Reply to What’s the different between upper middle class and upper class?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Upper middle has at least some income through a w-2 and actually needs to work to maintain their lifestyle/savings.

Upper class can fully sustain themselves with investments. [/quote]

Plenty of FIRE people “sustain themselves with investments.” But they are living on $100k a year in a LCOL area. That doesn’t make them upper class. [/quote]
But many upper class people are cheap as hell.[/quote]

For sure. But that doesn't have anything to do with whether or not they are UC.

My mother wouldn't let me order sour cream on my baked potato at Ponderosa because it cost 25 cents extra. Drive up the road from that Ponderosa (just about the only place we ever ate out, unless you count BK, which was also rare) a ways and you would come across a uni building with our name on it. Lol. She was a money hoarder -- it's a mental illness and had nothing to do with how much money there actually was, or the fact that she had grown up the way most UC people do. She was just nuts. I remember one evening at the Country Club we were having dinner with my grandparents and my grandfather looks up from the menu and says to my grandmother "Larla, we can't afford this!" and she just shook her head at him annoyed -- they could afford every dinner in the place and the building it was in to boot, and more. People have weird relationships with money and get very controlling around spending and sometimes having a lot of money doesn't really matter. My grandfather's dad jumped off a building in NYC in 1929 though (yeah, not a myth, it did happen) -- so we will allow him his trauma and controlling feelings around money. [/quote]

Sounds like my FIL. UHNW and almost had a heart attack when he thought we weren’t covering the entire $100 Carrabba’s bill at dinner. It’s a sickness.[/quote]

I’ve noticed this too. It’s the wealthy families we know who will invite one of our kids along to an activity and let us know the amount so we can Venmo them. And I don’t mean expensive activities, I’m talking ~$30 when they live in a $2M house and own vacation properties.

Meanwhile my family your typical DCUM UMC earning about $300k and we definitely need our incomes. Yet I refuse to let other parents reimburse me if I’m the one inviting their child somewhere. I always give 2-3x the suggested contribution amount to the room parents. We generally tip 20% as the default for things like going out to eat, hair cuts, etc. We give generous holiday gifts to our biweekly cleaners, teachers (well as much as the gift limit allows throughout the year), adopt an angel tree kid and try to get everything on the list we reasonably can, etc.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a working class neighborhood and feel so fortunate to now have the disposable income we do even if it’s not enough to quit our jobs and live a life of leisure. We are good savers and lucked out on buying a home with a sub 3% interest rate, so I don’t want to spend our lives fretting over relatively small amounts of money. I’d rather err on the side of generosity.

Conversely I think having a lot of wealth creates this scarcity mindset where you must protect that wealth and worry about people taking advantage of you. [/quote]

Getty who was one of the founders of Standard Oil along with Rockefeller had a pay phone in his house that guests had to use if they wanted to make a call.  Admittedly, phone calls back in the day were really expensive (in the 1950s you had to pay like $10 for a 10 minute phone call from NYC to Boston).

Don't you remember the commercial where they were serving boxed wine at some massive estate and the tagline was "how do you think I got so rich?".[/quote]

Didn’t he also refuse to pay ransom when his own grandson was kidnapped ? [/quote]

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