Wealthy and Obnoxious White People Share Their Top Money-Saving Tips for Financial Literacy Month
As “Financial Literacy Month” begins, personalities and pundits are delivering one-size-fits-all advice that everyone knows and no one asked for, such as pay down your credit cards, check your credit score, and save for a rainy day.
Former Merrill Lynch vice president and personal finance personality Suze Orman, whose net worth is an estimated $75 million, recently appeared on MSNBC. Orman discussed how women are keeping themselves poor by making the age-old financial mistake of buying too much Starbucks coffee instead of enjoying their brew at home. Orman’s interview took place during the Forbes 30/50 Summit’s celebration of International Women’s Day in Abu Dhabi — a city dubbed by Bloomberg as the world’s “newest haven for billionaires.” Registration for the summit cost $10,000. A roundtrip business flight on Qatar Airways from the Bahamas, where Orman lives, takes about 28 hours and costs around $5,000. With such an expensive trip, it’s a good thing the airline’s coffee service is free!
Whether it’s Suze Orman, Larry Summers, Dave Ramsey, Jamie Dimon, or Gwyneth Paltrow (whose combined net worth is an underestimated $2.5 billion), Financial Literacy Month is the time when wealthy and obnoxious White people disconnected from reality give advice to everyone else.
Never mind the fact that White people built wealth through kidnapping and enslaving Black people, taking Native peoples’ lands, and committing genocides. Go ahead and ignore how employers steal millions of dollars in wages from workers, pay lower wages to Black and brown women, exploit immigrant and undocumented workers, and cut back on healthcare benefits while exposing workers to the deadly COVID-19 virus. And just because, today, White households hold seven times more wealth than Black households, the top 0.1 percent have more wealth than the entire U.S. Black population, and you have to inherit wealth to become a billionaire, doesn’t mean wealthy and obnoxious White people aren’t qualified to give advice about saving money by brewing coffee at home! After all, they’ve shown an exceptional willingness to save themselves money by paying you poverty wages and foreclosing on your home in exchange for the benefit of under employing you to commute to their home for brewing their coffee.
Let’s skip the advice about spending too much on coffee (if you’re a Millennial, maybe it’s avocado toast). We already know the best brew is prepared by a unionized worker and it rains every day in this economy. Instead, here’s the real list of money-saving tips from wealthy and obnoxious White people that everyone knows and no one asked for:
1. Nutrition guidelines are just that: guidelines! Save money by eating only one meal per day — or maybe go on a soup broth diet
2. Always pull on your bootstraps, even after we’ve taken your boots
3. Internalize your financial hardships as personal failings
4. Accept your credit score as an accurate and undisputed measure of your intrinsic worth
5. Open a credit card for your baby, because it’s never too soon to provide them a numeric representation of their intrinsic worth
6. Borrow as much money as you can, because we make our wealth off of your debt
7. Don’t unionize or even whisper about unionizing for better wages and working conditions. We really hate that!
8. Take advantage of banks’ generous 0.001% interest rates to build your savings. If you deposit $10 in a savings account, you’ll earn an extra $0.01. Count your pennies as your blessings!
9. Realize that money won’t bring you happiness; we know, because we’re miserable
10. Never say anything bad about capitalism; that is, if you even have to mention capitalism at all
