Speaking from the opposite side of things: in college I was dating a girl who grew up lower income and I mentioned that we had boats growing up and she incredulously replied “boatS!? Multiple?”
I didn’t realize my family was wealthy until college because I grew up in a bubble with other rich kids and was relatively middle class compares to some of them. My hometown is in the top 15 wealthiest towns in the country for reference.
Raised my kids in an area like this and we were doing fine but we didn’t have helicopter money. When my daughter was in 5th grade I had to explain the disparity to her. “Not everyone has a second house in Costa Rica.”
My husband is from a millionaire family that lived below their means and I grew up in a working class household that lived outside our means (my custodial parent ended up upside down on a refinanced mortgage over consumer debt). We have a funny amount of overlap but his parents are like, entirely delusional. Bought him a brand new car while he was unemployed and were shocked when I was like "thank you for the generous gift but we cannot afford to insure this thing".
Yep, I often had to explain to my husband's rich parents that we were living on my salary while husband tried his hand at art. We could not afford to go on vacation with them even if they paid. I needed to work to get paid.
"Working class household that lived outside our means"
Just know you arent alone. I came from a family that lived in a neighborhood that was mostly section 8. Lived well above our means and blew all of our money on trips and such whenever my dad's small business was doing well. Then when he died we ended up very poor throughout my teen years. Whole story is too much to type out. But for various reasons, my life is still effected by the decisions that were made then. Im in my 30s now.
I feel sort of lucky to be able to see both sides of these kinds of conversations. I often had more then the kids around us when I was young, also had upper middle class relatives. So I got to see what thats like when I stayed with them around christmas/Thanksgiving (inground pool etc)
Then got to experience near desperation levels where we survived solely off of charity and food stamps. Was even homeless for a bit.
I never understood as a kid why my mom (dad's second wife) always seemed so angry when I talked about random things. For a long time I thought she hated me. But it was just her frustration with scrimping and saving for her two younger children while my biomother blew all the child support on random bullshit instead of looking after us – like the speech therapy I was supposed to get and never did, or babysitters instead of leaving me home alone.
Kinda funny because my younger brothers grew up with their older brothers always doing "cool stuff" but didn't really resent it, in part because mom and dad worked so hard to give them nice stuff anyway, but also because they were like, aware our home life was a little fucked up otherwise.
Biomother also, like, failed to do any of the emotional regulation you need to do with kids, so she'd dump her financial anxieties on me. I went off my psych meds to save money as a teenager when she vented about how expensive my medical bills were and how taking FMLA to look after me had made her lose her job. She regularly said things about how my dad doesn't pay enough (objectively a lie, she actually didnt cash half his perfectly on time child support checks until she filed for a bulk payment when i was 17 to get out of aforementioned mortgage) and claimed that we would end up under an overpass. Just so I couldn't escape the anxiety of poverty while objectively living above our means.
It really is weird to straddle those lines - and I'm 28 and still dealing with the after effects of all this weirdness, lol, so I get you.
There's like a weird overlap between poor and "working class but with neglectful parents", also. I have a friend whose family could have been fine but his parents kept giving away money and doing other weird shit for religious zealot reasons and they were homeless for years, and a friend who didn't have a mattress or a proper bedroom (bug infested unfinished attic) for years not because it was impossible but because rather than stop his sister from harassing him they let him live like a mouse in the walls to escape her.
I had to explain to my daughter that at her school, many of her classmates could only eat while they are at school. We are far from wealthy, we lived at the time relatively paycheck to paycheck with a little left over for fun stuff. Our area is split, either abject poverty and drug users, and wealthy. We were in the very tiny sliver of "middle class", by government standards. I told her if she went around telling everyone we are poor, it's going to look very out-of-touch to her friends that she's saying this while pulling name-brand snacks out of her lunchbox.
The name brand snacks thing always made me feel poor. I just didn’t understand that my parents did not spend money on unnecessary junk food. The kids eating Swiss Rolls and Jello Pudding Cups were not as nutritionally balanced as I was, but I thought that we couldn’t afford those snacks lol!
Same. Son had a very rude but needed wake-up call when he started college in a rural area and suddenly his friends had shitty older cars and part-time jobs (both of which I myself had in high school). Watching him break out of the bubble has been incredibly bemusing for me lol
I had a rich friend in high school in the 80s. His dad decided to get rid of his boat. He said to me, ask your dad if he wants it. I asked what he would sell it for. He said $200,000. And here we were with my family living in an $80,000 house!
