Seven Secrets the Super Rich Won’t Tell You

Of course, the Super Rich have secrets! If you and I have our own hidden items in our closets and we are not even tagged within our group for whatever wealth we own, what  more with the super rich ? Let’s consider their wealth range that some wealth analysts set at $175 Million up.

If you own right now just a comparably obscure amount of $500,000 in total wealth, and tomorrow, you win a super lotto jackpot of $100 Million, and the week after another $100 Million to qualify you to belong to this group, would you announce your winnings to the world? Wouldn’t you keep that a secret?

If you accumulated $200 Million over a period of time by whatever means or reason, would you tell everybody how you did it?

If you own right now $1 Billion in total wealth, and in the next breath, this amount levels down to $200 Million for whatever reason, economic or otherwise, will you tell everybody how you lost your hundreds of millions?

Our instinct and human nature will tell us to keep these secrets to ourselves. Whether it is a trade strategy or a formula or a behavior lapse or an immoral source or a decision point that went sour or a series of real honest-to-goodness investment transactions, there will be secrets that the Super Rich will not be too willing to share to others. Researches on the lifestyle of the super rich lead to more than a dozen areas where vital information is blocked, or suppressed, and guarded heavily and very closely to their chests. What might these information be?

Here are the top seven (7) secrets the Super Rich will not share with you:

1. Their true identities. This is perhaps the number one
    

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   information that the Super Rich will keep to themselves as a matter of personal security and that of their families. While their identities may be known from reports or published documents, as in the Top Listing,  these are sourced from information that are submitted as a matter of civil compliance. Call it self-preservation, but being a super rich poses a serious security problem, so they will rather not be known or they will maintain a heavy cordon around them.

2. Their true net worth. Who was the analyst who estimated that the Super Rich report only 50%-60% of their true worth?
3. That they inherited and are not really responsible for their wealth. Most of the Super Rich are super rich by circumstances. They did not work for it. It is said that the wealth of the Super Rich came from four sources: inheritance, marriage, crime and honest work. A small minority of them got theirs through honest work.
4. They are selling their properties. The world economic crisis has borne heavily on the Super Rich, and they are unloading many properties to salvage whatever value might remain. And they do not know which assets to retain or to lose out.
5. They are worried to the bone, fearing loss of wealth, even loss of home or self-esteem. It is said that, in a very serious economic crisis such as this one that encompasses the whole breadth of economic class, the richer one is more vulnerable to despair than the poorer one. Which probably explains the suicide cases of the Madoff client, the German billionaire, the real estate power broker and the Silicon Valley investment manager.
6. That while they make a bone out of their philanthropy, the Super Rich are not really that generous to the poor. A study of donations in one particular super rich country shows that 82% of donations came from those segments of the population earning less than $60,000 per year.
7. They are not happy. Psychologists will tell us that money can make one happy only up to a certain extent. Beyond that, money can’t buy more happiness. How can one find happiness in a double life, devoid of  authenticities,  pressured to keep up for status’ sake, and where  challenge to one’s self-actualization is virtually nil?

There are more secrets the Super Rich won’t tell you. And they won’t tell you because that will mean more threat to their personal safety, a scraping of their self-respect and a demolition of their programmed image. What does this listing of the seven secrets aim to achieve? To create a bridge of compassion. The Super Rich are human beings. They long for happiness, which unfortunately can come only from authentic relationships. They need to be understood.