If the fears of hyperinflation are realized, you'll look back with pride on your luxury purchases. All that money you've sunk into custom jewelry and top-of-the-line stones will make you look like an absolute genius. Well, that's the position of South African billionaire Johann Rupert, and I'd take the advice of a guy who can be described that way.

According to Bloomberg News, the told investors, "If we enter hyperinflation, you're going to be so glad that you bought that stuff two months or six months ago." He added, "If inflation picks up, you're going to see people running into your stores, buying high jewelry."

Will inflation cause a mob to form outside the Cartier store on Fifth Avenue? Well, I don't think I'd worry too much about the pushing and shoving, but being ready to throw an elbow probably isn't a bad idea.

Of course, Rupert has something to gain – his company, Richemont, is the world's second largest luxury goods maker (behind LVMH). In his talk with investors in the company controlled by his family, he forecasted "normal growth" with luxury sales showing signs of recovery this month and next.

In Florida, yacht abandonment and repossessions are on the rise but wealthy boat owners may soon get a bit of tax relief. The Miami Herald reports that state legislators are considering a tax break on boats and planes. A bill currently moving through the Florida legislature called the Aviation and Maritime Full Employment Act would cap the sales tax on boats and planes at $25,000.

It is hoped that the bill would stimulate the economy by creating jobs. Currently many rich people avoid the sales tax by buying their expensive planes and yachts elsewhere and storing them in other states or registering them in the Cayman Islands and other places. These actions cost the state not just tax revenue but it makes it less likely that the owner will buy other related services in Florida. The Herald quotes Republican Representative Tom Grady who says: "Someone might want to beat up the rich. I don't. Anybody with capital to invest in the state of Florida, where jobs can be created, I want them here. I want their money here."

Others are saying the tax break is outrageous especially at a time when the state is contemplating raising the price of licenses and other fees that would affect a broader swath of the population. The cap could cost the the state $8.1 million annually and local government could lose $1.1 million. No number for the potential economic gain from the new bill has been forecast.

Normally pawn shops are reserved for the seedy and desperate, and the occasional middle-class divorcee looking to unload bad memories and a diamond ring, but in these tightening economic times even some of the country's wealthier individuals are turning to pawn shops to keep their high-end lifestyles and struggling businesses afloat. Since the banks aren't lending, pawn-brokers are seeing increased business from upper class individuals seeking short-term loans to fund everything from elective surgery to business payroll obligations, and they're putting up their diamond jewelry, watches, and even boats as collateral.

That can't be a good sign.

The needs of the wealthy often require quick moves and the ultimate in discretion. That's where services like The Home Zone Company come in. Laura Naramore, a former corporate consultant, specializes in helping clients make lifestyle transitions whether it's creating a new life for retirees or helping an executive get a new footing in a strange city. How does one get into the business of helping the wealthy relocate and what does it entail? Laura Naramore gives me more details in our mini-interview:

Can you define in one sentence what The Home Zone Company does?
The Home Zone Company manages the entire process of lifestyle asset acquisition, which starts with location research and property scouting and ends with a fully renovated, staffed and provisioned lifestyle asset. ("Lifestyle Asset" is the category for boats, jets and homes.)

How did you decide to start this business?
I was frustrated by the inefficiency I experienced securing my own homes. First, the real estate agents are paid by sellers, prohibited by law and discouraged by self-interest from sharing relevant information and limited in scope to very tight geographic boundaries. The system works fine for people with narrow geographic options, but it is a time-wasting business model if you want to buy a secondary home "where it is warm in the winter". After months of research, hundreds of phone calls, dozens of look-see trips and finally finding a property by navigating all those agents, the demands on my time just got more intensive: I realized that I was the only nexus where my banker, lawyers, real estate agents, general contractors, designer, mover and employment agencies met.

All we wanted was an enjoyable bolt-hole but in order to get it I had to indulge this overwhelming, otherwise irrelevant cast of characters in my daily life. I joked one night to my husband that what we really needed was a lifestyle COO to manage all these P&Ls, and the company was born.

Who is your typical client?
What my clients have in common is cash flow, a sense of urgency, a deep sense of privacy and a preference for results without process. The circumstances for which they hire me vary. A pending divorce, transitioning senior parents, a change in financial circumstances and other "dislocation" events drive the majority of my referrals.

What's the strangest request you've ever gotten?
The strangest requests for me are the conspiracy paranoia ones- -recently, I was asked to pose as a prospective buyer to unmask a coalition of realtors who were suspected of intentionally driving my client's multi-million dollar property into foreclosure so that they could buy it themselves, flip it and share the profits. And what seemed exotic to me at first, like setting up love-nests or tucking away children, is now just part of the lifestyle ecosystem.

