Reply to What percentage of the population do you think has a trust fund?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Probably about 1%. Think about it though, if 1% is “rich” I’m this country, but you live in an area where almost everyone is a 1%er, I will feel like everyone is a 1%er. So, it’s possible that everyone you sister knows does have a trust fund. [/quote]

This. Particularly if you travel in certain professional circles in DC, there are a lot of people with under-the-radar family wealth. As someone mentioned upthread, most trust funds "only" have a few hundred thousand in them. That's not the kind of money that exempts you from working. So there's probably a ton of people in DC who have a trust fund or similar but still work in Big Law and consulting because they can't live off the trust. They can, however, use the trust to buy a home or put down a sizable downpayment, make investments, and other things.

It took me about a decade of living and working in DC to figure out that the reason I couldn't keep up with the spending habits of so many colleagues or friends from grad school is because, unlike me, they were not living/saving from their salary alone. It's embarrassing to say that, and of course I knew some people had family money, but for so long I just thought everyone was financing these fancy vacations and massive bar tabs on credit cards and was secretly judgmental. Turns out they could afford trips, clothes, and socializing that I could not because their family's funded their housing (and often also their vacations and wardrobes) even into their 30s. It was actually a relief when I realized it because I had previously thought that I was just missing some obvious way to stretch my income, like some investment strategy that magically netted a spare 50k a year or something. Nope.[/quote]

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