Does prestige necessarily follow wealth?

How are we defining prestige?

1 The level of respect at which one is regarded by others; standing.
2 A person's high standing among others; honor or esteem.
3 Widely recognized prominence, distinction, or importance

I'd say no, no, yeah pretty possible.

If you have what others want, they will treat you differently for it. Especially if they can't just take it, and even moreso if they want glory by association.

GF and I own our condo, have a lot in savings, and travel fairly frequently. We buy frivolous stuff when we want it. We are planning on purchasing a house in the next year, and we don't have to sell our condo to do it. We are doing very well. However, we have worked very hard to get where we are. For years we scraped by, had shit jobs, and lived in shit places before we got to where we are. We decided to live outside of the city so that we could afford to buy. We have always lived within/below our means so that we can have a healthy savings account. And still? By certain CA standards, we are nowhere near wealthy. Not that I care, but it is interesting.

I know my cousin looks down on us because we live in the dreaded Valley. Meanwhile she is living in a teeny tiny, old 2-bedroom apt. in a not very nice part of Santa Monica. It's all a matter of perspective and values, I suppose.

I think the two are pretty tied together, increasingly so the larger a community or group you are talking about. Say, in America as a whole, almost anyone generally thought of prestigious is also going to be wealthy - it harder to be known if you are not wealthy. Being in the public eye generally comes with wealth. But say in a small community, prestige may not be tied with wealth as closely.

1 The level of respect at which one is regarded by others; standing.

That's the definition I was thinking of when I asked.

That's the definition I was thinking of when I asked.

I'd say no. And cite Paris Hilton.

I've yet to see better value from a hotel room than the one that gave me proof of an afterlife for $160/night.

Okay, since nobody else did, I have to ask how that worked...

BTW, Matt -- I have been skimming through the forums on TWoP a lot lately, and keep stumbling upon posts from you that make me laugh.

Speaking of $... I just talked to a nice woman who might offer me a job, but probably at a lower salary than I have now. Tonight I will do some math to figure out how much getting the hell away from my current job is worth to me. I suspect it's worth a lot.

it's interesting that you're discussing money and such. i was wide awake this morning about 4:30 thinking of ways to make extra cash. i think i've settled on getting a second job and working an extra 26 hours or so. i've considered it several times, but this time i really have a goal to achieve. i need to save as much money as possible in the coming months so i can buy a house. down payments and closing costs are killer.

this weekend i went and bought furniture in preparation. that way i don't have all these huge costs all at once.

oh and gas has actually gone down quite a bit here in the last week. the cheapest i've seen it is $2.58, but the average seems to be around $2.65.

I've yet to see better value from a hotel room than the one that gave me proof of an afterlife for $160/night.

Yeah, I need to know, where was this, Matt? I need to go stay there.

Money. I like it. I don't want to work really hard to get it, though. All I want is to be able to comfortably buy a decent house in a place I want to live (not this place), have no debt, a healthy savings/retirement fund, and be able to travel some and buy some frivolous stuff without straining my budget. Anything beyond that is gravy. I don't quite have that, but I can see getting it eventually. I like money, but I won't kill myself to get it, or hate myself for not having it. I've stayed in 5-star hotels. They were fun, but I'm just as happy with a clean room at Hampton Inn. Fancy cars are fun, but my old Chevy gets me where I want to go. I have no real ambition, and no envy of rich people.

Mostly staying out of the discussion except to say that we are comfortable, yet just getting by, still get to do stuff that we really want to do, and I don't think either Mr. Jane or I consider ourselves nobodies.

Also,

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.

Did y'all see just a little while back where Keith Allen from BBC's Robin Hood got into it with those people? [link] I had no idea Lily Allen was his daughter! So freaking awesome!

This has been a great conversation to read!

What irks me about the $10mil guy is that it's not necessarily representative of how many of the wealthy, even in SiliValley, act and react. When I worked at the ridiculously expensive all-girls school in SiliValley (though, it was a bargain at $16,000/year), I got to encounter how that half of SiliValley lived. There was a donor who gave the school $500,000 for scholarships, and my first year, paid all the staff bonuses ($10k for being there 2 years, $5K for being there one). He owned 5 houses (1 in Tahoe, 2 in Napa, including a vineyard, one in Los Altos and one, I think, in Hawaii) and he worked and worked hard because he liked the work and liked what he did.

His daughter was one of the most modest down-to-earth kids I ever encountered. And while his wealth was out of the norm for our families, his values (work because he enjoyed it, worked hard) were not uncommon.

I never heard a parent complain about how hard it was being a millionaire or a multimillionaire.