Breaking it down on daily expenses really helps me understand how bad their situation is. Thanks for that!

(I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).

You take loan for a mansion that can suck such an income dry. Or two, or 5. Add some luxury lifestyle (cars, clothing, vacations, gadgets, expensive restaurants) and you are losing money.

That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.

How do you live in two or 5 mansions at the same time? Questions over questions... But yeah, I don't make enough money to understand those problems.

> Let's says it's the half after taxes

If you make that much money, you're not paying more than 25% taxes. Or you are not using the right lawyers.

Is there any easy way to use those tax evasion schemes as a private preson with a lower income, too?

I wasn't even talking about tax evasion. Just that rich people can often reorganize their income to be capital gains, for which the tax is just 15%.

I don't think this is controversial. Warren Buffett talked about how he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There is also the famous curve of tax vs income group: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...

Tax evasion is illegal. What these people do is not (but maybe morally questionable?). Please don't go to an accountant asking to help you in "tax evasion schemes" :)

Seems like nobody really cares about tax evasion, though. But maybe only if you're big enough... ;-)

I also think I still have some legal headroom for optimizing my tax return forms. Maybe I'll have to try an accountant next year.

No tax lawyer but the principle this works on, as I understand it, is having a lot of deductible costs to lower your taxable salary. It works for anyone, just the degree to which you have to invent expenses differs.

I'll read more into that. Should be able to find some things.

There's lots of info about this online but it really depends on your country. For me, things like my commute to work, expenses for my home office (even though I worked in an actual office until corona), and other things can be deducted. The most ironic category is expenses necessary to file taxes.

Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.