“I mean it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?”
Although Lucille Bluth was dead serious when she uttered those words on Arrested Development, we as the viewers found the line hilarious because we could never imagine a person saying such a thing. However, that might just be because most of us are not hanging around extremely wealthy people very often…
Reddit user JustDadThanks sparked a conversation by asking others to share the most out of touch things they’ve heard wealthy friends and family members say, and it turns out that Lucille Bluth might fit right in with them. From having no concept of money to being unable to comprehend that everyone else does not take luxurious vacations year round, we’ve gathered some of the most ridiculous quotes from rich people that prove that money doesn’t buy you self-awareness. Keep reading to also find an interview with Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble with Billionaires, to hear her insight on the topic.
Be sure to upvote the replies that you can’t believe were said in real life, and let us know in the comments if you have ever had a conversation with an affluent person that would warrant a spot on this list. Then if you’re interested in yet another Bored Panda article that will make you want to eat the rich, check out this story next.
#1
The wealthiest person I know: “Oh you get seasonal depression? Why don’t you just go to the Caribbean for a week and the Mediterranean the next? It always helps me.”
Image source: fredundead, Dương Nhân
#2
Going on a school trip to Poland to see Auschwitz. Obviously it’s a normal flight. One girl expresses how disgusted and/or scared she is because she has never been on an economy flight before. We’re going to see a f*****g concentration camp.
Image source: zincvitamin, Suhyeon Choi
#3
A friends mom at a party,
“You know after 6 weeks in our Tuscan villa you honestly get bored of having people wait on you all day. I was so ready to just pick up my own dish and wash it”
Like uh huh. Life must be so hard.
Image source: dindia91, Sarah Chai
#4
[freshman semester of college]
Friend walks into a store where I’m working to buy something.
“What are you doing here?”
“I work here”
“But…. We are in college. You don’t have to work until we graduate.”
Image source: sammysbud, Christiann Koepke
#5
My husbands step mom told us she’s thinking about retiring. She’s been a stay at home wife/mom for the last 30 years. She lives a very luxurious lifestyle with multiple vacation homes. What is she retiring from?
Image source: kdawson602, John Fornander
#6
“Prices are going to increase anyways so there’s no need to complain just pay for them” regarding increasing gas/food prices. For someone who only has $30 left in between paychecks that $1-5 increase on items for everyday use makes a difference
Image source: thelittlelambe, Christian Dubovan
#7
My ex fiancé when I brought up how his parents had a college fund for him and mine didn’t.
“My parents were just responsible”
So we’re mine. They were poor.
Other comments similar to this and my student loans were that my loans were “my choice” and I’ve also heard from both him and other friends who had college paid for by their parents that it’s “because their parents care about them” – idk how having poor parents means they don’t care but ok.
Image source: Hes9023, Towfiqu barbhuiya
#8
“People like bin men and garbage collectors are needed in society. But why should they have more money for doing such a task.”
My jaw hit the floor.
Image source: anon, Mathias Reding
#9
My mother has become very wealthy and out of touch. She’s made lucky investments but doesn’t share her wealth at all. So when I couldn’t qualify for a student loan (my identity was stolen when I was a kid. It’s fixed now) or get financial aid (because I still fell under her financial umbrella as far as aid is concerned. They just assume if your parents have money, they’ll help.) she was furious that I had to give up on my big college dreams. “I paid for college with a part-time waitress job after class. Just do that!” Her university was $2,500 a year back in the 70s! The older generations getting annoyed at the younger generations for wanting college debt forgiveness have no f*cking idea what college debt looks like now. All this “Just pay it off like I did”, bullsh*t is absolute ignorance.
Image source: 3toeddog, Andrea Piacquadio
#10
My coworker, and friend, who is head of the office’s payroll/Controller of the company made an error and no one’s paycheck was deposited on time.
Coworker: I got quite a few angry/concerned emails first thing this morning, I was shocked. Do people really notice this kind of thing especially so fast?!
Me: uh….yes…? You do realize that most of the world, including 90% of the people who work here live paycheck to paycheck right?
Coworker: ooooh no way I had no idea I feel bad now.
He was genuinely shocked…
Image source: Precariousme183, Tima Miroshnichenko
#11
During my college days i ran into my then-roommate on my way home from work. she was obviously really annoyed about something so i asked her what was up. her words: “you’re so lucky you have a job and can just make money. i have to wait for my parents to give me money and it’s so annoying.” i was like, “yeah, that sounds really hard…?!!!!”
