There was a time when rich people were pretty easy to spot. Everything about them, from their clothing to their leisure activities, was more or less designed to exclude the rubes. If you couldn’t afford a valet to dress you, you couldn’t wear rich-people clothes. If your skills tended towards the practical and remunerative instead of the genteel and artful, you’d never fit in at a society ball or private club.
But things have changed in recent decades, and the signs of wealth have become harder to detect. This is due in part to the rise of the Influencer, the person on social media who curates their life in photos, reels, and emojis to convey an image of wealth and luxury—even though most of them are broke and just faking it, usually so they can sell you something.
Credit cards allow people to do “rich people things” even if they’re barely scraping by, after all, and the days when rich folks dressed and acted differently are long gone. In a world where everyone is wearing jeans and T-shirts, and where a generous credit limit will allow you to live the high life (for a while, at least), how can you tell fake rich from real rich?
Rich people don’t flash their wealth for one simple reason: They don’t think about it. An actually wealthy person rarely flashes their money. They don’t make a big deal about paying for things, or pose for photos holding stacks of cash or sitting in a private jet—in the same way you don’t post photos of you sitting in your Honda Civic or shopping for groceries. Money is just the air they breathe, and there’s no reason to think so hard about it. If they do think about money, it’s often in terms of a reluctance to let people know how much money they have, and the steps they can take to hide it.
We all know the old adage that “time is money” is actually the inverse—money is time. When you pay someone else to clean your house, you get back an hour of your day that you can then use in any way you choose. Truly wealthy people have more time, and this translates into knowledge in terms of skill sets and life experience. They know how to ski or ride a horse (or play polo); they know the protocols of private jets; they’re familiar with foreign cities in a way that goes beyond tourism. They might not be bragging about how rich they are, but their breadth of knowledge about the world tells you they haven’t had to devote 40-plus hours every week to paying the rent.
One reason so-called influencers love to flash brands? Because they’re being paid to—or want to be paid to. Fashion and luxury brands exist to advertise to the world that you have the money to pay for them, and that’s the last thing really rich folks need or want to do. The real rich do dress in luxury brands—they’re just luxury brands that you don’t hear about often, and don’t scream "wealth" unless you look closely. Truly wealthy people also wear tailored, bespoke clothing that has no brand label at all. If someone is dressed in high-quality clothes that fit perfectly but have no logo, you’re likely looking at an actually rich person.
As a wise woman once said, “It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?” Even if you’re relatively well off, you still know, generally, how much stuff costs because you’re still interacting directly with money. You buy your own gas, shop for your own groceries, and pay your own bills. You might not think twice about buying a new car, but you know how much it cost.
But the truly wealthy are disconnected from money to the point where everything seems free, because they often don’t directly pay for anything—and if they do, they don’t worry about the price of things. Paying for specific things or experiences just doesn’t really impact their day-to-day existence, which is why they can be stymied by questions like “How much does a gallon of milk cost?”
It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but often a surefire sign that someone is real rich is a lack of luggage. Regular people travel with multiple bags of stuff because we only have one of everything and need to bring it with us wherever we go. But the real rich can hop on a plane and just buy or rent whatever they need when they get to their destination, so they can head off on a lengthy trip with a carry-on and their phone.
