It's a status thing. You never know if someone is an astute money manager or is just very good a juggling credit. Look at the vendors who pose in Lamborghinis. I look at who is flying at the front of the plane. The guys who spend their own money to upgrade to first class are probably well off. The guys who are flying private jets are rich.
Not in the CA's Bay Area it's not... i read somewhere that to be considered middle class in the Bay Area you need to make $220K a year.
That's not a 65-year old. And second that woman could have a thing for big men. So doesn't necessarily mean he's rich.
Ha! This reminds me of a conversation at the hedge fund I used to work at. We had a new secretary, who was clearly bored one day as she asked everyone on the desk what sort of car they had. She even had a spreadsheet drawn up with columns for Porsche, Lamborghini, Mercedes and so on. Well the young guys didn't have cars as they lived in London and didn't need them. The older guys with families like me all had boring non fancy estate cars (what americans would call station wagons) or SUVs that were several years old. The CEO had the nicest car, but even that was a 10 year BMW 3 series that had never been cleaned. She said something like "I thought you were rich! Why do you all drive such shitty cars?". I can't remember if anyone said so at the time, but the truth was that one of the reasons why we were rich is because we drove such "shitty" cars. GAT (currently two cars, combined age 16 years, combined value probably less than $8K)
As an IT contractor the advice was never to drive an expensive car (eg Porsche) to the client offices. The chances are you wont get a contract extension as permanent staff wont be very happy. A neighbour once mortgaged his house and bought a second hand roller for 50K about 20 years ago. He worked in a factory of all places, not much more than minimum wage, but was asset rich from property, and he drove it to work everyday. The next round of redundancies at the factory, he was the first person that management let go. Nowadays car leases are common and with low interest rates its not hard to put an expensive car on the driveway.
very difficult to recognise a rich person in today's world. Plenty of new money and different cultures. Some like to spray them, some don't. Some will wear expensive watches and clothes, some won't. Some are very well educated, others are not. Some will flaunt it, others will hide it.