People Who Grew Up Rich, What Did You Think Was Normal? (r/AskReddit)

redditors have grew up filthy-rich what did you think was normal till you learned otherwise honestly it was the little things I knew we had nicer cars than average a bigger house went on more trips etc but I thought everyone's refrigerators had wood paneled cabinet doors for example we had a subzero built-in refrigerator and freezer the first time I saw metal fridge I thought it was weird and I thought it was even weirder that the fridge and freezer were combined but then I got really jealous because you could put magnets on it I also thought everyone had a central vacuum system where you can sweep dirt into a little hole under the cabinets by the floor and it sucks it up we had these little holes all over in every room stuff like that probably a weird example but growing up all of our dishes were made of fine china Waterford glassware etc and I just thought that's what plates and stuff were made of because we didn't have anything else then one time I went to a friend's house for dinner and we ate on coloured plastic plates and non matching plastic cups I just thought that was the weirdest thing ever and asked why we were eating with camping dishes by myself I'm not rich but I have an uncle who is very well-off so one of my not rich aunts was complaining about her car acting up on her while my cousin from the rich family was listening and got really confused so he just asked her well why don't you just get rid of it and go buy another one this kid was probably 13 or so at the time and had no concept of not enough money he couldn't understand why you wouldn't just go get a new something if you're old something didn't work I thought everyone got to eat dinner quite often with the president I always thought the president as dinner at random houses until I learned otherwise when I finally joined regular school I was home-schooled till I was age 9 and no kid believed my dinner story dad was ambassador of Kenya to Saudi Arabia kidnapping whenever we traveled there were guards I was trained in what to do if it happened we had insurance policies against it when I dated a middle class suburbanite and talked about it she thought I was paranoid but that was a thing I remember my parents having a sit-down talk with me after a parent-teacher meeting and letting me know that there was one student in our class that was feeling insecure because his family was the only one that didn't have a lake cottage or mountain home my parents paid in full for my $60,000 a college tuition I was always grateful for that but it wasn't until the post-grad reality of my friends working to pay off their student loan debt while I was able to directly pursue my professional goals that I truly realized the advantage that I had from my parents wealth I had always known we were well-off but it wasn't until after college that I truly appreciated that I guess I hope I can pay them back for that someday I think the moment it really sunk in was during five-stroke 6th grade around middle school I felt like I was getting too cool for little kid parties so I decided I wanted to go somewhere and do something fun my parents were super excited about this since it meant I was taking one stupid middle schooler with us on a mini trip instead of having 15 stupid middle schoolers in the house I decided on a trip a twosome Festival which meant a ferry ride and then drive to a Canadian City and have a big fancy meal the girl I picked had been my friend for years I had no idea her life was so different she lost her mind on the ferry it was so fun she had never seen Canada before so we stopped and took her picture my parents realizing immediately that is was a huge deal for this girl bought her and I souvenirs which she later gave to her mom since her mom has never left the area my mom would not let her order the cheapest thing on the menu which I never realized is something poor children are trained to do I thought you could just pick whatever you wanted to eat she was the first person in her family to travel more than 30 miles from her house this was pre 9/11 when a family could just take a random child with no heed and a permission slip from their parent into another country we are both adults now and occasionally run into each other she is married with four children and still talks about the time we rode a ferry and went to Canada had she not brought it up I probably would have forgotten middle-class but went to school with a lot of rich people the weirdest thing for them was that I didn't have kidnapping insurance they thought that was a completely normal purchase just like car or house insurance till there is kidnapping insurance having a helper in your house doing everything housework related my mom used to take us to the mall and drop five hundred dollars in a day without thinking about it budgeting in general was a foreign concept until I racked up credit card debt that I couldn't pay off immediately I was pretty poor as a kid but lived in a wealthy City so most of my friends were quite well-off one time my friend's dad took us to a comic book convention and he bought me a 25 dollar book just because I was looking at it and seemed to like it it absolutely boggled my mind that someone would spend $25 on me from no occasion and without agonizing over the decision I spent my late teens and early twenties butlering for a very very wealthy not billionaires but not far off family they had two school-aged kids that I would drop off in the morning the elder seven maybe eight at the time of the two was amazed to learn that I didn't have a holiday home to go to when I took time off I feel bad having said this while joining a friend on a road trip up into the mountains at his brother's