Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wealth Therapy Tackles Woes of the Rich

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-have-to-ask dept.

HughPickens.com writes: Jana Kasperkevic writes in The Guardian that it can be very stressful to be rich. "It's really isolating to have a lot of money. It can be scary – people's reaction to you," says Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. "There is a fair amount of isolation if you are wealthy." According to Clay Cockrell, who provides therapy for rich, this means the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery, but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems. One big problem is not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. "Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult," says Cockrell. "As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated." Sci-fi author John Scalzi has published an entertaining take-down of the cluelessness in this article.

2 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, its called the Republican party. Where the super rich are at the top and those at the bottom worship the rich.

  2. Re:Easy, make them less rich by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think "earn" means the same thing to you and the previous AC. Of course, 1M of "earned income" on a W2 form gets taxed more than 400K on a W2. But, those 1M and more incomes are often structured in other tax-advantaged ways that end up taxed as long-term capital gains.

    Even more, the rich often can defer taxes indefinitely with unrealized gains on the assets they hold. These assets are essentially the same form as what they would use to store value anyway (you don't park millions in a regular FDIC deposit account), so they have no reason to convert back and forth between cash, savings, and investments like the plebes getting W2 income. They can have this huge divergence where the assets grow and they only pay capital gains tax on the subset of realized gains they "withdraw" for living expenses in a given year.

    The increasing use of trusts and other asset-holding constructs makes this even worse, as the rich can accumulate this huge economic power, share it across generations, and defer taxes indefinitely. Through further shell games like loans using these assets as collateral, or adjustments to beneficiaries and trustees, they can transfer control or exploit the economic power of the assets even further.