GIVE ME A BREAK:FORGET YOUR BUDGET troubles and spare a thought for those social outcasts who are still filthy rich. Can you imagine the embarrassment of having several big houses, overseas accounts and a slew of luxury cars in this climate? Here are some tips for overcoming the social disease of luxury shame, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
Understate your spoils. Put your 09 German traffic-crusher in mothballs in your four-car garage and buy a cheap second-hand runabout, say an 08 BMW or even an 08 Japanese model. When volunteering at the soup kitchen, borrow the help’s car. Go on, swallow your pride and downsize your guilt by downsizing your car.
Continue to buy your staples in Brown Thomas, Donnybrook Fair, Avoca and Morton’s, but always carry your purchases in Lidl bags. If you haven’t got Lidl bags, borrow them from the help. And please, remember to carry the bags yourself. Learn to use your cooker, and pop open those bottles of Cristal at home, to avoid public embarrassment in restaurants.
Join a support group for the wealthy. Lunch in Peploe’s (as expensive as Guilbaud’s but with a raffish air) is a good place to start (as long as you order the house wine). Socialise only with other rich people to avoid feeling excluded from the pervasive penny-pinching through which everyone else is bonding. If forced to attend a social event with people of lesser means, use public transportation and wear “vintage” from a charity shop.
Be like Bono and impress your friends by rising at 6am, reading the business pages and thinking: “Now, what company do I want to buy today?” Spread your largesse, but only while wearing ethically produced Edun cotton jeans and T-shirts, which you should say you bought in Penneys.
Learn to keep down with the Joneses. When your diamonds are complimented, tell people that they are fakes from Marks Spencer. That Hermès handbag? Insist it’s a cheap knock-off. Ditto your Patek Philippe watch.
Ostentatious spending, such as attempting to adopt babies from the continent of Africa, is out. You might just like to try having a baby yourself, as it will take you off the social circuit for the foreseeable future, lessening those dreadful diamond-envy moments.
Hope for good weather this summer. Tell no one that you are going to your villa in the south of France/Hamptons/Majorca and when they compliment your tan, say you got it gardening. Alternatively, say you house-swapped or took a low-cost package holiday to the Canaries, even if you actually went to Barbados.
If you’re really doubtful about your worthiness, a company called Ranch Rider is offering what it calls “guilt-free unadulterated extravagance”, where you work for your holiday as a cowboy in British Columbia at a cost of £2,740 (€3,050) for a couple – an opportunity to have your cake and eat it, unless you count the spa treatments and the helicopter tours.
Hold a birthday party for one of your kids with no clown, no face-painter, no bouncy castle and no entertainment whatsoever. Rent a foreclosed estate house on the far fringes of north-western suburbia for this purpose.
Let your roots grow out, do your own nails (badly) and buy five identical outfits so that people think you can’t afford new clothes. Dress down at all times to fool rioters outside the financial institution where you work, as London city workers were advised to do during the G20 summit. Be seen in Dunnes.
Askmen.com advises the wealthy to get the goodwill of employees by deferring their salaries and living on less. This is also a useful way of avoiding gold-digging exes, lazy kids, nosy shareholders or even bloodthirsty revenue investigators.
You are already an expert in stealth wealth through tax havens; now practice stealth luxury. Fly Ryanair to the Med, then hire a local helicopter or seaplane to fly you to your €2,000-per-person-per-night villa. Save your complaints about your aching back due to uncomfortable Ryanair seating for your bath butler.
Tax-exiled? Claim that you have emigrated looking for work. Try not to come home for a while. Cancel the private jet/helicopter and get to and from the airport by bus (people on public transport really aren’t so bad). What you lose in hours, you will gain in credibility.
The recent Budget, which targeted middle-earners, may have exacerbated your symptoms of what the Money, Meaning Choices Institute calls “Sudden Wealth Syndrome”. Expect early-morning waking (like Bono), panic attacks, depression, paranoia, intrusive money-related thoughts and “ticker syndrome” (anxiety brought on by changing stock-market levels).
There is a cure: do the same as Bill Gates, JK Rowling and Warren Buffett and give your cash away. Give it now, to our hard-pressed health and education systems. You’ll find the social welfare system very generous, even if the Christmas bonus has been cancelled. Living with your several children, wife and ex-wives in an ordinary three-bedroom council house will give you a warm glow of belonging, once you’ve spent a few years on the waiting list.
kholmquist@irishtimes.com
