More Money Than Sense?
CoreData has recently been researching the investment, savings and discretionary spending habits of Australia’s rich – and it seems most, if not all, have something they can’t resist spending money on.
Some of things are surprisingly dull, ranging from a new Holden Calais every year, to an annual overseas trip to the guilty admission of beach front properties in Thailand and small, old houses on the banks of Italy’s fabled lake Como.
But then there are the down right odd purchases and each came with their own particular logic.
One of the people that we interviewed paid just less than $200,000 for a restored 1950’s American racing yacht and forks out almost half a million dollars a year to race it around the planet, because as he put it, he “needed something to do”.
“I’m retired, I’m not dead and it’s a great focus, it’s outside and we race in beautiful places, the wives come and sometimes we win, I’m going to do it as long as my body lets me,” he said.
Another had 11 Packard Cars – perfectly restored and housed in their own climate controlled garage in the house next door. In fact he revealed later that he had bought the house next door, bulldozed it and built the garage especially to house the cars.
Intrigued by this automobile passion, we asked him if he liked restoring the cars he said:
“No I hate working on them, I like driving them, I like showing them at car shows and I like talking about them.”
But it seems there are areas where the economics of rewards simply don’t come into it – a cursory glance of the website www.bornrich.org reveals that there is no link between wealth and common sense.
In the past month a number of incredible and incredibly pointless items have leapt onto the market and have been snapped up, by people some may say with more money than sense.
The first is Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome’s new time piece – called the day and night and featuring a tourbillion movement first perfected by the French in 1795 and costing $300,000.
$300,000 for a watch! The price of an investment property for a watch. You can’t live in it, you can’t drive it and it delivers no yield – yet it was sold in less than two days.
But that’s not all. It is now possible to buy (for a mere $2,000 extra) a gold plated iphone from www.goldstriker.co.uk, in case the iphone itself isn’t grand enough and if that’s not enough for ten times that amount – you can buy one studded with diamonds.
And as if you needed further proof, that money, taste and discretion are not aligned characteristics – goldstriker are also selling a coffee machine completely covered in Swarovski crystals for $5,000. And it’s not even a great coffee machine it’s a Nestle Nespresso machine, which at best produces a passable brew.
One Comment on “More Money Than Sense?”
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duff says:
I find that in this day and age that are people stil on the breadline in the land of plenty. Who cant get enough to live on. This is at 6 Victoria Street, Michell , Queensland . They have to have food parcels from the Old Country to survive