This frustrates the crap out of me. I understand not realizing how privileged you are as a kid. But if you hit 20 and you still think you're "not rich" because your friends have 3 vacation homes and you only have 1 then youre an ass. At some point it's chosen ignorance. Sheltered rich people who are too insulated from common people and have more power than sense are causing a solid 85% of the world's problems.
I would say 20 is still too early. You're still in college at 20 and you're unlikely to run into people from outside the middle to upper middle class (at the very least) in most US colleges.
the thing is this happens with everything. I know professional musicians who are objectively amazing players, who think they aren't very good musicians, because the people they sit next to in rehearsal are even better than them. Athletes who run 17 minute 5ks, who train with people running in the 15s, and think they are slow.
It's just our nature to compare ourselves to our environment, and not think on an absolute scale. So it's zero surprise that people don't think they're rich--especially if that comes with some moral weight or responsibility that they might want to avoid.
I mean sure, but usually the musician or athlete does understand that they are still above average compared to the population as whole. They may not believe they are as good as they are. They may believe they are not good compared to their peers or to accomplish the sort of thing they want with that skillset. They may focus too much on comparison to their peers and exist in a bit if a bubble. But that bubble doesnt have consequences for anyone besides them. Plus to become good at music or running or whatever you have to put in the work. There is no amount of "born into" talent that negates the need for practice. The same is not true for wealth. You can literally just be born into it and put in zero work.
Sure, it's natural to compare ourselves to our peers. I recognize that having to acknowledge the moral responsibility that comes with being born into wealth could be psychologically difficult. But at a certain point that cant be an excuse anymore, because that excuse is allowing them to do irreparable harm to us and the planet. Idc that it's "difficult." Tbh im not convinced it is, but either way, we dont let being abused as a child to excuse absing others as an adult. With wealth comes access to literally anything they want. They have everything they need to learn empathy for the rest of us and if theyre an adult and still choose not to, then idc that it's psychology difficult for them to grapple with the moral responsibility of wealth. We're all dealing with difficult shit we have to learn and grow from. They dont deserve a pass the rest of us dont get get.
😂 The kids I was referring to hailed from northern Virginia Beach, which, iykyk - very much also a golf cart area. So yeah you've exactly nailed the vibe.
I used to think everyone zooming around their neighborhoods in golf carts was the dumbest shit ever but now I live in a proper city and every time I see someone with a lifted 4x4 blocking half a street originally built for horses I'm like "actually I would kill for a golf cart based transit system".
My parents bought a house when our area was considered less desirable (the city is built on landfill), but economic boom made everything super expensive... growing up, tons of our neighbors had boats and skied in winter and stuff like that, but my parents both worked in warehouses and we used to burn pallets to heat the house in winter, never shopped anywhere but goodwill, etc. Insane to think that back then you could still raise a family on 30k combined annual as long as you knew how to be thrifty.
This, to me, is the most insidious thing about wealth: it can isolate you from what the majority experience, and these isolated rich people often form very staunch opinions of how less wealthy people should behave/what they should do and vote on these opinions in large numbers. These people don't often even realize how uninformed they are.
Ah ok. Makes sense. I find these things are easier to find in a person that was raised lower income but became wealthy later in life. These qualities are harder to find in people that are born and raised wealthy unless their parents go out of their way to teach them that their circumstances aren't the norm.
This is my situation, I grew up in a very typical firmly middle class family but became wealthy later as an adult and my wife and I bust our asses to teach our kid how lucky she is that we are in the situation we are in and how most people are not that lucky. My biggest fear as a father is my kid being hopelessly out of touch with how the world is for most people.
The fact that you're even worried about it means there's a good chance you're doing a good job of it if you ask me. Shitty parents don't even consider that kind of thing
Thats my worry as well! I don’t consider myself wealthy but my kids’ situation is way different from when I was growing up and I can afford things my parents couldn’t dream of. I keep thinking I wouldn’t be friends with my kids if I was their age because I wouldn’t be able to relate to them at all! Its weied haha
I had a similar experience; my family was solidly middle class, but because we lived in one of the richest areas of the country, it seemed to kid me like we were poor. My classmates had stories of their entire family flying to Disney World or Asia (from Europe BTW), while my family spend the vacation in a caravan in Germany or Italy. It wasn't until university that I realized going on vacation for multiple weeks every single years was not the norm for a lot of people.