What's the average cost for your services?
We are hired on a project basis for individuals or on retainer for family offices. Our average retainer is $25,000 and our average project fee is in the $6-8k range. We are not paid in any way by the service providers with whom we engage on behalf of our clients.

Huntington Hartford, a man who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and became famous for squandering most of it, died yesterday at his home in the Bahamas at the age of 97. His story is one of those particularly American stories of wealth, ambition, dreams and loss. He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost around $80 million of that.

He was a grandson of a a principal founder of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company and was raised with wealth as a boy. His desire was to be, as the NY Times puts it "an arbiter of culture and a master builder," a goal he worked on in a variety of ways. He opened the he Huntington Hartford Museum, also known as the Gallery of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1964 to showcase 19th and 20th century art and to buck the current trend then for Abstract Expressionism. The overblown palazzo-style of the building, which is shown at right, was considered slightly ridiculous and the art inside wasn't particularly distinctive. Hartford poured $7.4 million into the project before giving up and the museum's home is now undergoing a extensive redesign as the future home of the Museum of Arts and Design.

Another costly venture was his investment in Hog Island, in the Bahamas. In 1959 he bought most of the island, renamed it Paradise Island and started to build a lavish resort. Unfortunately he was unable to get a gambling license for the resort and his increasingly extravagant plans doomed it to failure, losing him an estimated $25 million to $30 million.

His life reads like a story of wrong turns. He graduated from Harvard and worked briefly for his uncles at the company headquarters but was often absent. He donated a yacht to the Coast Guard after the start of World War II and was given the command of a supply ship in the Pacific which he rang aground twice. In Los Angeles, he tried his hand at the movie business and converted an old movie house in a stage theater, the Huntington Hartford Theater. He later started an arts and entertainment magazine, Show which he lost more money on before it folded in 1973. He eventually declared bankruptcy even though he was still the beneficiary of a trust fund that brought him more than $500,000 a year.

His losses were so legendary that a book "Squandered Fortune: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford" (Putnam, 1991) was written about his life. The author Lisa Rebecca Gubernick that lacked focus, his dreams were big but he was easily distracted.Hartford definitely had his fun, marrying four times and spending time in the company of movie stars. All in all, not such a bad life even if it was the reversal of the American dream. Writing in Esquire in 1968 he described himself as "Horatio Alger in reverse."

Economic slump or not, according to The New York Times the ultra-rich aren't slowing down on spending. This news follows right along with the current trend of contradicting reports we keep hearing, like the fact that luxury retailers are reporting steadily falling sales while private jet spending is holding steady or even going up but luxury car sales are down. So what is it, are the rich spending or aren't they? Or is it just that the ultra rich are still spending, but all those who are just "middle-of-the-road" rich are cutting back?

Greetings from the American Express Publishing Luxury Summit at the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, California. Last night, I attended the opening dinner. After a meal of an amuse of golden tomato gazpacho, crab beignet with lemon aioli and chicken oyster with wild rocket followed by a Santa Barbara lobster tart with morel mushroom sauce, assorted asparagus celebration paired with the 2005 Cambria Bench Break Chardonnay and then a veal tenderloin with pan-seared foie gras, potato savory caramelized vegetables in a port wine sauce paired with the 2003 Atalon Merlot, it was time to tuck in the words of the keynote speaker Robert Frank. You may have read Frank's work either through his blog for the Wall Street Journal, The Wealth Report, or his popular book Richistan,. Richistan is Frank's name for the world that the wealthy inhabit, a world that coexists with the normal world but also has its own rules and peculiarities. Frank's focus for this particular audience was on how businesses can best market to the rich, especially in this changing economic climate.

The American dream is a little different for everybody but it almost always has something to do with having lots of money and being financially stable. Of those who do have wealth some were born into rich families, some worked like dogs for years and years to build a successful empire, and then others hit it big seemingly by random chance.

This article highlights the successes of 5 people who were millionaires before the age of 20. Whether it was launching an online website for high school friends, selling greeting cards to friends and family, or cooking jams in the kitchen, these kids all did something seriously right.

Hm, needless to say I'm just a tad past my 20th birthday and I don't have any good business ideas. Guess I'll just have to stick to the lottery tickets!

