Quiet Distress Among the (Ex) Rich

[marmar]

Quiet Distress Among the (Ex) Rich

Thursday, 18 December 2014 09:27
By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | News Analysis


While the wealthy don’t get much sympathy on this website, the restructuring of the economy to save the banks at the expense of pretty much everyone else has hurt some former members of the top 1% and even the 0.1%. And it’s also worth mentioning that some of the former members of the top echelon occupied it when the distance between the rich and everyone else was much narrower than it is now.

The fact that economic distress has moved pretty high up the food chain is a sign that this recovery isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Even though the media is awash in stories of how much stronger the economy is getting, I see all sorts of counter-indicators locally: more restaurant and retail store closures than during or at any point after the crisis (and pretty long store vacancies), reports from my hair salon that business is not all that great, and my gym offering hefty discounts on renewals for the first time. Perhaps NYC is in a mini-downdraft, but that would be the reverse of the pattern in recent years, where thanks to the tender ministrations of the Fed and Treasury, the city has weathered the downturn better than most of the US.

A cohort that is in quiet distress is women who were divorced 15 or more years ago. Conventional wisdom is that London is a great city for woman to go through divorce, and New York is a lousy one. I have no basis for validating that statement. But regardless, the assumptions in handing out settlements back then, that the ex wife would be able to earn a decent return on her investments and land at least an adequately paid job when she was done receiving alimony, are out the window now. So women who thought they’d gotten enough to be able to raise their kids and live comfortably, or at least adequately, are now scrambling in their mid 50s to mid 60s to figure out how to survive, when reinventing yourself at that age is an against-the-odds proposition.

Here’s a story from someone I’ve known for the past three or so years (details disguised). We’ll call her Karen. She is from a wealthy family, sent to private school in Europe, attended an Ivy League college in the mid 1970s and got a graduate degree in math from one of the top programs in America. She married someone also from a wealthy family who is now a billionaire. Karen wound up inheriting almost nothing because the very successful manufacturing business that her grandfather built was run into the ground by her father. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28079-quiet-distress-among-the-ex-rich

[Skittles]

1. ".....enjoy some small luxuries, like going to London once a year"

sorry, cannot relate.....not at all

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. Maybe reinventing yourself is easier when you begin as someone. n/t

[Warpy]

3. I do sympathize, although all the stay at home mothers I know

who were dumped in favor of a younger model or who left marriages that stifled them completely are finding themselves in horrible straits, even if they are still relatively young, in their late 30s and 40s. The world seems to think that their brains came out when the babies did and that they remember absolutely nothing from their prior education, even postgraduate education, even when they took only three to five years or so off.

The problem is rabid sexism compounded by ageism compounded by corporate stupidity.

Staying at home and out of the workforce to raise children is one hell of a gamble. A lot of women lose, bigtime, which is what happened to the woman in the article.