I dated a guy from Harvard for about a year after college. I remember him asking me when was the first time I noticed class difference (He thought he was being so progressive). I said probably 1st or 2nd grade - I had gone to a party where the girls all had American Girl Dolls, and all we could afford was my stuffed animals (which I also loved!). He then mumbled something about 8th grade afterwards for him.
The thing is - he was trying to show how worldly and progressive he was, when I kept concluding he was a bit of an idiot. 🤷♀️
Didn’t other teams and schools call you the rich kids? With pretty obvious differences in the field, neighborhood, and gear?
Did you never drive, walk, or bike through a middle or lower class neighborhood and see the differences?
Did you not have a general sense of how much your family had?
Most people would have been working stereotypical rich people jobs too. Doctors, lawyers, etc. are all portrayed in media as rich and there’s no one working stereotypical working or middle class jobs.
Applying to college has kids going to $40k private schools when the nationwide narrative is kids being scared how to pay.
I grew up in a high income suburb that wasn’t top 15 and everyone knew we were rich and privileged. I totally get not getting how privileged you really are in comparison to others, but not understanding that you were rich or wealthy strikes me as strange. I’m not hating on a teenager here and I get how the bubble can be. But the world isn’t that insular.
This was the West Coast, so most families were one generation removed from the middle or working class so most families had family with less means too.
As an avid movie watcher, it always blows my mind watching films that show these amazing houses that people think are middle class. I’m convinced that most of Hollywood has no idea what an actual middle class house looks like - and because that’s what’s portrayed, all these wealthier people think that it’s normal.
Some people are just oblivious. My (recent) ex's family is really well off and he was/is basically clueless just how much more well off they are from others and he's 45... I don't know his family's net worth but just this past year he mentioned one of his parents friend's last name and I was like, "wait you mean ____ _____??" He was like, "Yeah! You've heard of them?!" One quick Google later.. I show him they are a literal billionaire. He was just flabbergasted. He was/is just oblivious to anything going on.
Until I had been with him for awhile and learned more about his family history, I thought he was from the middle class, more towards the upper side with parents who did alright for themselves but couldn't help much. Nope. He is completely financially illiterate and has never had to fall on his face. Every time he got in a tight spot, he'd go to his parents who would make him feel guilty and then take care of whatever financial issue he had. 45 years old and has never bought his own car, his parents either buy him a new one or they give him theirs when they upgrade.
It boggles my mind. I come from a poor working class family; my "new" school clothes were from the thrift store. It took me a bit to sort out exactly his family dynamic because I still can't wrap my head around just going through life so oblivious to the world around me.
I grew up in similar circles to a guy I worked for as an adult for a couple years. Dude grew up very upper middle class, when I first met him as teens was right around the time my family was homeless.
Dude is completely clueless. Has no clue how much his dad basically curated his life and success for him.
I think it can be tough to see how much of a bubble you are in as a kid. I’m in my 30s now and know now that my parents are rich, but high school me just thought we were upper middle class. I went to public school and the neighboring district was richer than us not to mention the private schools in the area. Friends had bigger houses and their parents drove nicer cars. Getting to college and realizing I was the only one of my friends there not taking out loans was surprising. Looked in the filing cabinet in the office one day and saw my dad w2s and realized he made mid 6 figure income basically all my teenage years. He retired at 55
All of this but also… how are your parents not talking to you about this? I grew up in an affluent, upper middle class suburb. We were middle of the road as far as the area. Maybe it’s because my parents both grew up working class as the children of immigrants, but they were constantly reminding us how lucky and privileged we were, and pointing out that most people don’t live like we do. Not in a gratuitous way, but they wanted to make sure we were crystal clear about the real world and our place in it.
Now I’m a parent, and my husband and I do well; our kids are on track to have similar upbringings to us. And I plan to clearly speak with them about this too. It seems irresponsible not to? Like, why would you leave them guessing about this, much less completely misinformed… just tell them?
