Ghost busters don’t come cheap
The super-wealthy can splash their cash on whatever they choose. Singer Lady Gaga spent $50,000 (£30,514) on a ghost detector machine and wore a $100,000 (£61,500) meat dress to the Grammy awards. Fellow pop icon Beyoncé (left) spent the same on a pair of Balenciaga gold leggings for another awards ceremony. Actress Kim Basinger bought the town of Braselton in Georgia for $20m (£12m) to turn it into a film studio destination, but it never took off and she had to sell up. Microsoft guru Paul Allen bought his local baseball team, the Portland Trail Blazers, for $70m (£43m). After forgetting his hat, U2 frontman Bono paid $1,700 (£1,045) to fly it first class from London to Italy. HNWIs can be devoted fans, too – a Julian Timberlake devotee bought his idol’s partially eaten French toast for $1,800 (£1,100), while Britney Spears’ used pregnancy test was sold on eBay for $5,001 (£3,076).
Everything to play for
Katie Small, founder of bespoke insurer Mercury West Associates, runs classes in personal finance for football players. The lessons began as a pro-bono initiative, but her good work has won her an endorsement from the Professional Footballers’ Association. She says: “Young people rarely understand insurance, so we teach them how to get good value and not to do the wrong thing.” The upside? Small gets to talk to two to three dozen young men at each club who are sorely in need of her products. With wage packets stretching from £10,000 to £240,000 a week, footballers are the ultimate honeypot. Factor in the 92 professional league teams, plus their managing staff, reserves, wives and relatives, and the customer base adds up to around 10,000 HNWIs not known for their frugality. As Blackburn Rovers’ El Hadji Diouf’s taste in cars (right) so perfectly demonstrates.
to magazine
