Who's spreading these rumors?

Reading the latest GUComics strip, and I can't help but wonder... where do these people think we raiders get money from? In the post for today's strip Woody says "I'm sure some kind soul in tier 6 would toss a few measly hundred gold my way if they truly understood my plight." Now I realize he's just saying this for a quick laugh, in that he is a comic writer and his job is to make jokes. But this is a impression that goes beyond just him. When I was wandering around in original WoW on my mage in epics, I would get comments about my gear, then sometimes requests for money.

On the one hand I can understand the line of thought: As you play and get better gear you can make more money. Therefore obviously someone in full epics from raiding is making a lot of money. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. A large amount of the money goes into repair, reagents and consumables for raiding. I know I spend around 75-100g per raid counting consumables. And the thing is, the further into raiding you go, the more costly it becomes, as your repair bills ramp up. At 70 in mostly I'll pay around 15~20g for a full repair. Once I get into full epics I expect to be paying 20g minimum for a full repair.

In the end, raiding is a way to have fun, not make money. In fact, it's probably one of the greatest money sinks out there, even more so they the 5000g you spend on epic riding skill, because you keep going back to raiding and spending more.