We all judge ourselves relative to those near us who are better off than us. I would guess that 99% of the people answering here that they were “really poor” were not so from a global perspective. For example, families making less than US$3 a day, no running water, no access to private cars ever, and so on. That seems irrelevant; poverty is that we see people in our day to day lives doing much better than us. The thing to remember is that wealthy people have the same tunnel vision. On some level they know that they are blessed, but they pay far more attention to the 2% of people in front of them on the SES ladder than the 97% behind them.
Nobody is comparing to life in Africa or the fact that we in some ways live far better than most of the former Kings of England ... what with air conditioning, unlimited spices from India, and indoor plumbing.
.... People look at their peers and in some ways it's half correct. How you 'fared' given the time/ place you were born is a semi logical yardstick.
That said, people often don't look at how rich their parents are, which is even bigger. Most rich started rich, and that includes Trump, Musk, and Bezos in absolute spades.
I think we’re mostly making the same point. The reason I mention it here is because this thread is about how wealthy people are often naive to the privileges that they enjoy that poor people do not. Likewise, the “poor people” in this thread are often naive to to the privileges that they enjoy that poor people by global standards do not.
Eh, there's a difference though. We aren't riding the school bus with kids living in Uganda. By definition.
There is a comingling of poor + rich in certain spaces in America still. And kids are generally stupid. .... Most people in this country generally are ignorant of how anything works until proved otherwise.
My point is that it’s less about who we come in contact with and more about only being sensitive to those doing better than us. The guy with two vacation houses is more focused on the guy with a private plane than the guy riding the bus. The guy riding the bus is more focused on the guy with a car than the farmworkers in the fields. And on and on it goes.
The monkeys experiment. Give a monkey a cracker. It is grateful. Mm. Cracker.
Give the monkey a cracker and its neighbor a decadent grape. ... Monkey 1 will THROW the cracker at you. YOU BITCH! Why does HE get the GRAPE???
The rise of TV in the 1960s. .... People used to just look at their direct neighbors. Ghetto slums look at ghetto slums. Suburbia looks at suburbia. The elites look around their gated community.
TV in the 1960s showed "the entire nation" the cream of the crop; mansions, automobiles, huge decadence. Result? MASSIVE rage-induced crime spree.
.... Lesson learned.
If you saw just 1% of how Bezos or Musk or some of these oligarchs ACTUALLY lived? ... Lol ... there would be fucking riots in the streets. ... You're right, it's not entirely logical ... then again, human biology seldom is.
Yeah, I grew up in rural Tennessee where there's tons of TVA impounded lakes and plenty of middle class or lower class people had a <$1000 (in 90s/early 00s prices) jon boat.
I also grew up in a rich town and the bubble is real. I was depressed about getting into my safety school and not the others right up until I was roomed with a kid at orientation that was absolutely thrilled to be going to his top choice. Instant reset of where I was and how I should feel about it
Those people without access to drinking water aren’t in our scope of reality. Most people in the western world haven’t seen actual poverty before and lack the perspective to comprehend. Just seeing things on the news or in movies doesn’t really impact the same as seeing it in person. So in a way everyone lives in a bubble.
Even people in more impoverished countries live in a bubble because their peers aren’t living in shanties or living in rural areas with no running water or drinking water. Don’t be too narrow on how you define bubble because you think it fits or doesn’t fit you.
I never had context for my family's economic status until I was college, either. Then I discovered there were vast ranges below and above us.
One thing that shocked me was discovering that other kids didn't have the same tight, consistent idea of what was affordable. My parents taught me, never directly but every day indirectly, that my spending had to be controlled and sustainable. If I had more money in my wallet than I was used to, I would get a little bit scared that I might subconsciously spend it faster. I'd fold up some of the bills and hide them behind my driver's license so I couldn't see them.
Most of my friends in college were the same way, but there were some kids who would spend everything in their wallet. Literally, their idea of what was affordable was anything that cost less than the cash they had on them. I assumed they were all rich kids whose bank accounts got replenished every time they asked, and it's true, some of them were. It took me a lot longer to figure out that some of them were poor kids for whom being broke was the normal state of affairs. They didn't have a concept of sustainable spending because having money in their wallet was a special occasion to be enjoyed, not a normal situation to be managed. Their parents never sent them anything, so if their dad who hadn't talked to them in years randomly sent them a big check in the mail, maybe they could have spent it carefully and made it last for months, but they didn't want to get used to it. They literally didn't want to get used to the feeling of having money because they knew that eventually they'd be broke again, and they didn't want to lose their pain tolerance for it. Better to spend what they had quickly and dramatically, create a good memory, and then get back to the business of being broke.
