I’m scanning over DealBook’s article on how hedgies spend their money, and some of it just looks a bit out of whack.

Granted the info is based on a pretty limited survey of 294 hedge fund managers with a median net worth of $61.7MM, but still. (The survey was conducted by MARHedge and Alan Prince of Prince & Associates.)

Here are the numbers, which are supposed to represent average personal spending in ‘05:

Fine art: $3.99 million
Yacht charters: $429,700
Jewelry: $376,400
Hotels & resorts: $304,900
Watches: $271,300
Fashion and accessories: $204,200
Traditional spa services: $124,000
Electronics: $99,300
Entertaining friends: $76,700
Wine & spirits for the home: $48,900
= $5.9MM (P.S. there is no indication that these categories are comprehensive. In fact it seems they are not. P.P.S. This is more than the average MD makes in a year.)

Let’s consider hotels & resorts. Persumably this doesn’t include spa, which has its own category. These people are rich so I guess this means they’re not staying at the local HoJo. But $304,000 @ $1,500/night would equal 203 nights at a hotel. Bump it up to $3,000/night and they’re still spending more 100+ nights on the road — that, or spending more than a third of the year on vacation. I think it only starts to make sense at about $10,000/night.

How about when we apply this rigorous analysis to “Traditional spa services”? Facials cost about $200, haircuts let’s say $80. Now these people are loaded and going to places and getting stuff done we’ve never even heard about so let’s take those numbers and triple them. Unfortunately this gives us only one equation with two variables $124,000 = $240x + $600y (if I remember correctly to solve this we need two equations with two variables.)

But let’s say x = 12. That means they’re getting about 200 $600 facials/treatments or what have you per year.

Yeah yeah I get it, they’re rich. But I’m just too plebe to get this … what the hell are these people doing?

My theory? Of course a survey is only as good as its respondents. There’s no telling whether the numbers are skewed by a few heavy hitters. But I wonder … could there be a bit of inflation going on here? A wittle bit of ego enhancement?