Learning to play the hand we are dealt

Illustration by Gary Clement for The National

Last week I was aboard the Nirvana - the world's most expensive superyacht for sale (not to be confused with: the world's most expensive superyacht) - at the Dubai International Boat Show.
I was being shown around by the man tasked with the sale.
The price tag: more than US$300 million, on top of which you'd need to factor in 10 per cent of that for annual upkeep I'm told.
I asked what type of person would most likely own a boat like the Nirvana, and whether old or new money tended to attract this sort of oversized trinket - or as someone key in the industry put it: the most expensive thing you'll ever buy that you don't need.
A picture was painted - this would be a 35 to 55-year-old male, dynamic entrepreneur most likely very hands-on with his businesses. He'd be using second generation wealth that he's built on, and this person would have a lot of money - billions. After all, only 10 per cent of net wealth should ever be spent on the likes of yachts.
This got me thinking. How socially mobile are we? How realistic is it for people born without a silver spoon in their mouths to end up having the keys to the owner's deck - the Nirvana has a whole floor set aside as a private area for this lucky person.
My guess is that we're more likely to lose money than to make it.
Here are some figures I dug out to give us a feel for what's going on in the world around us.
. There were more than 100,000 individual insolvencies across England and Wales last year, according to government figures.
. Belgium suffered its worst-ever year of corporate bankruptcies in 2013, with an 11.3 per cent increase in companies going under compared with the year before, according to the credit information provider Graydon. The vast majority of these were small businesses that went bust, with another increase due this year.
. In the United States, more than 1.3 million people filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
Contrast this with the following report, released in September, that found nearly 10,000 people in Europe and North America joined the world's ultra-wealthy club - meaning they have at least $30m in net assets. (The number of their counterparts in China and Brazil fell, by the way).
Granted, I don't have figures for how many people now believe they are "wealthy" - however they choose to measure or define that. But the numbers do give us an indication of the haves vs the have-nots, and the trend is there to see.
This is also backed up by research carried out by Professor Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis. He concludes that if you look at multiple generations, social mobility is lower than presumed in most nations. In other words, we stay stuck where we start out. His second conclusion is that there is less difference between nations than usually thought.
What's my point? It is that we are led to believe that, work hard enough, be in the country of opportunity, and you too can "make it". We are fed stories of start-ups that sell for tens or hundreds of millions, and poster boys for success like Mark Zuckerberg - but chances are none of us will ever be in that boat. In fact, I'd say that most of us would be happy simply not having to worry about where next year's rent money or school fees are going to come from.
Unfortunately, most lives are more like a financial groundhog day.
People's inability to see a way out of this predicament is why the World Economic Forum cited the worsening wealth gap as the biggest risk facing the world this year. This according to its annual global risks report.
As we have seen, social disenfranchisement leads to social upheaval.
So, yes, it turns out that people have been socially immobile in countries like the US for generations. But despair not, you can better your lot, I believe, by taking responsibility for how you deal with the money that you handle in your daily life.
The promise of upwards social mobility wins politicians votes. But they're out before much-needed long-term change to education systems, for example, can really kick in and give us all a better chance in life. So instead of being at the receiving end of others' agendas, let's start to look after the pennies, or dirhams, and make our own way in life - and sail smoothly, if slowly, towards your own Nirvana.
Nima Abu Wardeh is the founder of the personal finance website cashy.me. You can reach her at [e-mail]
Follow us on Twitter @TheNationalPF