i am beginning to wonder if this is a new phenomonen? rather than keeping up the with neighbours, the wealthier neighbours are dropping the levels of expenses?
was thinking about that today as i was doing the ironing. i live next door to a doctor and his wife who works parttime. they are not short of a quid - him being a doctor - and have recently come back from taking their 3 teens to italy for a month. the kids are all in private schooling etc etc.
anyhow - as a stay at home-er, who will do anything rather than "go out" to work, i do most of the chores around home including the mowing and edges.
i noticed this week that the neighbours has dispensed with their mowing guy and now are mowing their own. the wife also told me she is having a clothesline installed - everything used to go thru the drier but i hang everything out. there are a few other things, like we've been renovating extensively and the neighbour was out fixing his own deck last weekend - i didn't know he owned a hammer!
is this the new trend - keeping down with the jones' rather than up?
Not especially.
It is a well know (anecdotal) fact that doctors are among the worst in our society for bad financial positions.
The pattern seems to be that they earn plenty, but are very good at spending it on "fluff".
And of course; there is no guarantee that we'll never see a downturn in our situation, so maybe they are doing just that, and are now having to do the normal things that people do.
The other day, we fitted two new tyres to one of my wife's colleagues - an orthopedic surgeon. Now, money is not much of a problem in this case, but read on and you'll see what I mean...
The two tyres for his car (a Mazda RX8) were...wait for it...$628 EACH.
I offered to try and source a similar tyre for a lot less (which was easily possible - around $350 would have done him nicely), but he was happy to go with the expensive ones.
I can here some of you say; 'well, he can afford it, so good luck to him" and so on.
This might be true, but as I've seen in many cases, when people of this income level (and he is not ultra-high income; only high income) and with these spending habits come upon tough times, then you'll see the more noticeable down-turn in their lifestyle.
In contrast, when was the last time you saw someone "scaling down" on fluff when their life/income is flying along?
I've never seen it.