house there was slow as balls internet at the house we were going to end the connection dropped frequently I didn't have my car with me since I was on a road trip with someone else at the time this was also before personal Wi-Fi was a thing and my cell phone at the time was a state-of-the-art brick phone from Nokia the snow hotspot me if there's any way I could borrow a car to hop into town for internet tomorrow that would be awesome friend well my brother uses his car every day and I'm using mine to go to that event we talked about me that's fine is it okay if I just use his extra car awkward silence until friend he just has that one car I drove a crappy 96 Taurus in high school one day I drove my friends into town a well-off girl drove a new BMW I didn't know very well came along when we got out of the car she asked me if my car locks like she thought it was so crappier didn't come with a lock growing up I thought apartment buildings were only for college students I didn't know families lived in them my friend in high school was filthy rich and he would always Wes you jackets and fedoras one day he said I wanted to wear my other purple suit with the jacket was at my third house it was some Gatsby level extravagance your friend was a solid argument that money can't buy good taste going on ski holiday every year living in Germany where the Alps are just a two hours drive away but still flying to Western Canada for skiing at Whistler mountain but I like this snow I was trying to show a friend of mine that she's rich because her family has a team of maids and drivers if seriously a driver for every member of the family she said she's not rich because everyone has made us and drivers I asked her do you think your maids and drivers have maids and drivers I think then it clicked that she might be rich John Travolta told a cute story about his daughter once they had to fly commercial once and she was shocked incredulous and asked daddy who are all these people on our plane she thought everyone had their own 757 to never discuss the affordability of things within a family I thought it was totally taboo which isn't to say I got everything I wanted growing up I was an obsessively frugal kid but I was never denied something on the basis of we can't afford that I was pretty shocked in elementary school when my friend's mom told her they couldn't afford to buy something I guess in my mind it was impolite for parents to talk about money issues with kids and it hadn't yet dawned on me that sometimes that's unavoidable I lived overseas for a year when I was in high school and attended an International School where though my family was decidedly middle-class in the US and my dad was being paid several times more to work abroad than he had been at home I'm fairly certain my family were the least well-off in the entire school none of these kids ever seemed to realize how fabulously wealthy they were a few examples several boys from North Korea I don't know exactly how high up in the political world of the dprk you need to be to be allowed to send your children abroad for an education that these kids showed up to school and brand-new Benzes for a start one friend of mine lived in a luxury high-rise in the single richest endlave of the city where I lived his parents lived on the 16th floor each floor was a single unit he lived on the 17th floor in his own unit he had his own livin maid and Driver as well another friend's parents ran the largest import-export company in the country he had two bodyguards and was driven around in his own armored bulletproof SUV the windows were 2 inches thick and didn't roll down but I attended his birthday party which was on his dad's 180 feet superyacht it was not uncommon for my friends to spend three-day weekends in Bali the Maldives or wherever their vacation home s happened to be I'm still friends with several of them through social media and the most frequent post I see from several of them is after for the week then on to end those locations almost always being on three separate continents my family was broke as heck mid my mum was and still is a teacher at this really nice private school which was the only reason my brother and I could attend everyone's parents were doctors and lawyers you get the idea but my brother and I were being raised by a single mom who had just relocated we were living in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere for the cheap but rent we didn't always know when the next meal was coming one day during lunch the kids noticed that all I have is a peanutbutter sandwich and a tiny bag of pretzels one dude says wow you must really not be hungry since I was six and just as clueless to any other lifestyle as he was I just straight-up told him we don't have any more food I had to explain it a couple of times before he realized lunch bro sheepishly asks if I would like some of his food that orange and bakiyev cheetah's whether start over now 20-year long friendship I thought until the start of high school that a $100 bottle of wine was cheap expensive ones raised several thousands after all at the end of the year we decided to offer our retiring teacher a bottle of wine and he said by a $100 bottle I made a joke about how picky he wasn't made a fool of myself my roommate in college would order a catered meal for every dinner like he'd have a restaurant bring so much takeout that they'd bring it in those aluminium trays and heaters underneath and a server would stick around to dish out the food and clean up afterwards it took us a couple months to realize that he thought this was totally normal behavior and was confused why we made such a big deal about it he saw it as kind of a splurge but not crazy out of the ordinary until I just pointedly