Our neighbors are also our next-door landlords, and they are Rich. They have 3 houses in among the top highest COL areas of the country, etc. They have been lovely, generous landlords.
And also a cautionary tale about economic outpatient care and inflating your kids' standard of living. A few years ago their daughter came home for a few weeks. Mid-thirties, hasn't worked in over a decade. (I think there likely have been some mental health challenges there so I don't know the whole picture.) She came over to chat and was really complaining about how her parents felt like because they controlled the purse strings, they got to control her life. She said she was sick of it, couldn't take it anymore, and was determined to control her own life. If she pursued career interests she was intrigued by but her parents didn't support, she said they told her that they would cut off her income from them. "What would you do?" she asked.
I told her I'd try to get a job, any job. She is very smart, and felt overqualified for the positions she had been offered, wasn't offered things she thought she'd like to do, and felt like she was never offered enough money or control. I didn't doubt it, but told her that if I was trying to control my own life, I'd get a job making whatever I could, spend a few months building up an emergency fund, and then move to an apartment I could afford on my own, etc. That way if they cut the cord (on their own or because I insisted), I could afford my life, and if they didn't and wanted to support newfound independence, that money could go to savings.
She laughed. "I could never do that." I didn't understand why! She's smart, talented, seemingly independent-minded, with something of a wild streak. The gist: "My apartment alone is $10,000 a month! I'll never be able to find a NYC apartment with 2 bedrooms, a huge kitchen, a great view, a doorman, and a washer-dryer in such an amazing, trendy location for anything I could afford to pay, so I can never go against their wishes."
I'm pretty sure they despair that she hasn't left the nest, and she despairs that they control her, and from the outside it is sad and frustrating to watch. It is two years later and she has not had a job in that time, though she just applied and was accepted to grad school. I fear it will be hard to go from not having to apply herself to anything she didn't want to for over a decade to seeking an intense degree, but I am really hoping she can do it!
(I thought she had to be exaggerating and there was no way they would pay for a $10k 2 bedroom apartment where a single, non-working adult lived, but then I was talking to the landlord and they were deciding which plane to take to one of the vacation homes. Not "which commercial flight," as I originally assumed. Which of their planes. That gave me a whole new outlook on the level of wealth we were talking about.)