Our HHI is almost exactly 200 and I am definitely middle-class for Fairfax County!

Anonymous wrote:I laugh at the people who get snippy on here when posters are explaining why they FEEL middle class, when they make more than middle class money. Snip this...I FEEL middle class but make UC money. I am not a 1 percenter but a comfortable top 5 percenter of earnings. I am happy with where I am but realize nothing is guaranteed in life and have worked hard to get where I am today. I know people of all income levels work hard, I would never discount this. But how one 'feels' is relative to this discussion.

Sure, it is relative but most of the posters on here conflate how they feel (“l don’t feel rich”) with what they actually are (they are rich).

Listen, lots of people have imposter syndrome. Lots of people FEEL like their money doesn’t go as far as it should. I am actually, legitimately middle class (family of 4 on 115k, dual income). Sometimes we want to do something, like go to a baseball game, and we can’t afford it, and it makes me FEEL effing poor. Like I personally think it’s insane that it costs over a hundred dollars just to take a family if four to a regular season baseball game (and sit in the upper level )— that’s crazy, and middle class people used to be able to do that for a reason able amount.

But I’m not an obtuse jackass, and while I don’t like that feeling, don’t walk around lane ring to people (and especially not actual poor people) that my family is poor because I sometimes feel that way. We have two incomes. We own our home. We rarely go to baseball games but we can do it very occasionally if we plan carefully. We don’t eat at fancy restaurants but I also don’t stress about buying groceries (generally), because we’re not actually poor.

Your feelings are relevant but they aren’t facts.

I felt rich when I went from 50k to 75k as a single person. Have never felt worried about money since.

We are DINKs around $250k and do not feel middle class. Our two sacrifices are living in a townhouse and driving inexpensive cars, but we don’t yearn for a large home or a luxury car and in general have no financial concerns and can buy everything we want.

I laugh at the people who get snippy on here when posters are explaining why they FEEL middle class, when they make more than middle class money. Snip this...I FEEL middle class but make UC money. I am not a 1 percenter but a comfortable top 5 percenter of earnings. I am happy with where I am but realize nothing is guaranteed in life and have worked hard to get where I am today. I know people of all income levels work hard, I would never discount this. But how one 'feels' is relative to this discussion.

Spending all of your very high income on stuff for people who make a lot of money (close-in houses in good public school districts; 529 accounts; maxed-out retirement savings; etc.) does not make your income middle class.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When you say “middle class” do you mean old days middle class, or nowadays middle class? There’s a difference. Nowadays middle class are actually pretty poor…struggling to pay bills and clipping coupons and forgoing college and health care because both are astronomical. In the old days middle class had the Subaru and took a summer vacation and so forth. Anyway, I agree with around $400k.

Middle class is not $400K. You are extremely wealthy, probably living in a million dollar house. Middle class live in small, $300-400K homes max or rent. They are living on a tight budget. They dont' have savings, retirement, etc.

Nonsense. Of course middle class people have savings. We live in a million dollar house - it is a 3 bedroom 1930 house on a busy road. We make over 400 K but nothing in our life is upper class - no private jets, no business class travel, no private schools.

You are clueless. Private jets, etc are for the very rich. Most truly middle class people have very little, if any, savings. Definitely not while they have children at home.

One problem with DC is that so many people grew up UMC and didn’t know it. They lived in suburbs where everyone else was like them, so they didn’t know how good they had it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We make $250k, live in a million dollar house with fantastic public schools, take great but not extravagant vacations, have at least one very expensive hobby (horseback riding), and two kids with all the attendant extra curricular activities (granted no travel sports yet). We also save for retirement, school, and rainy days. We are about to have an income increase and I have no idea what we will do with it. Save more I guess.

I’d say we no longer feel middle class now.

Did you have any family help to boy your house?

Yes

Anonymous wrote:We make $250k, live in a million dollar house with fantastic public schools, take great but not extravagant vacations, have at least one very expensive hobby (horseback riding), and two kids with all the attendant extra curricular activities (granted no travel sports yet). We also save for retirement, school, and rainy days. We are about to have an income increase and I have no idea what we will do with it. Save more I guess.

I’d say we no longer feel middle class now.

Did you have any family help to boy your house?

We make $250k, live in a million dollar house with fantastic public schools, take great but not extravagant vacations, have at least one very expensive hobby (horseback riding), and two kids with all the attendant extra curricular activities (granted no travel sports yet). We also save for retirement, school, and rainy days. We are about to have an income increase and I have no idea what we will do with it. Save more I guess.

