The problem isn't that you have to little. The problem as the richer people have too much. The solution isn't for you to earn more, it's to recover the excess from them. |
We are just under $300k. It seems like a ton of money! But yes, I do marvel sometimes about how fast it goes lol. We live in a 1500 sqft home, send our kids to state schools, drive old cars, have mostly old crappy furniture. But having grown up truly middle class, I can say with certainty we are living pretty high the hog, in a pricey suburb of a major city, with all its cultural amenities, with the ability to save for retirement, travel internationally on occasion, send our children to college without taking on (or them taking on) any debt, pay our credit cards in full each month, and pay cash for a new boiler when the old one goes kaput. Most of these things are beyond the means of the middle class. |
What's your net worth though? Rich is about that and not income. |
The problem is on 400 you can pick and choose your luxuries but you can’t have all of them at once. You can have the nice new car every 3 years and the country club membership but you need to compensate by not doing the elaborate ski trip or Europe trip every year, or maybe send the kids to public. Mid 6 figure incomes bring too many compromises in lifestyle to be able to say you’re rich. |
Do you mean individual income or household income? |
If a family making $200K a year is "barely getting by," that’s likely due to their own choices (i.e. paying way more for a house than they need to, sending kids to private school, etc) which can be undone if need be. That’s not actually "barely getting by." We make $150K a year and have plenty to spare, but we also don't pretend that the "perfect" house that feeds to the "perfect" schools is a need rather than a want. |
Can you hear this tiny 🎻 in your fancy EarPods? |
We do quite well on $200k a year. |
We have a household income of $250k in northern Virginia with three kids and we are unquestionably rich.
Only financial worry I have is how to pay for college when all three are in college at the same time in a few years. Everything else in my life is free of financial worry. |
This is exactly right. It's all about the definition of "rich". I realize people making quite a bit less would look at 400K as rich, but they are not. Of course, they are very fortunate to be able to make choices on how to use the money, but those are choices that come at the expense of something else. |
There is no way people earning $200k are sending their kids to a chi chi private school without some combination of family help, trust fund, incredibly low housing payment, not saving for retirement, etc. |
This was good until houses became over 1m |
This is true in the DMV. |
Same |
It's more simple than that. It doesn't feel rich because you have a spending problem. |