First of all , Happy Labor Day weekend. I appreciate the forum and its members. Almost like AA, But SS - Hello, Im ( ) and I'm a Super Saver.
Our net worth is over 9.5M right now. Our situation is all of our friends who are doing OK are spending and showing off everything they have, Pools, Watches, Huge trips, cars etc. I usually don't say much, I guess we could afford those things, but I was brought up to be humble and not be the center of attention. In my older age I feel I am becoming a hermit because of this. I believe think they think they are better than others because of wealth.
They are good people, again is it just me?
DW and I live in an upper middle class neighborhood where a lot of people drive luxury cars and live in highly upgraded houses or custom-built MacMansions. They also all seem to have the latest iPhones, expensive handbags and fancy jewelries. At the middle school where our two kids attend, there is definitely a competition to look good and be seen when parents drop off or pick up their kids (at least before the pandemic).
DW and I don't care about all this status symbol stuff and it doesn't bother us one bit that we don't have any of this. How they choose to spend money is entirely their own business and none of ours. And I've found that most of the people that I know or have interacted with are nice and grounded; buying some of this stuff is just their way of enjoying fruits of their hard labor. and there's nothing wrong with that.
I was offended only once when someone tried to rub it in my face. Among our acquaintances in neighborhood are a couple, he a doctor and she a SAHM. We got to know well them because our kids attended the same school and the kids participated in many activities together. They are very nice people, but the SAHM's mom is a stuck-up who likes to one-up other people and show off. She lives with them and is very proud (and vocal) that her daughter married a well-paid doctor and they live in one of the biggest houses in the neighborhood (she lives with the couple). Every time we meet at kids' functions, she would tell me about the latest fancy vacations and cruises the entire family just took ("Have you been there?" was a common refrain), or how the couple bought the nice house ($1.3 million) in our neighborhood without having to sell their old one ("because my SIL makes too much money"), or the new cars the couple just bought. I usually just smiled, nodded and bore it with good humor.
But one time, she heard from another acquaintance that we had just bought a plot of land with plans to maybe build a vacation home, and when we next met up, she asked me about it, and without waiting for me to elaborate in terms of location and size, she made the snarky comment, "it must be pretty cheap." The implication was that she didn't think DW and I could afford something expensive.
To be fair, her assumption was based on not knowing anything about us other than we live in one of the older and smaller houses in the neighborhood, our cars are respectively 15 and 20 years old, and that DW works and I don't. So she drew conclusions based on what she saw.
But I guess I must have gotten off the wrong side of the bed that morning, because her comment kind of set me off, especially in light of all her bragging I had to put up with previously. So I told her that, yes, at USD $300k, my plot of land was pretty cheap. I then told her about the the various "cheap" land investments DW and I made over the last decade which cost us mid 7-figures and which we also paid in cash, but even those are a relatively small portion of our overall portfolio. I'll freely admit that it was satisfying to see her smug smile disappear from her face as I related the "cheap" investments that DW and I have made.
After that, she never regaled me with any of stories of her family's fancy vacations and investments again and when we met, the conversation was usually limited to kids and the weather.
I felt kind of bad afterward for getting into a pi**ing contest with a 70-year-old woman, and when I told DW about it, she gave me a well-deserved smacking and told me never to do it again
Lucky Dude