I was talking to a friend about an attorney who only accepts two or three cases a year. It' s always a high stakes money case taken on contingency so that the stakes can be higher by winning. Over the course of the last 12 years, this attorney has never lost. So, he has amassed a huge fortune from the contingencies he's won. He's also good at investing, so the money he has won has multiplied considerably.
His wife has a housekeeper, two nannies, a yard and pool man. She flies to Paris as if it were only a day trip. She takes her friends to concerts and buys them front row seats for 3-5,000 per ticket. a five dollar bill is a nickel to her.
By comparison, my life is quite average. I am a part of the middle working class. But stories like the one these two people live keep me in line if I ever for a second think I might have arrived in some area or another.
2 comments:
I doubt you could identify the single individual on either extreme (great wealth or dire poverty) which means we all fall in the middle somewhere. I would argue that material wealth has nothing to do with quality of life lived. Only in our relationships one with the other will we be truly rich or poor. Would that we could teach that lesson to our children well, but many of us do not learn that lesson till our kids have grown and flown.
Wealth, whether material or not, should not be the basis for relationships for sure. But, knowing that we operate in financial circles closer to our own status makes the ideal difficult to test. And, I have noticed that status is important to our children. That is something they could have learned from their parents, I suppose.
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