Reply to What is Middle Class....Really?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Not PP and I agree it's not struggling, but you forgot about student loans, utilities & house maintenance, car & life insurance, and medical care, among other things.  All of this adds up to more than $1,000 a month.  My student loan payment is $1000/month alone and I'm in the public service loan forgiveness program.  And to keep that "middle class" lifestyle after retirement, most people would need to save more than the minimum $18k/year/person in 401k's. [/quote]

I can definitely see some of those things being additional expenses, but not all of them, and certainly not at a deal-breaking level.

For car insurance you're looking at $200 a month extra at most. That's a rounding error in this kind of budget.  And I would assume (or at least hope!) that by the time you are on your second child and have bought a million dollar house you have paid off your student loans. But hey, we are also talking about people who can't figure out how to make ends meet on $350K a year, so who knows, maybe they couldn't figure out that 2 or 3 more years in that 1BR without child expenses would have paid off their loans!

A quick quote from state farm says $2,000,000 in term life insurance is $253 a month for someone in good health. Assuming you are in good health and you're around 40 years old your medical bills shouldn't be too much, especially with the kind of insurance you can buy at $350K/yr.

You're right, there is more than meets the eye with regard to expenses, but the point remains that anyone with a modicum of common sense could easily run a middle class household on $350K a year, and it would not require much more financial savvy than that to figure out how to run it while affording a trip to Europe. [/quote]

You think it takes 2 or 3 years in a one-bedroom to pay off student loans?  [/quote]

If you're making $350K a year and haven't started a family yet and paying off your loans is a priority? Absolutely. You could do it in 1 depending on how much your loan balance is.

Take any average entry level couple in DC, (say $80K HHI) emulate their lifestyle, put all the rest towards your loans. Congratulations, you just paid off $140,000 in a year![/quote]

You think that's how it works?  It could take years for a couple to reach that income.  It's not like someone starts making $350k out the bat (some do, but most of us don't). [/quote]

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