I must be moving up in the world – only nobody told me!

                                                                           

I have this habit that I execute on Monday mornings. I clean out my junk mail folder on Outlook which is, for some reason, strangely empty on Friday afternoon and yet by Monday morning at 7 am, is stockpiled with offers and pitches for products, edgy publication subscriptions and health aid testimonials that for decorum let’s just say they claim that once ingested, will make Casanova seem like a middle school wallflower.

But lately the spam mails have been going upscale.

Where I once received regular solicitations from my local Volkswagen and Kia dealers, last weekend I received an invitation to come down to a Mercedes dealer and check out their new and used 550 series. Since that model’s MSRP is roughly $95,000, some marketer somewhere must have inadvertently added another zero to our adjusted gross income.

Truth be told it was sort of flattering, nonetheless. But it gets better.

Apparently, someone in auto cyberspace thinks that our financial profile fits the dream customer and thus I received another luxury car offer – this one from one of the premier vehicles currently manufactured. The Bentley.

Now I have been in a Bentley exactly once in my lifetime and I can readily attest to its justifying an average price tag of $200,000 and up. From a hand-stitched leather interior, mahogany dashboard, 12-cylinder high performance engine and top-of-the-line Breitling clock, a routine tune-up and oil change would most likely run comfortably in four figures. And trust me, you cannot insure it with a Geico policy.

Well as much as I would have liked to preserve those emails for posterity, I had little choice but to delete them into the circular file of cyberspace.

But wait, there’s more!

Like many others, my wife and I have dutifully put money away for the day when 4:30 early bird dinners and weekend pickleball tournaments replace the 9-to-5 grind, but I had no idea that I could qualify for the American Express Platinum card, which requires an astronomical credit score and God knows what else. As an Amex cardholder since 1984, I remain very happy with my basic green card.

Yet, there it was, a platinum invite so to speak.

And last but not least, a major financial services firm in nearby tony Greenwich, Conn., invited me down for a portfolio review. Now the income demographics for Greenwich probably has hundreds of residents that pay more in annual taxes than the aggregate total of our investments.

Alas, another deletion, but admittedly I did gaze at it for longer than probably was necessary.

I’m not exactly certain how my profile got pushed into this higher bracket, but considering everything that’s happened in 2020, I encourage them to brighten my day a bit and keep those cards and letters coming.