Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Anxious Billionaire, and Other Tales


As someone who's pretty recently entered the U.S. economy and workforce, I'm becoming a tiny bit interested in reading advice about how to spend and save my money intelligently. So, like an idiot, today I clicked on the New York Times' Special Section on wealth and personal finance. Whoops. I forgot that the Times is obsessed with the emotional and financial problems being experienced by the super rich.

Although the number of uninsured Americans recently dropped to 47.5 million - hey, that's just 15.3% of our citizens! -- the Times is discussing people forced to sacrifice their Botox treatments. Although most Americans can barely afford to retire, let alone leave their children an estate, the Times has an article about how to tell your kids about their inheritance. And despite the fact that only 1.5% of American households earn more than $250k, the Times is devoting significant space to folks whose annual income has recently decreased from $10 million to $2 million.

Other highlights include emerging trends in tax evasion, how to collect valuable shit that you can sell later, and the sentence, "What's a high-net-worth investor to do?"

P.S. The woman on the left is Elyse Goldstein. She works as -- you guessed it -- a counselor to the wealthy. And her clients are very, very upset.

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