Image source: pvssylord, Karolina Grabowska
#12
Oh man, my roommates and I were going out for dinner (burgers, nothing fancy) and I was driving us. I mentioned I couldn’t do something one of them wanted to do later that week because I couldn’t afford it – I was like 22, working two part time jobs, pretty broke. She told me she hated it when people said they couldn’t afford to do things because they just spent the money on something else and could spend it on that if they really wanted to. I was like, well I spent it on my car insurance for this month? And she doubled down and insisted that I HAD the money but I was prioritizing something else (yes, my car insurance). Very awkward conversation!
Image source: sybil_vain, cottonbro
#13
I heard this during the coronavirus lockdown which basically meant solitary confinement for everyone who lives in an urban, carfree apartment area. “I don’t get why a general lockdown is such a bad thing. I take my family, drive to Croatia and have a vacation on my boat.”
Image source: schwarzmalerin, Oliver Sjöström
#14
Not a woman, but i’ve gotta share this one because my parents have been utterly zombified by fox news.
My parents are very well off and they live in Texas. When the huge freeze hit their home and they lost power, they quickly booked a week long vacation to Honduras to wait it out. Ever since, they’ve made a bunch of dumb comments along the lines of, “why doesn’t everyone just keep a vacation fund so they can leave Texas when hurricanes and blizzards hit? We all know they’re coming, most people just refuse to save money and want everyone else to come save them.”
I don’t talk to those ghouls any more than i have to these days.
Image source: dicklord_airplane, Magda Ehlers
#15
Friend was texting me when we were both in college and on winter break. His family was in Aspen for 3 weeks skiing. I said that sounded really fun and he asked me to come out. I said I couldn’t afford that and he said “just have your parents pay for it”. I thought he was joking but he was not.
He learned a lot about how the other half lives that day. At least I hope he learned something.
Image source: deskbeetle, Terry Agar
#16
When I was homeless as an 18 year old without any assets, a car or support systems my older sister, who had married into money looked at me blankly when I asked if I could stay with her for a while or help her around the house for some spare cash & simply said
“ what’s your problem? why don’t you get more money?”
Then she walked off .. nothing more was said. What can you even say to that?
Image source: Vikingtender, Nathan Dumlao
#17
This was right before the pandemic began and we were seeing a spike in BTC’s worth. Not only could I not afford a whole coin, I’m an immigrant who just entered the workforce so I didn’t have my own credit card and my dad was strictly against crypto, so that was my situation. Anyways, I was telling about how I forecast an immense increase given how everyone was starting to allow cryptocurrency as a payment, and this friend of mine, H, just casually went, “oh yeah! I don’t know how to use it either so my dad got me like 2 coins, I think, to play around with”, in a very as-a-matter-of-fact tone. Then she goes, “why not just ask your dad to get you a few (coins)? It’s really fun!” Each coin was worth 22.5k that day, I remember it vividly.
Image source: theysquawk, Ewan Kennedy
#18
“Couldn’t you just renovate your suite and do the repairs yourself, out of the kindness in your heart?” When I told her my ceiling caved in on my rental unit. You know, because I have money to renovate my landlords house, a house I don’t own.
Image source: BotGivesBot, ultragamer667
#19
I was around 14 and was at church on a Wednesday night. Being Baptists, several of us were standing there talking about food and I mentioned that pinto beans and cornbread is one of my favorite meals. One of the wealthier women in my church looked at me and said, “That’s poor people food. I don’t eat things like that.”
A year after college, I was at work and trying to get to know a new coworker. She was talking about all of the trips she’s taken and the places she’s been. When she asked where I had traveled, I said that I’ve never been out of the USA, and that I don’t even have a passport. She looked at me incredulously and said something about how I should travel because it broadens the mind (how ironic considering how close-minded she was about poverty in the US). She then said I should really get my passport because then opportunities to travel would just pop up. Sure, I make $24k a year, so not having a passport is the only thing preventing me from traveling. I just blankly stared at her until someone changed the subject.
Image source: GreenLabyrinthQuinn, Spencer Davis
#20
I used to work for a wealthy housewife, house sitting and tutoring her son. She was a very sweet, kind person who always very friendly with people around her, including staff and waiters and the like. Definitely not a snob.
But one time she told me she thought hotel maids (she would stay at fancy hotels for weeks on end at times) must have such nice lives because their jobs are so easy and relaxing and they probably make good money doing it. That she might consider doing that if she ever wanted to get a job, just for fun.