asked Kevin the server who else he did this for in the entire city we were living in um just him my roommate just looked shocked the interesting thing was the fallout this was only part of the reality check that college dealt my roommate he really was raised to think catered meals and drivers and massive wardrobes whether norm and he felt deceived that sound his parents lived that's how his friends lived he'd never known anyone who didn't live that way I mean it's hard to imagine but he really did feel like his whole life was a lie and he felt really dumb from not seeing it before so he really swung the other direction he rejected his parents help started working on his own got crazy tight about finances and became honestly annoying about money but it was a learning curve so we were patient it was inspiring to watch someone take control of their life we never have sympathy for the wealthy but it was a painful growing experience for him and I was proud my eight-year-old came home from school last year and told me that not everyone had a tennis court in fact he said nobody but he had a tennis course in his class he was amazed that other kids played in the street instead of their own tennis court the tennis court is old and crappy it makes a great play area paved and with a ten feet fence around it I have many kids who have many friends it's nice to have a pen to keep them and during parties I think the term you're looking for is prison yard not tennis court this girl I knew was rejected from a law school because her diversity statement was written about her struggle of writing commercial to Europe for the first time through the entirety of elementary school I would buy ice cream for my class on Fridays at lunch the money came from flipping pokemon cards paper jewelry and of course mostly from my dear old dad it doesn't seem like much but we all came from a very poor rural town with one store and one school our playground at school was a stretch off-course pavement it was like the sixties in the 90s my dad had just started up his own machine shop in town which employed ten also my slight business sense as a kid coupled with my dad's business sense made us rich everyone would call us bossman which is probably where I began realizing that being a boss man wasn't the norm my dad taught me a lesson after he realized I was spending all my money on the other kids if you want to make a lasting impression let's really give something back and fix up that old playground my dad's machine shop then produced and installed an entire playground system for our school at no cost it was that day I knew what it meant to be a good man and that I wanted to be just like my dad when I found out my dad paid off a multi-million dollar mortgage in less than five years that's when I knew one was not like the others I grew up dirt poor and when I met my husband was dirt poor myself he came for an upper middle class family where everyone got college paid and they always had new things my husband has never been unemployed and doesn't understand how someone can be unemployed I remind him all of the time that when he met me I was unemployed yet but you just had some crappy things happen to you that's all um yeah honey that's how it works complaints about airport security we never got around to owning a claim but most of our family friends who we would vacation with would share theirs with us basically you show up at the local airport and hop right on if we ever took a commercial jet we had a prepaid sorry check that let us zip through our own security line I never understood why people would say they planned on heading to the airport two hours before their flight my mom never works instead she stayed at home and raised each one of her four sons in succession so there was a point when I was shocked to learn that other kids moms had Jobson didn't just play them watch them take them on excursions every day i think people start with not filthy-rich because everyone looks up and sees people with more money than them but rich and poor will always be relative so i can't help but start with saying that while my parents aren't filthy rich it never occurred to me that it wasn't that normal to have a fully owned house without any mortgage I thought renting with something only people in their twenties had to do I thought doctors and lawyers lived in the poor part of town you know the guard gated communities with golf courses in them I don't think I realized they weren't poor until I got to college I wasn't the one who was filthy rich but I went to a fancy private school from ninth grade to twelfth grade on scholarship there were tons of kids there who didn't know exactly how rich they were I remember one girl complaining about how her parents were buying a third house in Florida but VAT it cost 1 million less than her main home which was around for 6 million I have so many stories where the rich kids from my school didn't realize just how rich they were it was pretty sad only middle class but I realized I was globally rich when in the Marines Filipino folks were taking our trash to fix their roofs I remember going to India and giving about 10 rupees roughly 10 pence or 15 cents to a homeless woman she was basically in tears it's as if I saved her life or something that was a big wake-up call you have been visited by the grandmother gymnast comment my body is my temple so you can do that when you old if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video or don't either way have a great day you magnificent people you [Music]

Channel: Updoot Everything

Views: 1,463,559

Rating: 4.9381261 out of 5

Keywords: #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: AJxNkXInykc

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019