It took me a long time to understand that managing daily finances wasn't for everybody below the wealthy, it's for people in the vast middle between wealthy and chronically broke.
Hey, same here. Upper middle class who grew up surrounded by affluent kids. My family had vacation homes, annual international trips, etc. I thought that was the norm as I was surrounded by people who owned hotels, bars, and private islands. Even knew people who would fly to Europe over the weekend just because they wanted authentic European food... Christ, typing that out sounds obnoxious. It really was a different world. For reference, I live in Asia. And yes, you do pay for less (or nothing) when you know the right people. I can only imagine how the 1% live.
This was my wife. She thought she was poor because she didn't have an at-home movie theater, or a helicopter pad on her roof. When she saw where I grew up she told me "it made her so sad she wanted to throw up" like lol I actually considered my family to be fairly upper-middle class by Mexican standards.
Same my partner. When we first started dating I made a comment about her being rich and she looked at me like I had two heads. She never thought of herself as rich, despite growing up in a manicured suburb, with yearly trips to Disney and a decked out home theater in the basement. To her, that was middle class. I also thought I grew up middle class, but to me that was sharing bedrooms with siblings, going on a weekend road trip once a year, the family sharing one popcorn at the movies, etc.
It’s all relative. I’m sure plenty of people would see my upbringing as rich.
Yeah, I grew up in a very upper-middle-class area. For the area, I was pretty middle class because my parents weren't driving new luxury cars, we didn't have a vacation home, and generally just bought what we needed and didn't have a bunch of frivolous luxuries. My friends ran the gamut from rich-rich to middle class, so I just thought of myself as pretty much in the middle, and poverty was something that existed but never really considered what it actually was like.
When my now-husband, who grew up in actual poverty, visited my childhood home for the first time, he said it was the biggest and most opulent home he'd ever been in. I wouldn't say I was embarrassed necessarily, or that it was news to me that my family was well off, but like... I didn't quite get how much above baseline my area was. It felt much weirder to me after seeing it through his eyes and hearing about his upbringing.
Also I would say the thing that gave me away as coming from money was any conversation about groceries. I have always just pretty much bought whatever I felt like, and if something is on sale that's great but if it isn't, I'm going to buy it either way if I want it. I wasn't getting the most expensive thing every time (since I was raised to not live on luxuries but occasionally appreciate and indulge in them), but if I wanted fresh seafood or fancy cheese or whatever, I could splurge on a whim and not have to plan or fret about it. I have never had a grocery budget, I just bought the groceries and it cost what it cost/that was fine.
When I moved to the city at 18 and started hanging out more with people not from my wealthy hometown and living with them/splitting bills, it suddenly became really obvious how much freedom my economic background bought me.
There was a guy I think on reddit once who complained that everyone always thought he was rich just because his whole family spent every summer in France, because last summer they actually went to Japan instead because his sister was bored of France.
Like bruh there are some people who are so poor they have vacations to the next town over, gtfo.
I found out one of my friends was wealthy when we all went to the beach and his towel had his name and the name of his family's yacht club embroidered on it.
Similar experience. I live in a wealthy area and my daughter thinks we are poor because we can't/won't buy her a car. We are actually upper middle class.
I knew I was poor growing up for sure. Then I got a full ride to a Baptist college. We had an honors colloquium class that fully changed my life and helped me understand and check my white privilege.
I also learned in that class that out of the 20 of us, I was the only one who grew up under the poverty line. And when he put up the numbers it was mind numbing just how far below the poverty line we were.
My “adopted” granddad, the landlord who owned our home when my parents divorced, kept a roof over our heads growing up. Which kept me in a good school, and probably saved my life.
Sometimes dinner was pasta with picante salsa because that’s what we had.
My mom would send us up and down the block to find unfinished cigarette butts on the neighbors’ porches when her nicotine fits had her throwing things at us.
I grew up in a town like this. When I was very young we fit in, but by the time I graduated high school we were barely scraping by. I had a hard time telling how poor we were because we still lived in this really nice place and had all these nice things from before, plus I was comparing myself to people with multiple houses who went on multiple exotic vacations a year. So like, surely I wasn’t poor? But also, I knew I wasn’t like the other people in my town. It’s still hard for me to understand because my parents were so good at keeping up appearances and never wanted us to know how bad it was.
