Reply to People who grew up middle class but then became rich, what does it feel like?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Mostly it feels like peace of mind.

For context, we are not absurdly rich like many of the people posting are claiming to be. Our HHI right now is around 250K, down from its peak at 375K. We have a lot saved in investments relative to our age (40), but our networth - including home equity - just crossed 1M this year. We've reached Coast FIRE and are on track to retire by 55.

We live in a middle class neighborhood (100K average HHI) because that's what felt normal to us when we bought right out of grad school when our incomes were much lower. Truthfully, we were too middle class to expect our incomes to increase so significantly over time. We used our high income to get rid of student loans, build robust emergency and retirement savings, save in brokerage accounts, and create wealth which gives us a lot of peace of mind.

I used to worry a lot about every little penny I spent (I literally kept a notebook where I tracked every expenditure), and now I don't worry about things that cost less than 1K because spending that much isn't going to impact my financial life. I don't worry about emergencies because most things aren't emergencies when you have the money to fix them.

After that, the biggest change has been realizing that, for many things, I can get precisely the thing that I want. Not the cheaper alternative, or the used version. I can actually buy the furniture I like and not just pin it on pinterest. I can buy a new car instead of a used car just because I want a specific interior/exterior color combo and the upgraded version with heated leather seats. I can pay for parking. All things I could never imagine myself doing when I was younger.

I don't think people treat me differently, but I don't think people can readily tell our financial circumstances by how we live. Because we live in an actual middle class neighborhood, we don't spend extravagantly. It's just more comfortable to not stick out. Where we do splurge, it's in areas where our spending is more private. I really love fancy boutique hotels and have spent as much as 1,200/night. But I'd only share where we stayed with friends that also like and can afford luxury travel.

The one weird thing has come up recently in moving to a new nonprofit role where I took a substantial paycut. I work many people who make between 65-90K, and they regularly have talk about struggling to pay for basic/essential life expenses like housing (many are single moms), and I just have to keep quiet and listen. Our lifestyle often feels solidly middle class with the occasional splurge, but I realize from talking with my neighbors and co-workers that middle class life comes with a proximity to financial precarity that we don't experience. [/quote]

You are not even close to rich and do not belong on this thread[/quote]

They’re somewhere between the 85th and 95th percentile for their age, which ain’t too shabby. [/quote]

Yeah. They're not rich. Just comfortable middle class but still with clear budget restrictions.

I do fine but have a sister who is genuinely wealthy ($25M vicinity). So I see the differences clearly. Our families have similar food and clothing but where we really diverge are in travel and renovations. We both go to Europe but they fly business automatically, will spend multiple tens of thousands on a single vacation while we're still in economy and book cheap and cheerful hotels. We put in a nice kitchen (for us) but the quality of their renovations is just on a different level altogether. They also have a second house and club memberships. And my sister has commented to me that she sees the difference between her family and those with $100M! [/quote]

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