golfer Jesper Parnevik’s children, and voila!, a few years later she is driving the best and most expensive Range Rover made, wearing designer sunglasses that cost thousands, hanging a shoulder purse that cost in excess of ten grand and living in a thirty thousand square foot mansion as if born to the manor. From the help to filthy rich and they don’t flinch.
Not bad for the hired help. Quite the status leap in just two-to-three years. Stunning blonde looks and Swedish genes can take you overnight from wiping little snot nose brats faces to the pinnacle of society. Gucci purses, Cartier Panthere shades, and Worth Avenue clothing beats the Hell out of chasing Parnevik’s little ones around.
What I love about the transition is the sense of entitlement. That “I’m so tired of the paparazzi” look they give to the camera, as if having your picture taken exiting a Palm Beach restaurant and climbing into the Ferrari is somehow worse than giving two golfer’s under three aged children a bath.
New money has to tell you that they are going to the family compound in St. Croix, or the Caymans, and taking the company jet. Old money just says they will be away for a long weekend. You don’t hear where, you don’t hear about the specifics of the transportation, just that they won’t be available to join your foursome on Saturday.
Hang around old money enough you just know to expect they won’t be around those first two weeks of January to begin the new year, they are always in Phoenix to start the new year for a few weeks.
If you golf you can spot new money the same way you notice they are walking clothing billboards. Their golf bag is a travelogue of the finest “name brand” clubs in the US. It is the Merion driver head cover, the Kiawah Ocean Course bag tag, the Pine Valley medallion. You immediately notice their golf bag has taken a first class tour across some fine golf tracks.
An old money golf bag tells no tales. No Gulfstream bag tags, no hint of having played Augusta, no telltale sign that there is a Caves Valley out-of-town membership. Just a crisply well dressed old dude that appears very comfortable in his own skin. No need to ask him what he does for a living, because it is clear he never did. He took a board seat on the family firm at a young age, invested well in real estate and the stock market, and never worked a real job in his life.
If you are observant enough, and pay close attention, old money has a way of saying to you “act like you’ve been here before”, without uttering a single word.
New money is crass, and I don’t want to be crass. I don’t want to be gauche. If you gave me a few hundred grand tomorrow and I made a list, I can assure you that banging strippers in DC wouldn’t ever be a consideration. I don’t even have a desire to smoke crack, or take a shot at the sister-in-law. Wouldn’t enter my tiny mind.
I would like the idea of sitting oceanside at a the best table the Four Seasons Hotel has overlooking the waves, and ordering anything I want on the menu absent any consideration for ever looking at the right side. Just think how wonderful it would be to order stone crab claws in season at the Four Seasons in South Florida absent any concern for what digits pop up from an “MP” right side listing. I’ll bet the stone crab claws at the Four Seasons are the big ones, the ones bigger than your own fist.
And wouldn’t it be great to plunk down one of those metal black cards, the heavy ones, the ones that make it known to the waiter that you aren’t some white trash from Parkville, Maryland, no, you’ve “arrived”?
It would be, but then again I’d give it up, I’d give the game away. They’d hear some inflection of my awful Baltimore lower class accent, the one where I pronounce shower “shour”, and probably snicker behind my back, despite the fifty-percent tip.
And isn’t that the bane of no money existence, you can’t just leap from no money to old money in one step. You have to go through new money, which sucks.
Then again if I could get to new money, that means my grandkids would be old money, and they could pull off the smooth, quiet, assassin like lifestyle of the old money crowd.
I know I owe it to the grandkids to try to pull it off for them, but I can’t do it, I can’t become Hunter Biden just so they can get invited to all the right debutante balls.