Reply to What is the “upper” in upper middle class?

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[quote=Anonymous]I am genuinely middle class, not UMC. HHI is 130k for dual income family if 4. We can afford to own a home but have made lots of sacrifices to do so. We also still carry a considerable amount of student debt 15 years out of school (more than 50k). We can afford all our basic needs, including modest vacations and some leisure activities, while also saving for retirement and college, but that’s it. Our discretionary income is quite limited and we must adhere to strict rules about non-needs like restaurant meals (mostly casual family restaurants and not frequently), take out (almost never), clothes (shop consignment a lot, DH and I sometimes go year buying nothing but socks, underwear and necessary shoes), cars (one car, 13 years old, will drive until it dies), etc.

I consider upper middle class to include people who still do many of these things but it’s not all necessary. Like my current goal is to get our household income to 180k in the next 5 years. If we stay in our current home or something similarly priced, don’t alter our spending habits much, that extra 50k a year will allow us to more quickly pay down debt, save more aggressively, and even allow for slightly more extravagant travel on occasion. To me that’s the line between MC and UMC— the discretionary funds to CHOOSE where the excess goes, instead of having every penny accounted for at all times.

We are both professionals and I have a grad degree. But having to borrow almost all of the money needed for our educations has kept us firmly middle class. Without our degrees we’d make far less money, but to obtain our degrees we had to go into serious debt. It’s such a catch-22 and I don’t know that I’d do it again.[/quote]

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