Reply to 200k HHI is just getting by Six-Figure Salary No Longer Means You're Rich 5k leftover see this chart

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Reply to "200k HHI is just getting by Six-Figure Salary No Longer Means You're Rich 5k leftover see this chart"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I come from an Eastern European country. A yearly vacation, a well maintained (albeit small) apartment, a decent school, retirement, maternity leave etc., are considered staples of the middle class not luxuries. When my relatives visit, and see our home and lifestyle, they are not really impressed, they certainly do not consider us rich. I find their perspective interesting and quite in contrast with the trend here of ever lowering standards. Slowly everything is becoming a "luxury"  and the middle class is being defined as those who can subsist by putting food on their table and a roof over their head.[/quote]

Thanks for this perspective.  So much of this thread is about semantics that no one wants to see past ("so now rich means being able to buy whatever you want"?).

But having an outside perspective from what is most likely a country we Americans would not consider to be "wealthy" is very interesting.  I actually agree that there was a brief period in time (after WWII, before Vietnam) when Americans with decent jobs could expect a very comfortable lifestyle which included "luxuries", if you will, that went beyond mere subsistence.  I have my own opinions on why that's no longer the case, but I don't want to start a political debate.  I do, however, think the higher acceptance of wealth redistribution in many European socialist countries makes the lifestyle you are describing attainable by a larger fraction of the population.  I suspect at least part of this acceptance owes to European countries being ethnically and culturally more homogenous.  The flipside is that the UMC and UC in Europe is much smaller.  So most of us, like myself, with $500-600K HHI would probably be earning a lot less.

I'm a PP who said that she felt my HHI makes me rich...though I certainly can't afford everything that I could ever possibly want and [b]our ~$1.1 million house is very nice but not lined with marble or anything nor in the most desirable part of town[/b].  We don't take extravagant vacations, but we don't fret too much about visiting family etc either...and we don't fly first or business class except for with upgrades.  There are, of course, people wealthier than me including many of my college friends who went into finance with HHI twice or even several times ours.  At least one of them also talks about how she feels "poor" in NYC, because of how much more some of her friends there make.  There is no winning the comparing yourself to other people game...though comparing an average American to an average Eastern European is pretty interesting.[/quote]

omg[/quote]

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