Reply to 31% of millionaires think they're middle class

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's because of inflation, especially in college and housing.

We have a high HHI and about 5 million in investments. Plus our house, which we own. We don't put that in net worth because you have to live somewhere and if we moved, it would probably be to somewhere bigger/more expensive. This all sounds good and it is right? We're mid 40s so we still have more time to build savings. However, about 1 million of that money is earmarked for our 3 kids' college educations and we intend to spend every penny and then some. If they go to grad school, we'll have to pull from other savings.

Then there's our house. It's a nice house and it is worth a lot of money but it would have been considered firmly &quot;middle class&quot; back when we were growing up. It's 4 bedrooms and less than 3k sqft. Our kids go to public school in a &quot;good&quot; school district and we live in a lovely neighborhood.

When it comes to more frivolous spending, we spend money on our kids' activities and vacations. They each do private lessons for their chosen activity (tennis, skiing, gymnastics). We go skiing once or twice a year, we always take one trip to the Caribbean over spring break, one bigger &quot;splurge&quot; trip to Europe in June or July, and one trip to the OBX in August.

I'm not complaining about our lifestyle AT ALL. It just blows my mind because I know how much money we make and I would have considered it &quot;a lot&quot; back when I was growing up. It's just that wages haven't kept pace with inflation. [b]I just checked flights to see what it would cost to fly to St. Martin from NYC in February and it was 8k for 5 people!!![/b]

Basically what I'm saying is, it's crazy that it takes &gt; 500k to live a lifestyle that would have been &quot;upper middle class&quot; in the 80s and 90s with 3 kids.[/quote]

This is not MC. Never has been. Never will be. You all have grossly overestimated middle class lifestyle and this is what people in the Midwest are referring to when they refer to Elites. This honestly sounds like a SNL skit.

Like Cheryl! we can only go to Europe once this year. Its a travesty.  :shock:  [/quote]

Yup!  I grew up MC in the Midwest.  MC vacation: piling into the family big ass station wagon, towing a popup camper and you camped at sites with communal bathrooms.  A luxury vacation was one where you got to stay in a motel (not Hotel) for a few days, bonus if it had a decent pool.

I didn't fly until I went to college. My parents only flew when Dad went on job interviews or they were house searching for a big move. If you couldn't drive to it within 8-10 hours, we didn't see it. [/quote]

+1  This was us too--growing up in the 1980s/early 90s.  Dad an engineer and mom a preschool teacher. Only my dad was insane and would drive us places 25hrs away in our station wagon with pop-up camper.  In addition to not ever flying, I also never once ate in a nice sit-down restaurant until after college--a local 'pizza parlor' once or twice a year was the big deal.  Any food out at all--fast food/take out etc. was also a couple times a year. On vacation, we made most of our food in camp.  Our family was lucky in our neighborhood because we had "central air conditioning" because my sister had asthma.  My parents had double digit interest rates when they bought their first home. The thought of "researching the schools" was never a question--they just thought good schools were in any suburb, bad schools were in the city, if you are Catholic you might go to Catholic school but otherwise you just go to the local school.  In fact, we were zoned for a choice of two high schools and they let me choose the one that was on the poorer side of town bc a friend went there--it never occurred to them that I might get a better education at the clearly 'richer' school.

[b]The structural issues--esp. housing and college are definitely more challenging now.  But the lifestyle inflation and the things perceived as "necessities" in a middle class life have also dramatically gone up.  We might have been living in a 4 bedroom suburban house, but we weren't doing the things that families that live in those houses do now.[/b][/quote]

Grew up pretty similarly to the previous PPs and agree with this (the way our parents generation evaluated schools is spot-on!).  College and buying a house are definitely pretty challenging right now, particularly in certain metro areas.  I read an article the other day about how boomers trying to downsize and first time home buyers are competing for the same houses and the boomers are winning because they can pay all cash.  Meanwhile my parents bought a house when all the farmers were selling off their land and subdivisions were popping up all over the place, the demand-supply balance was just different.

But I also agree that the lifestyle creep is real, we may have a smaller house but live a lot differently than I did growing up.[/quote]

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