Anonymous wrote:No, this is not me. Because working hard to me means you are doing something that gets you results, so that your situation improves.

His income by his own admission was dwindling steadily over a long time. That's not working hard.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eh. I'm really not surprised that a seemingly rational and sane person puts himself in a precarious financial state keeping up with the Joneses. This is very similar to my family's story. My dad was a high ranking government official and because of whom we grew up and mingled with the world elite. The government perks made it so we were able to keep up with the Joneses and the prestige his title afforded us more than made up for our lack of actual funds. We wined and dined like the rich and lived like rich even though we had no savings no college funds no home. Ultimately dad retired and his pension isn't enough to keep us afloat. My younger siblings work part time in retail and attend NOVA. I have developed very elite tastes and find it hard to live a "normal" MC life. My parents have no retirement savings and no home. Its awful.

+ 1 I struggle with the same. It's a form of child abuse in my opinion to grow up with pictures that just don't represent the real world in any way.
Good luck to you, don't let the anger eat you up. Jump over your pride. I dug myself out slowly but still feel like a fish out of water.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eh. I'm really not surprised that a seemingly rational and sane person puts himself in a precarious financial state keeping up with the Joneses. This is very similar to my family's story. My dad was a high ranking government official and because of whom we grew up and mingled with the world elite. The government perks made it so we were able to keep up with the Joneses and the prestige his title afforded us more than made up for our lack of actual funds. We wined and dined like the rich and lived like rich even though we had no savings no college funds no home. Ultimately dad retired and his pension isn't enough to keep us afloat. My younger siblings work part time in retail and attend NOVA. I have developed very elite tastes and find it hard to live a "normal" MC life. My parents have no retirement savings and no home. Its awful.

+ 1 I struggle with the same. It's a form of child abuse in my opinion to grow up with pictures that just don't represent the real world in any way.
Good luck to you, don't let the anger eat you up. Jump over your pride. I dug myself out slowly but still feel like a fish out of water.

Anonymous wrote:Eh. I'm really not surprised that a seemingly rational and sane person puts himself in a precarious financial state keeping up with the Joneses. This is very similar to my family's story. My dad was a high ranking government official and because of whom we grew up and mingled with the world elite. The government perks made it so we were able to keep up with the Joneses and the prestige his title afforded us more than made up for our lack of actual funds. We wined and dined like the rich and lived like rich even though we had no savings no college funds no home. Ultimately dad retired and his pension isn't enough to keep us afloat. My younger siblings work part time in retail and attend NOVA. I have developed very elite tastes and find it hard to live a "normal" MC life. My parents have no retirement savings and no home. Its awful.

Anonymous wrote:We are paycheck to paycheck and have to juggle bills around all the time. It's awful. I could do some juggling to come up with 2000, but it's not sitting in a savings account. And I would have to wait till payday to get it. Our HHI is $180 too. We bought, then DH effectively had a pay cut. It's a long story.

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this made my blood boil:

"But, without getting too metaphysical about it, these are the choices that define who we are. We don’t make them with our financial well-being in mind, though maybe we should. We make them with our lives in mind. The alternative is to be another person."

Uh, fuck you, sir. I'm made literally every important decision in my life with my financial well-being in mind. Whether to marry when I did, how much to ask my parents to spend on the wedding (they chipped in $5K and DH and I paid $2K), what house to buy and where (and whether to compromise on location, size, schools, etc), how many kids to have, which career to follow (passionate about art but do that as a hobby and went into tech).

Making decisions "with our lives in mind" sounds a lot like hedonism if you're not considering your financial future. I'd love to buy a $1.5m house in North Arlington and be a creative and never sit at a desk or work on a schedule and have 4 kids, but realistically, I can't afford any of that. So I do as much as I can while still being careful and planning for rainy days.

The author sounds like an awful, awful person who condemns those who live carefully and thoughtfully as "not being their true selves" or something similar. What an evil, soulless, greedy asshole he is. I'm glad he's floundering and I hope he enjoys being the grasshopper when the winter comes.

Anonymous wrote:In a 2010 report titled “Middle Class in America,” the U.S. Commerce Department defined that class less by its position on the economic scale than by its aspirations: homeownership, a car for each adult, health security, a college education for each child, retirement security, and a family vacation each year.A 2014 analysis by USA Today concluded that the American dream, defined by factors that generally corresponded to the Commerce Department’s middle-class benchmarks, would require an income of just more than $130,000 a year for an average family of four. Median family income in 2014 was roughly half that.


So to open the continuous argument here - $250K 'feels' middle class in DC because by this measure, it probably takes at least $200K in this area to attain some or most of the things on this list.

"But, without getting too metaphysical about it, these are the choices that define who we are. We don’t make them with our financial well-being in mind, though maybe we should. We make them with our lives in mind. The alternative is to be another person."

Anonymous wrote:

We have no retirement savings, because we emptied a small 401(k) to pay for our younger daughter’s wedding.

WTF?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This isn't quite me and I haven't made as many dumb financial decisions as the writer, but I am unlike most on DCUM, at least.

I am a single parent. I finally hit $90K this year. I could pay the $2000, but I would only have $4000 left in my emergency fund. I have enough saved for two years of state college for my teen. I have more than $4000 credit card debt, left over from a medical emergency. I have retirement savings, but nowhere near enough for someone who is 50.

I disagree that working hard equates to your income going up on a steady trajectory. I'm a writer/editor. Journalism has imploded over the last couple decades. I stay because I love what I do and I don't think I have the temperament or right kind of smarts to be a lobbyist or IT professional to rake in the big bucks.

I'm not exactly close to the edge, but closer than I'd like, and no one in real life knows that.

So the person you procreated with isn't financially supporting your teen? I'm a good writer and may have wanted journalism, but I wanted to be financially secure so I went into law. Where did you decide you had the luxury of going into a disappearing, very middle class profession?