You see, despite having house cleaners come in several times a week she sometimes did some chores around her house and found it pleasant so of course, being a hotel maid is similar.
Image source: catathymia, Volha Flaxeco
#21
In our college friend group one woman in particular has become wealthy over the years, wealthy enough to fly NetJets and maintain a townhouse in NYC as a pied a terre. The rest of us are just hoping we can one day retire. To her credit, she makes efforts to stay in touch. When she’s in town, she always organizes a dinner and the rest of us are always happy to see her.
At the last dinner, we talking about how difficult it was to buy a car post-pandemic. She said, “In our world, nobody can buy a boat.”
The rest of us made a lot of eye contact over that one.
Image source: FFuLiL8WKmknvDFQbw, mali maeder
#22
I have an uncle who was mad when we didn’t fly to Fiji for his son’s second wedding. With flights, hotel, gifts, etc the price came out to nearly $23,000 for my family of four. I was in my early twenties and had just started out in a new job. When we said we couldn’t afford to go, he snapped and told us if we really wanted to, we could save for year to afford it. He couldn’t wrap his head around why we couldn’t save an extra $2,000 a month to attend.
Image source: LeonaLulu, Asad Photo Maldives
#23
I was talking to a friend once about the fact I was saving hard because I wanted to make sure I would always be financially independent, after I had been through a relationship breakdown. She was a casual contract academic and her husband an investment banker, but she told me she didn’t have any savings of her own as her income was spending money for luxuries, essentially. I didn’t think much of it, but the next day she texted me to say she’d discussed it with her husband and he’d transferred her £100k into a bank account in her own name.
It was so tone deaf… I was happy for her in a way, but also I have just worked my a*s off for two years to save one fifth of that and you just go home and your husband sends you a huuuuuge amount of cash just because? I just didn’t need to be told that, you know. It sat really weirdly with me.
Image source: Boring-Pirate, Tima Miroshnichenko
#24
“Homeless people should just gets jobs if they need money. They don’t wanna work, so it’s their own fault anyway.”
Image source: TinySparklyThings, Ev
#25
The amount of people who have criticized my husband and I for only having one child- finances is a big part of our decision (amongst many other reasons) and they always say something like “oh everyone makes it work with multiple kids”. Like yes. But I don’t want to MAKE it work. I want it to work on its own because we can easily afford the child we have…. Also had a friend say that I should just “apply for credit cards” to fix my credit. And I’m like uh… that’s not how this works when you have credit tanked by medical debt my guy.
Image source: pelicants, PNW Production
#26
I am from a poor family, and a wealthy woman I know announced to our dinner table that she wishes that she could be poor to see what she was truly made of. The year before my family had trouble keeping our lights on.
Image source: AwkwardPeach1721, Ben Maxwell
#27
Me: I would loooooove to travel to San Francisco one day.
Boss: Why aren’t you just going? The plane ticket is just like €1,000 per flight.
Me: Yeah… exactly.
Image source: kalenderdose94, Pixabay
#28
My aunt, who grew up as one of seven kids in an a lower middle class home, married well at 20 because she was knocked up. My uncle took over his dad’s company in metal polishing when they were young, so she has been wealthy most of her adult life.
During the first term of Obama’s presidency, she shared some awful email chain letter about him that had inaccurate information and racist dog whistles. I replied with the facts on each of the items and pointed out the racism. She replied back that I was “being disrespectful,” and Obama’s Affordable Care Act was going to “bankrupt” my uncle by requiring he provide health insurance to his workers. I was a high school teacher at the time, and all of her brothers worked as unionized tradesmen. She has not had a job a day in her life.
Image source: Bobcatluv, Marten Bjork
#29
Not to me, but I remember going out one night with a small group of friends and we stopped at a small convenience-type store. As my friend was checking out, she kept saying how tired the cashier looked and telling him that he should take a vacation. And he was just like.. She grew up VERY privileged and recently bought a house at the age of 21, goes on dumb vacations all the time, eats out multiple times a week, etc. I was cringing the whole time. What makes her think this obviously overworked convenience store cashier has the time or money to afford to go on a vacation??? There’s lots of ignorant things she’s increasingly said over the past few years and we’re thankfully no longer friends.
Image source: buhdumtss98, Kaihao Zhao
#30
She acted like the pandemic was so horrible for her when she lives on a massive property, is a SAHM and her husband’s business wasn’t affected at all, and continued to frequently travel the whole time. Her husband complained about how the stimulus payments were unnecessary.
Image source: goldandjade, Jondave Libiran
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