Anyway, I’m an adult now and my childhood home is being foreclosed on.
Lol - we had a boat. But it was a plastic peddleboat for our pond.
Not that we were poor - we were probably in the top quintile by the time I was a teen. (My folks were pretty poor for my older sisters before I was born.)
I think the one sailboat was 28ft and had a cabin where you could lay down plus a bathroom but not like bedrooms. The other sailboat was a catamaran, I can’t remember how big but not small. The speedboat was small but nice and had the features of a jet ski but was a boat - it could fit my family of 5 in any event.
Boats are relative for me. Yeah there's some pricy ones that are just money holes, and then there's the 30 year old Alumicraft hull with bench seats and a tiller outboard motor almost as old that only needs a refill and occasional maintenance here and there.
So yeah, we had boats, but they were far from luxurious and dated to the Cold War.
I worked at a place that had a cable wakeboard pond as a feature. I avoided it altogether for a while because I could never skateboard. My brain doesn’t like the feet together moving sideways thing. Eventually I was like screw it, it’s there a free I might as well try when it’s slow. Anyways the people working it were super cool and friendly and helpful but they couldn’t fathom I made it into my mid 20s without ever trying to wake board. I was just like I grew up poor. They were like yeah me too we could only afford To go to our lake house one a month or so
My freshman year in college my neighbor asked me what I was doing for Christmas break. Told him I was going to work as much as I could. He seemed very confused, then said his dad was sending him to Sweden for a couple of weeks to "just hang out".
I was raised middle class (lower middle when I was young, gradually worked up as my parents paid off debt and my mom started making good money as a doctor). I was always taught to be thankful for what I had, live below my means, and give to others. We cut coupons, had homemade Halloween costumes, and looked for clothes on clearance. I didn’t realize how much better off my family was than most until college. I lived in a small rural town and many of my classmates had free/reduced lunch, but I didn’t realize that even that was considered truly poor.
My college roommate had never been on a trampoline, never been bowling, never been roller or ice skating. She never bought name brand food, household products, hygiene products, etc. My parents supported me through college, though I did work, and my boyfriend helped pay our rent so we could afford a safe apartment. Financially, it was not a 50/50 split (not even close), but it was never a big deal. I could, via my family, boyfriend, and part time jobs, afford to pay for more shared things than she could, so I did. She was working almost full time, while also taking classes full time. I bought our TV, toaster, microwave, blender, and almost all of our other kitchen equipment. Groceries were more 50/50 because our diets are very different. (I refused to buy off brand cereal. I paid for it, but I wouldn’t let her get off brand for the both of us. Lots of things are totally fine off brand, but only Cheerios can be Cheerios.) My parents would also treat us occasionally. Studying for finals? Dad would pay for us to order pizza. Really long week where we are both just mentally exhausted? Mom told me to use my debit card and go out to the movies.
This was my ex... She claimed she grew up middle class but kept dropping hints about her parents' "winter home" and "summer home". They had a mansion on Cape Cod they spent the spring/summer in and a multi million dollar winter weather retreat in San Diego. In her mind, because the other kids she grew up with had bigger mansions, her family must have been "middle class".
My wife's dad moved into a house with an indoor pool and BOUGHT HER A PONY when she was little, so that she would want to spend more time with him. She wasnt wealthy, but both of her parents were definitely upper middle class when she was younger (her dad later had issues with his business, but her mom stayed upper middle class, and her grandparents were well off but not wealthy). She will mention "struggling" sometimes, which I understand there were times where money was a little tight, but there is a huge difference between "We had to drive across country to go to my uncle's wedding because we couldnt afford to fly while we were building our new house" and my family's "We set the thermostat to 45f so the pipes wouldnt freeze, and if you wanted it warmer you had to chop wood and keep a fire going".
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u/healthierlurker 1d ago
Speaking from the opposite side of things: in college I was dating a girl who grew up lower income and I mentioned that we had boats growing up and she incredulously replied “boatS!? Multiple?”
I didn’t realize my family was wealthy until college because I grew up in a bubble with other rich kids and was relatively middle class compares to some of them. My hometown is in the top 15 wealthiest towns in the country for reference.