I’d say we no longer feel middle class now.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really depends how long you've been making the high income. Often the first few years of "professional pay" are following years in school and coincide with people starting families. So a couple can hit $400k HHI, but have $400k in educational debt and are very behind on retirement, be living in a pricy apartment near work, have two giant daycare bills for downtown centers, extra childcare bills to cover their intense work hours, lots of convenience food costs to support two busy careers with little kids, plus feel a need to save for a house down-payment (and potentially another car to shift to the suburbs), plus then furniture and tools to support the new house, etc. It's an expensive time of life. Ask the same couple 10 years later and they'll be much more comfortable.

They should not have taken so much debt, should have waited to have kids, and made different choices. Something is wrong if you cannot live comfortably on that even with the debt. We'd be very comfortable and we are comfortable making less than half of that.

I’m really loling at the idea I should have waited to have kids so I could have felt rich sooner. Those are some messed up priorities man.

Also the debt was necessary to make the money (prestigious law school). I was making $35k/yr before I left for law school. Definitely didn’t feel rich then!

No duh it is an expensive time of life, and no surprise you feel strapped after spending all of your money. People who say the above^"it just doesn't feel like a lot after I spend it all!" have lost a bit of perspective. Imagine trying to pay for all those same things on half or a quarter of that HHI.

Making a good HHI for one year doesn't magically make up for years of making a subsistence wage. I went from a $20k / year grad school stipend to a professional salary in my mid 30s. There was a ton of catch up to do financially. It's not the same as going from a smaller professional salary to a larger professional salary.

Two observations:

1) Many people here seem to be basing their beliefs on this on their past experience as a "middle class" person. I know many people like this in my life. They grew up UMC but don't seem to realize it, either because their parents basically lied to them their whole lives or because of some artificial or temporary circumstances that made them feel like their family was struggling even though it wasn't. For instance, I know a lot of doctors' kids like this. They may remember some years when they were young when their doctor parent was a resident and things were tight. But by the time they were in high school, their family was firmly UMC and their parents could pay for things like private school for multiple kids, college without loans, grad degrees, assist with down payments on houses, pay for large weddings, etc. People like this live with a myth about their upbringing and it makes them overlook the many, many unusual advantages they have. So as adults, they don't "feel" well off until they have a nicer lifestyle than their parents. They don't understand their parents were, and are, very well off.

2) As an actual middle class person (125k HHI) who also grew up actually middle class (parent HHI was between 50k and 80k as I grew up) I would argue that the experience of being middle class has not actually changed that much. The amount of money it takes to pay for the same stuff has changed, but the lifestyle is similar. You can afford to own a home, but it will be small, or far out, or not updated, or potentially all three. You can have kids but the burden of additional kids is huge, largely because of the skyrocketing costs of college. Your kids go to public schools, and the schools are ok but problematic in pretty much all middle class neighborhoods. You might be able to move into a better school, but you will need to make serious sacrifices -- renting an apartment in an ancient building, for instance. You are unlikely to be able to buy in at this point, even if you are willing to buy the crappiest house or a tiny condo. You can take vacations but it's mostly via car (it's hard to afford airfare except maybe once every few years). You rarely stay in hotels and when you do they are budget. You don't eat out a lot. Most of your disposable income goes to stuff that richer people view as necessities (activities for kids, for instance). And so on. This is how I grew up, it's how I live now. The biggest difference is that we have school debt (neither of my parents had to take out loans to attend their public colleges) and we are terrified of how much college will cost for our one child. We stopped at one in large part for this reason, and even then, this is the largest source of financial stress, especially because our kid has turned out to be a smart, academic kid who will definitely want/need college to pursue an appropriate career, but is not some kind of superstar (and we can't afford to make them look like one the way rich people can). The cost of higher education is one of the central concerns on which I will vote moving forward because as things currently stand, our kid will either need to take out enormous loans or forgo college at even a state university. Maybe community college would be an option, but even there the ROI seems bad.

Anonymous wrote:In the UK “middle class” is a synonym for “rich”. In the US it is a synonym for “poor”.

Yes this is exactly. “Middle class” in the US for all intents & purposes IS poor in terms of buying power. It did not used to be!

Anonymous wrote:125. You all are scary wealthy and not middle class.

I definitely felt middle class when we made $110k.

Expenses:

Taxes: $12k
Insurance: $5k
Retirement: $12k
Rent: $12k
Utilities (including cell phones): $5k
Student loans: $5k
Childcare for 2 kids: $25k
Cars: $6k
Vacation: $2k
Charity: $2k
Food: $8k
Gas: $8k

Total: $104,000

That meant that we had about $500/month for the four of us for everything else we needed to buy from band-aids and baby bottles to car and home repairs to furniture and clothes. I'm not saying that we were dirt poor or anything. We were saving for retirement. Our kids were in a good daycare, and we had everything we needed. We had lived in Appalachia prior to that and had friends who were truly poor.

But we were definitely still middle class.

In the UK “middle class” is a synonym for “rich”. In the US it is a synonym for “poor”.