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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The out-of-touch DCUMers are an example of why middle America is furious with the elites.

I know young families earning $100,000 - and they rent a decent townhouse with a bedroom for each of their kids, own two cars, go to the beach for a week on vacation, go to moderate restaurants, and that type of thing. Straight middle-class life.

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Sure- middle class life.  A townhouse.  Ocean City for a week.  Hardly affluent. [/quote]

What is affluent? We make $450k/year and don't feel "affluent", but maybe I don't know what that means. We don't think about money or worry about it but we don't do anything extravagant. We fly economy. We drive our cars until 100k miles.  We go on vacations but we don't stay in fancy places. I think not worrying about money is a luxury but feeing "affluent" is pretty subjective. [/quote]

I think the issue here, re: "feeling" affluent, is that people are focusing on what they do not buy rather than what they *are* buying. Whatever we can afford and get used to buying has a tendency to become our new minimum standard.

To me, the real test is this: "Do I have choices?" Almost everyone would like a little more money to improve one more area of their life; if we don't recognize spending power until we've run out of dreams, that will be  a long time.

Taking myself as an example, I live in a small house (1200 sq ft), take camping vacation, and send my child to a private school, all while saving for retirement and paying off student loans. I splurged on a kitchen remodel after saving up for it. I have about 20k left over to save, that I have earmarked for daycare if we have a second child. Absent child 2, we will save that money.

In an alternative scenario, I could be taking nicer vacations and enjoying a nice yard and bigger house, while using public school. I would not have needed the kitchen remodel because I might have bought a house with a kitchen I loved already.

I'm clearly not as rich as someone with a nice house *and* money to fund the educations of multiple children. But I very clearly have more spending power than I did at 50k or 80k hhi. As I used to make that figures, I remember exactly what I was buying at those points.

What distinguishes me from the barely-scraping-by economy of the household in which I was raised is the fact that I have the choice to invest discretionary income in one or two high-priority goals *that are not available to a household making half the amount.* 
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