Income
£0 salary; £250,000 a year from investments

Housing costs
renting, about £5,800 a month, all-in

Savings
undisclosed

Biggest expense
£3,000 a month on travel

Donations
£6,000 a year

I have a coffee with Tim Stumpff, 61, at GQ’s offices in central London, in a meeting room overlooking the Thames. “It feels funny sitting here talking to someone on behalf of GQ, because we don’t spend money on clothes and we’re not fashionistas by any stretch,” he says. Today, Stumpff is wearing a secondhand navy raincoat, with an unflashy blue and white checked shirt. “We purposely don’t own a house. We don’t own cars. We don’t fly very much at all, trying to keep our carbon footprint down, so there’s no feeling of, ‘Oh yeah, I’d circle the earth five times in an aeroplane or I’d buy another house.’ I don’t want any of that.”

Stumpff retired from paid work in asset management four years ago, and he and his wife live on their savings and investments. He says their investments net them about £250,000 per year at the moment.

Stumpff was initially hesitant about taking part in this story. “I took a while thinking it through. It’s just one of those things, culturally, you don’t really talk about it,” he says. “It feels weird to share the specifics, and the thought that it would be out in the public for the world to see. But then you gotta think, well, why should we care about it? One of the benefits of getting older is I’m like, ‘Someone’s gonna think this is about me? OK, whatever.’ Money gets misidentified as a marker for other stuff, but it’s not a marker of intelligence or the quality of a person, or if they’re hard-working. The wealthy, miserable gits who are leaders of the world, right? They’re not smart, they’re not good people.”

Stumpff grew up in a small town in Missouri, “decidedly middle class”, with two teachers for parents. “We weren’t at risk,” he explains, “but we didn’t have money to throw around. They were both children of the Depression, very frugal. Never bought a new car, never travelled on a plane. I don’t remember ever eating in a restaurant.” He says he attended a local college on a basketball scholarship (he’s 6ft 9in) and has “bumped around” ever since. He went to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1990, he tells me, with about $100,000 of debt. He then lived in Alaska, then a tiny island in Micronesia, then Washington DC, Iowa and Oregon, to name a few. Stumpff moved to the UK 11 years ago, partly so his three now-adult children could get a more rounded perspective on life.

“In the US, rightly or wrongly, [money] is an 800lb gorilla in the room, economically, culturally,” he says. To his mind, it’s just as sensitive a topic there as it is here. “But certainly I think it’s more tied in with class issues here, and that seems to be a much more sensitive subject here than in the US.”

He and his wife now spend their time on philanthropic work, particularly around decarbonisation and assistance for refugees. They don’t have to worry about money in the sense of thinking about where the next paycheque is coming from or covering increased costs of living. But Stumpff does worry about money and how it works in the world. “The big thing for me is the stockpiling of extreme wealth. You can look back 50 years or so, and there’s been a massive shift from public wealth and publicly owned assets to private wealth.” He’s right, and it’s been especially bad recently – the UK wealth gap widened even further during the Covid crisis. “Just economically, if you want a better, healthier, more active, growing economy, that stockpiling is not good for that,” says Stumpff. “It ought to get out and get in people’s pockets, who will spend it in their communities. The other impact of this that I worry about is that the number of people that are going to food banks has just ratcheted out of sight, the number of people who can’t afford to heat their homes right now. I’m really quite worried… if we don’t start fixing it really quickly, we’re going to be relearning some really painful, ugly, miserable lessons.” Stumpff’s parents may have been children of the Depression, but he is decidedly the grandchild of it.