Not by myself, but if my girlfriend and I got married and filed jointly, we would be making well over $300k. Since most of our friends are also working professionals in finance/law/acounting/consulting/tech in the NYC area with roughly the same age and education level, I have to assume they all make around the same or much more in many cases. I know that at my previous company, Managing Director jobs (the next level above me) post at $225,000 a year.
But it’s hard to consider that “rich” when crappy 1BR Manhattan appartments rent for $3000k a month. Also, everyone we know works really fucking hard for that money and they work for someone else. So again, even with a high salary, it’s hard to consider yourself “rich” when you have to work 12 hour days and weekends just to live a comfortible lifestyle. The difference between “rich” and “upper middle class” IMHO is that rich people control their wealth, not the other way around.
I am not greedy if I want to keep as much of the money I earn as possible.
I am greedy if I think you should give me some of your money.
(I don’t make anywhere near 100k, much less 250k, but it irks me when I hear people called greedy who simply want to enjoy the fruits of their own labors as much as possible. That is not greed, it’s #&##% common sense.)
You’re working at the wrong state university. On the Massachusetts state payroll, the top 39 salaries all belong to University of Massachusetts employees, and the 39th is 250K. Cite.
Yes, that would be greedy. Luckily, nobody in the history of ever has suggested that the way taxes should work is that one person just gives a bunch of money to one other person.
Taxes work to fund things that are for the general good of the populace but that are too expensive for any one person to pay for themselves. Like, road-building, and health care. Then you can spend the rest of your money on whatever you like, comfortable in the knowledge that when you want to drive the car you purchased with your money, there will be roads to drive it on, and when you want to enjoy your old age in the house you bought with your money, you’ll be alive to do so, etc.
I realize that all of this is probably very obvious to anyone who has two brain cells to rub together. I just get really tired of people braying about “I want to keep the money I made and not give a cash handout to my neighbor!” as though they’re being asked to give a $20 bill to Louie next door, rather than being asked to pay their share of a social safety net that benefits everybody.
Well, we are at best the #2 state school in the state, and really more like the #3. At the obvious #1 state school the top salaries are much higher, and I count 94 people there with salaries of $250k or above. The highest paid employee there makes over $700k.
That said, there’s not much difference between these two schools for people in my actual line of work (university librarian), and I make a fairly typical salary for someone with my level of experience. If I were a university president I could make a lot more money at another school, but as a librarian I probably could not.
I do not make that much myself, but yeah, I know some people who make that kind of money, since I am a physician and am friends with many others.
The reasoning many of them have when it comes to this kind of issue is that they worked hard to make that money and that they deserve to do what they please with money they earned honestly.
While I will acknowledge that some people do encounter unfair roadblocks and bad breaks in life, honestly, I think that many people aren’t rich because it is not worth it to them to be rich.
I myself am not making 250k because the kind of work it takes to make that kind of money (even as a physician) is not worth it to me. If you want to spend 4 years in college, 4 years in med school, then somewhere between 3-7 years in residency (which in many specialties involves working 80 hours per week in exchange for making a middle class income and during which time you have to start paying back your student loans, so you often feel poorer than your normal friends who are working normal jobs and starting to build up savings) then you could be earning doctor money. I don’t know as much about what the specifics are in becoming a CEO, investment banker, a biglaw attorney, or a business owner (for examples of other people who could be making 250k as well) but I’m sure the ones who are successful and making large sums of money are, in many cases, working their butts off as well.
It is my opinion that most middle class people are perfectly CAPABLE of the hard work involved in pursuing those kinds of careers but have made the choice (whether consciously or unconsciously) to live a more normal lifestyle. The trade-off in getting to work 40 hours a week, sleep in your own bed every night, see your kids grow up, etc. is that you probably aren’t going to make as much as those willing to put in those 80 hour (or more) weeks at work.
Not everyone who is rich is Paris Hilton and was born with a silver spoon. There are plenty of people who became rich because of the effort they put in, and yes social mobility is possible. I and many others I know who are now working upper middle class professional jobs grew up in normal middle class families. My parents themselves worked their way up from poverty into normal blue collar middle class lives.
If you mean household, I can think of a couple. One if a pair of specialty physicians, the other is a businessman. The physicians were Obama supporters, who ran on ending the upper income tax cuts.
An annual income of 150k a year for an individual sounds impressive, but when I find out that a lot of the time the people earning that income work 70-80 hours a week it is less impressive. That works out to about $35-40/hr. Which is an extremely good income, but not rich.
I wonder what percentage of people who earn 150k+ a year work less than 40-50 hours a week.
50 hours a week? Hah! Try a minimum of 60 and sometimes up to 80, and being accessible 24-hours a day, even during vacations.
It’s like **lavenderviolet **said. I could work a normal 40-hour a week job and leave my responsibilities and the office at 5 PM every day. But I chose the path I took long ago because I wanted the lifestyle and comfort I have now.
My husband and I had one year where we made just about 250k jointly. I was working a bit overtime and my husband was charging at least 60 hr/wk, which meant he was in the office 80-100 hrs/wk. It really sucked.
People/couples I know socially or are related to: 2 for sure, maybe another one or two that I don’t.
People I know from working with: probably a good dozen managing directors of the consulting firm I worked at, as well as several executives for the other companies I’ve worked for.
Upper middle class vs. rich (vs. wealthy) are kind of irrelevant terms. But really, with a household income of $300,000 for 2 people you’re still earning nearly six times the median household income. It’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy about your expensive to maintain “comfortable” lifestyle when you’re intentionally choosing to live in one of the costliest real estate markets in the country, limiting the buying power of your exceptionally high income.
But in a proper society, it shouldn’t be expected that you would feel one way or another about how much money someone else makes. It should be none of your concern.
Let’s face it, the only reason people get so hepped up about some people making lots of money is because they feel they should be entitled to some of it. And that ain’t right.
My household income is either 250k or close to it but the comments about working hours are definitely true.
I don’t think I’ve worked a 40 hour week since I started this job. This was a 4 day week for our office (Monday was Simcoe Day here in Ontario) and I am still billing for 50 hours and that was predicting an 8 hr day for Friday and it definitely wasn’t. (Timesheet deadline is Thursday midnight).
My husband doesn’t work excessive office hours but he’s never had a vacation that he hasn’t spent at least a couple hours a day on the phone and he’s on call 24/7 for any escalated incidents. Between the two of us our cellphones wake us up at least once a week.
Now I live in Canada, and if we got to keep 2/3 of our pay I’d be estatic. Our marginal tax rate is looks it up 40.1%, and that’s the same rate for anything over 128,800. We can usually get that down to a little with deductions but as much as I groan about the numbers at tax time I wouldn’t want to switch countries with you for tax reasons.
That’d actually be a sort of interesting poll. How much do you actually earn per average hour of labor, rather than how much do you make in aggregate. Easy for me if I exclude job perks like health insurance coverage, as I’m paid by the hour. But do most salaried folks working 60-80 hr work weeks actually bother to work out their hourly pay rate?
Shit, I can see your user name and know where you fall in the $250k debate. Listen, I hit that club on a good year (and this is not a good year), and I betray my tax bracket then by saying there’s a lot of good things the government can do and should do, and I don’t mind paying for it.
I posted this in another thread. America is full of entitled weenies. You don’t hear the wealthy being grateful for being born in a country where they can acquire or even inherit such wealth. Every self made person in the US should be grateful they we’re born in China where the odds of making it to $250k are much greater than here. Me, I grew up poor, got a great state school education, and hate paying taxes but don’t begrudge doing so. YMMV
