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

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[quote=Anonymous][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. 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!!!

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]

Yearly trips abroad wasn’t an UMC lifestyle, even in the 90s.[/quote]

+1 I grew up middle class in the 80s/90s and the UMC and rich kids at my school had the following:

- multiple vacations a year to places like San Diego, NYC, Florida. Sometimes a splurge to Mexico or Jamaica (not yearly). Then when kids were MS/HS age, a couple big trips to Europe. Probably London/Paris once and then maybe a trip to Italy or Germany with some traveling around in HS.

- nice used car at 16, usually a used Saab or Volkswagen

- did not worry about paying for college, whether state flagship or out of state, just not discussed, college was covered

- new clothes and electronics. Stuff like their own en suite bathroom

- public school but the best ones in town, tutoring when they needed it, expensive extra-curriculars if they wanted them

The problem, of course, is that these kids grew up thinking they were middle class because no one explained otherwise, and now they are adults who are millionaires and can give their kids even better than the above but, because they can't take multiple foreign trips a year or front the cost of private college for four kids simultaneously, they STILL think they are "middle class."

It's just a total lack of self-awareness or understanding of what the word is actually like for the average person.[/quote]

Alright, I am not being sarcastic, you just described me to a tee. [/quote]

I knew so many kids in college like the above.   All thought they were middle class yet paid full price for college.  I felt so poor compared to them.[/quote]

It's their parents' fault. The doctors' kids are the worst. They will have heard stories about how broke their doctor parents were during residency and though these kids either weren't around for that time in their parents' lives, or if they were around, they were small children, it's this family lore that convinces them that they are "average" or "middle class" when they are demonstratively not. All the rich kid fixings listed above, from the nice clothes to the trips to Europe and college paid for, but they are convinced this is typical because, after all, dad once had to work 80 hr weeks while paying student loans for 4 years back in his 20s.

Then those doctors' kids go on to work in law or finance (very few of them go into medicine -- too much work, and god forbid they earn that residents' salary like dad did back in the day), get college and grad school paid for by their parents plus an extra 100k for a downpayment on a home, vacations paid for by mom and dad well into their 30s, huge and showy weddings, etc.

But they'll look you square in the eye and tell you they are middle class, grew up middle class. It's really something. There's some kind of collective neurological disorder with the kids of doctors, I don't get it.[/quote]

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