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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How much do you need to make for the following:

- Single family home within a 45 minute commute of downtown DC
- 2 cars
- Save for retirement at age 65
- Pay for college, 2-3 kids
- 1 week domestic family vacation every year
- No financial stress about all the regular, and unplanned, maintenance, repairs, etc

[/quote]

Live the American Dream or live the northern VA “upper middle class“ dream?

The American Dream, when it was coined, meant a 900-1800sq ft home with a linoleum floor in the kitchen, single paned windows, etc, in the suburbs with a car port or one car garage, one car, a few kids and a dog or whatever.

It isn’t even legal to build the types of houses that filled the suburbs in that era due to code changes and even if you could build them nobody here would deign to buy such a house.

In 2023 the median household income in Fairfax County was about $141k.  The cutoff for the top third was ~$200k.

If a household is making $250k they should be in the top 5th of households in the county and can easily afford most of the things people associate with middle class life here.

What they likely can’t do is afford them all at once.

Buying a home (or car) may require them to save… and even then they might not buy their dream home, but an interim solution that will allow them to trade up in 10 years.

I am an older millennial. I remember asking these sorts of questions (with lower numbers, median income in Fairfax was $81k in 2003).  I lived cheaply, saved money, bought a starter home… sold it 10 years later to buy my long term home.  There were years when paying for childcare, mortgage, etc, made us feel poor and question how we would get ahead, but bit by bit things got easier.
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