I have had the dubious privilege of hanging out in some pretty fancy places over the past few years. For a girl who grew up in a weatherboard house next to a highway, I am fascinated by the ways of the wealthy. I don’t think I’d even laid eyes on a truly rich person until I was about 17.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

1. Navy blue and beige. Rich people love that shit. The more navy and the more beige you can cram into a colour scheme, the happier the rich people are. If you can include a subtle sailing motif, extra points!

2. Champagne and oysters. Or more specifically, wanking on about Champagne and oysters, saying loudly how much you adore them and how divine they are. In fact, rich people seem to thrive on sea creatures. If they can pop on a cable knit sweater and brandish a lobster, they are delighted. Give them salmon – raw, smoked or cooked in delicate slabs – and their banker brains go into an Omega-3 induced orgasm.

3. Pearls and gold. Did a Korean woman die while free-diving for the pearls? Even better! Everyone knows things involving dead people appreciate faster. The key thing here is that the jewels need to be tasteful, and by tasteful, I mean large and understated, if those two things can conceivably co-exist. Alternatively, they need to be so wildly tasteless – think emerald jaguar arm bands, huge diamond pinky rings for men, gold watches so large that they could drag you to the bottom of the ocean – that you need to be outrageously rich to invest in something so insane.

4. Fakery. Fake teeth the size of billboards, fake camel-length eyelashes, fake tans that make you look like you narrowly escaped the lacquer coat at a Men’s Shed; rich people love fakery. If you can replace your saggy norks with teardrop-shaped bags of silicone, hey, why not? The next iteration of this will undoubtedly be fun things like extra arms to simultaneously whip your butler, fill in private school admission forms and hold your takeaway coffee. Handy (literally!).

5. Naming conventions. You must name your children after royals (Thomas, Henry, Harry), expensive things (Saffron, Chanel, Mercedes) and you must only hyphenate surnames, not first names. Example: Jones-Whitely = correct; Jayden-Lee = wrong. The child, once named, must spend the rest of his or her life acquiring new letters – MBA, Dr, Sir – in order to legitimise the expense of sending them to a school with a name like Kings.

6. Yachts and horses. This is the height of absurdity because rich people can afford drivers, helicopters and private jets but no, these beta modes of transport really float their boat. Firstly, they are expensive hobbies, require a great deal of paraphernalia (tapping into rich people’s raison d’etre: buying things) and they are elitist. Whereas people who have true need of a horse or yacht are out mustering or drug smuggling, rich people are off busily risking their lives so they don’t die of boredom from having their needs and wants met without effort.

What else do rich people like? What other entertainingly crazy habits do they have? Feel free to share your observations in the comments section below.