Wealth & Money Quote by Charles A. Jaffe

We tend to treat "rich" as a scoreboard number, a clean proxy for competence, virtue, even destiny. Jaffe’s line yanks that fantasy back to the ground: wealth isn’t an income figure, it’s a set of choices. The syntax is doing quiet work here. By dismissing "how much money you make" as the wrong metric, he’s puncturing the American reflex to worship the top line (salary, revenue, net worth) and redirecting attention to the less glamorous part of financial life: behavior.

The subtext is slightly accusatory. If you feel financially squeezed while earning a lot, the quote implies a culprit closer than the economy or your boss. Spending becomes a moral and strategic act: you’re not just buying things, you’re buying a lifestyle, a future, a story about yourself. That’s why the word "spend" hits harder than "save". It includes saving and investing by implication, but it also indicts status consumption, impulse, and the endless treadmill of "upgrades" that keep high earners anxious.

Context matters: Jaffe’s career sits in a 20th-century business culture that increasingly equated success with visible consumption - bigger homes, cars, signals. His remark reads like a corrective from someone who watched people get raises and still live paycheck to paycheck, or build fortunes and still feel poor because their obligations outgrew their earnings. It’s a compact reframing: richness is less a wage than a way of living, and the real flex is financial autonomy.