They’re Young And Wealthy but Normal

They’re Young And Wealthy but Normal

 

·  They drive hybrid cars

 

·  They donate to needy

 

·  They say no to luxuries

 

WHEN Mr Ray Sidney, a software engineer at Google, cashed in his stock options in 2003, they yielded him more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime.

 

06 May 2008

 

WHEN Mr Ray Sidney, a software engineer at Google, cashed in his stock options in 2003, they yielded him more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime.

 

But instead of building himself a 10,000-sq-ft mansion in Silicon Valley, he retired to a four-bedroom house in Stateline, Nevada, and started giving money away.

 

He has donated millions away for worthy causes.

 

Mr Sidney belongs to a new breed of people who are Gen Xers and Ys, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or Yawns.

 

The acronym comes from The Sunday Telegraph of London, which noted that an increasing number of rich young Britons are socially aware, concerned about the environment and give more money to charity or worthy causes.

 

They spend frugally for themselves.

 

Yawns sound dull, but they are the new movers and shakers. They are men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who want nothing less than to change the world and save the planet.

 

For instance, Mr Sidney has given US$400,000 ($546,000) to a local arts council to help build a new arts centre, US$1 million to a bus company to help launch a route so that casino workers wouldn’t have to rely on private transportation to get to and from work, and US$1.7m for a new field and track at a local high school.

 

DONATED MILLIONS

 

He has also donated millions of dollars to charities that try to cure diseases or save the world.

 

His one rich-guy, carbon-hogging guilt trip: a single-engine plane he flies about in once a week to see his girlfriend in San Francisco.

 

But his pet project these days is pure Yawn. He is building what he calls ‘an environmentally friendly affordable housing development’ on 40 ha of land near his home.

 

‘This world and our society and the people in it are good and worthwhile,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘And I think it’s worth spending money to keep it around and try to improve it.’

 

Mr Sean Blagsvedt, who moved from Seattle to India in 2004 to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, is another Yawn.

 

Moved by young children begging on the streets, Mr Blagsvedt quit Microsoft and launched two networking sites, babajob.com and babalife.com, to link India’s vast pool of potential workers with the people who need labour.

 

The larger goal – to reduce poverty.

 

The 32-year-old lives at babajob’s headquarters in Bangalore, a 3,000-sq-ft apartment where his mother and stepfather also live and 15 workers come and go every day.

 

‘I’m a happy person,’ he said. ‘It’s great to do something that you believe in doing.’

 

The state of the economy and the state of the planet have inspired a growing global movement.

 

The movement makes perfect sense, said sociologist David Grusky, since society tends to follow cycles.

 

Anti-materialist periods like the hippie movement generated a pro-materialist reaction – the yuppie period, and so on.

 

He adds that the evidence of climate change and a concern with terrorism gives rise to more interest in spiritual as opposed to material objectives.

 

That helps explain why Earth Day has become so big again, why products are all going ‘green’ and why freecycle.org, an Internet community bulletin board where members offer items for free, has grown in five years from a dozen members in Tucson, Arizona, to a network of over 3,000 cities in 80 countries.

 

Mr Deron Beal, the site’s founder, counts four million members, and is growing by 20,000 to 50,000 members each week.

 

‘People have many reasons for freecycling, ‘ said Mr Beal. ‘But the biggest reason is environmental – reusing and recycling instead of helping create more waste.’

 

Mr Rik Wehbring, a 37-year-old dot.com millionaire, limits himself to living on US$50,000 ayear.

 

That’s no small change but well below what he could spend in San Francisco, where his rent eats up 40 per cent of his allotted spending.

 

Mr Wehbring doesn’t own a television, his mp3 player cost US$20 (’and it works just fine’) and when he drives, it’s a Toyota Prius.

 

He buys most of his food from local farmers’ markets, is leaving the bulk of his estate to various environmental organisations and donates money to what he considers worthy causes.

 

Every day, he grapples with ‘how to live a low-carbon life’.

 

‘I don’t need a lot of material possessions, ‘ he said. ‘I haven’t had to buy anything in a while’.

 

Such frugality seems to run in his circle.

 

Mr Brad Marshland, 44, the husband of Mr Wehbring’s cousin, is a successful filmmaker living near Berkeley.

 

He, his wife and two sons, aged 10 and 12, dry their clothes on a line, grow their own vegetables and buy what they need at garage sales and second-hand stores.

 

He offsets his family’s ‘carbon footprint’ – how much energy it uses – by donating money to environmental groups online.

 

Source: The New Paper