There has been a definite slow down in the spending habits of the average American consumer this holiday season, and although the super rich weren't predicted to be affected the modestly rich, or "aspirational consumers," were another story. They were expected to slow down with the rest of us, and it seems those predictions were right on. Some of the biggest retailers catering to both the very wealthy and the merely "well-off" are making note of major slow-downs -- and even a loss of some of their customer base as many of their lower-income clientele retreat from stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom to Kohl's and JCPenny's.

Are you spending less this holiday season?

Cancer, heart disease, and obesity are common issues our population deals with but anyone heard of WFS? No, it's not text message shorthand but stands for Wealthy Fatigue Syndrome, a recent finding that apparently plagues the rich not only in America but Europe and beyond. Is this for real?

I am not sure if it is really clinically correct but it may just be the term to embrace a combination of narcissism, depression, loneliness, and paranoia. It is plausible that as the affluent gain more money, and their daily lives change, they slowly alienate friends, family and co-workers. Those of us who aren't uber-rich may think a night on the town, expensive drinks and dinner, and a taxi ride home is splurging but for the wealthy their private plane ride to a chalet in the Alps is just another day. Not being able to share their experiences with those they care for, they look for new friends that enjoy the same lifestyle they do. Loneliness and depression ensue and to fill that void the wealthy turn to the newest, hottest, most expensive vehicles, clothes and jewelry.

So enjoy your life with the perks and trials we all experience -- our mortgage, our car payments, budgets and bills. It could be worse -- you could have WFS!

When you think of the wealthy, what do you think? As open-minded as you may be (and unless you're actually rich yourself) you've most likely got at least some preconceived notions. Whether it's something extreme, like believing all rich people are snots, or something subtle, like simply believing the wealthy have no real problems, chances are living the life of luxury is not exactly what you think it is. According to the Luxury Institute there are at least 10 common misconceptions facing the wealthy -- are you guilty of any (or all?) of them?

There are different breeds of millionaire in the world, and one of the latest to develop is the "Googlaire." It refers to that exclusive group of people (estimated at around a few hundred) that have come into money and new lifestyles as a result of striking gold with Google stock options. And although some are obviously blowing their money frivolously and will soon have dwindled it down, there are many who are finding a nice balance between fun (buying dream homes and dream cars) and responsibility (investing the money for the future and starting businesses).

Good to know the Google founders, with their fleet of over-sized private jets and countless other amenities, aren't the only ones getting rich!

I can't believe I'm about to say this: Oh, those poor rich people.

But it's kinda true, if you're in a generous and sympathetic mood and willing to look at the numbers. The more money you have the more money you need, it's as simple as that. The luxury market and the prices of luxury goods is rising at about 3 times that of the standard market and of standard goods. Part of the reason for this is the fact that although there's more and more money floating around in the world there is still a finite amount of goods to be purchased with that money, and for people with money to spend status symbols become almost exclusively defined by their price: the higher the better.

It's a LOT more complicated than that, but it really can all be summed up in the simple phrase "it's expensive being rich!"

How much would you spend on a wedding if money were no object? For most celebrities it isn't, and the result is wedding costs skyrocketing into the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Forbes recently compiled a list of the 20 most expensive celebrity weddings, going back as far as 20 years. Whether paying for 50,000 exotic flowers or renting an entire island to escape the paparazzi, celebrities spare no expense when it comes to having exactly what they want. The top 5 spenders, in order, are:

• Liza Minelli and David Gest: $3.5 million
• Paul McCartney and Heather MIlls: $3 million
  
• Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar: $2.5 million
• Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes: $2 million
• Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky: $2 million

Others on the list of 20 include David and Victoria Beckham, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, and of course Donald Trump and Melania Knauss.

Sadly, 40% of the couples on the list are now divorced (including obviously Brad and Jennifer above), so feel free to check out this list of the most expensive celebrity divorces -- a few made both lists!

So we all know models make a lot of money, but do you know just how much? And if you had to guess which one was making the most money right now who would you pick? I just love the lists Forbes comes up with, and here's another great one of the world's top earning models. Its list has a total of 15 of the wealthiest models, and I've included the top 10 here:

• Gisele Bundchen: $33 million
• Kate Moss: $9 million
• Heidi Klum: $8 million
• Adriana Lima: $6 million
• Allessandra Ambrosio: $6 million
• Carolyn Murphy: $5 million
• Natalia Vodianova: $4.5 million
• Karolina Kurkova: $3.5 million
• Daria Werbowy: $3.5 million
• Gemma Ward: $3 million

How many of them do you recognize? And wow, Gisele is way ahead of the competition!