Well lazy people are going to be lazy.
I know plenty of people who started their own businesses and are doing pretty well. I know plenty more people who worked their up in the business they are in both corporate and non and are doing pretty well.
Where you live in the country makes a big difference too. 100k in most parts of New Jersey in no way will make you rich. The cost of living is very high. Between me and my girlfriend we are at about the 250 level. I’m a cop and she is a mid-level manager in pharma research. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and a decent standard of living but we are in no way rich. There is a big difference between being rich and having a good job.
Median household income in Santa Clara County California, (Silicon Valley) is > $90K.
It strongly depends on where you live.
Yes. For instance I have seen comparable houses to ours in South Carolina in the 200-300k range, Here they are 600-700. And property taxes are much much higher. Which of course is why people retire from here and move south. Your money goes a lot further.
It’s $250K that I (and the article) were referring to as “rich”. 21 percent qualifies as “common” in my book.
Lots of people think that way, or even call incomes of several hundred thousand “middle class” because they are not Bill Gates. But stop and think about that word “middle”, unpack the term a bit. If your household income is $52,000 per year, you are a bit above the middle: there are more households that have a lower income than yours than there are households who have more. (And that’s within a very wealthy country, so we’re not even factoring in how this fits into global terms, given that 95 percent of the world’s population gets by on an income of less than five grand a year, often a lot less.)
So how then can a hundred grand be “mid middle class”? It just makes you sound like a lot of the population is essentially invisible to you, which is the way the author Barbara Ehrenreich describes many affluent people’s position vis-a-vis the majority of Americans that are around the median or lower.
Cite? I’m exactly that tall, but would be very surprised if that put me at the 80th percentile of American men.
That’s because middle class doesn’t refer to a statistical middle, but rather a socio economic culture. And if you break down American culture into a mere three classes…
Middle class people work for a living - most people making $100k a year are not at the quit their jobs point. Middle class people tend to own their own homes (which they have a mortgage on) - but don’t tend to own more than one home. Middle class people tend to save for their retirements and their kids educations, but saving enough is a concern. Middle class people might inherit some money from their parents or grandparents, but it isn’t life changing trust fund amounts of money. Middle class people take vacations away from home, but usually not every year unless its close to home, a friends cabin, or camping. If they own “toys” they are middle class toys - a small boat, a jetski, a snowmobile. They own cars, which they generally take out loans for. They can do financial planning thinking towards retirement, college…
Poor people also work for a living, but don’t have job stability. They don’t tend to own their own homes and can’t afford to save for retirement or college. Vacations are something that happens when you are out of work, and you don’t travel for them (you might visit relatives or take a splurge vacation with windfall cash once or twice in your life). You won’t inherit anything, because no one you know has anything to leave you. They don’t own cars, or if they do, they own cars they have a difficult time keeping operational. Their financial planning involves making sure they’ll have money for rent each month.
Rich people don’t have to work for a living - investments give them enough income to support themselves - although they might choose to work, that isn’t where the majority of their income comes from. They often own more than one home - and they might own major toys - a big boat, an airplane, a expensive sports car. Vacations are a regular thing usually involving air travel. They don’t really need to save for retirement, and when the kids college rolls around, they’ll sell some stock. Their financial planning is generational - trust funds - grandchildren, estate planning - but they frequently have very little concept of how to do any near term planning (i.e. having to make rent is often completely alien, or so far in the past for them that the idea of budgeting for the month seems strange).
The problem with this division is that our “poor” group becomes a LOT bigger, and our middle class is huge.
Men quit growing by age 20, and here’s a couple of calculators that say 5’10" is 80th percentile if you use 20 (or 19.99) years.
http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/usefultools/l/bl_kids_centils.htm
I think how you get paid is also a factor. A lot of professional people are on salary. Their managers can push them to work more hours without having to compensate them. They may get promises of eventual bonuses and raises but that can be tenuous.
I always worked on hourly wages even after a few promotions. Avoiding going on salary was one reason I turned down some promotions.
The result was that when I worked extra hours, I always got paid for it. And there were a couple of years I worked a lot of overtime and made over $100,000.
Wiki says 5’10" is the average height for a male in the United States. Straight up middle of the middle.
As for income, the poverty level is about 20k and the 1% cut off $394k. And everyone else is in the middle. (By most academic models)
Though, if only 7% of workers make over $100k, and only 6% make between 75k and 100k, it seems the middle is getting squashed flat.
I propose five classes instead of three. Poor; working class; middle class; affluent; wealthy. If we did it this way, a lot of the people who are calling themselves middle class would have to be reclassified as affluent.
I’d go with that - but they you have to simultaneously shake the idea that these have anything to do with statistical quintiles. The affluent (of which I am definitely one) rub shoulders with the wealthy enough to know that that is NOT them - I’m not buying a private villa in Mexico in this lifetime (although staying in a friend of a friends villa was wonderful), this boat is not in my future, though watching them pull in and out of the marina at the condo we stayed in in Hilton Head was nice. And this suit won’t make it into my wardrobe any time soon - although I do own a designer piece or two second hand or snagged off a clearance rack from less pricey designers than Chanel.
I agree.
The term becomes meaningless if the single guy who makes $30K and rents an inner city studio apartment is in the same socioeconomic class as the home-owning couple making $250K. After paying for their varied expenses, they may very well end up with the same amount of money at the end of the month. But their realities are very different. And very likely, their outlook is different.
I have a coworker who owns two houses, three cars, and a boat. She’s relatively new to married life, so I can understand why she would think that many of these assets technically belong to her husband, not her. But I can’t figure out why she constantly insists she’s poor. Not middle class. But poor. She may be being ironic, sarcastic, hyperbolic, or whatever literary term is appropriate, but it drives me nuts. And this is a person who should know better, because she was raised in actual poverty.
When a person has this mentality–that their economic situation is more accurately represented by their liquid assets rather than their net worth–I can’t help but think that it does affect their opinion with regard to truly poor people. “I’m not rich either, but you don’t see lining up for food stamps!” The things we say, even in a joking matter, are a reflection of our mindsets.
On the flip side, quite a few young adults think they are middle class. They graduated from four-year universities. They may be living in comfortable conditions (parents’ house or a parental subsidized apartment). Maybe they are still driving the car that their parents bought them in high school. These things scream “middle class”. But they are working a minimum wage job. They don’t have savings. They have their healthcare subsidized by their parents or the government. They have the trappings of middle-classdom, but they are trappings that they inherited. If their parents weren’t there to provide a safety net, we’d just call them poor. But I don’t know how I would classify these people. They are different from the 25-year-olds who never went to college and has no hope of ever being promoted from menial jobs. But they aren’t the middle class of yore either. Maybe class distinctions are another thing that millenials will transform.
If you are 2 paycheck away from being poor it doesn’t matter if you have a nice house or an apartment.
I don’t understand this mentality. Can you explain it to me?
Because the way I see it, someone who owns a nice house isn’t poor. Even if they don’t have money in the bank, they still own something that’s worth at least tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have to go through some trouble to turn that into cash. But they are in nowhere near as bad a shape as the person who doesn’t have anything.
At the very least, a person who can’t pay their mortgage can still live in that house for awhile before foreclosure proceedings. A person who misses payment on their rent can be evicted the very next day.
When someone with a house complains about being just as poor as someone without a house, I just can’t relate at all. It’s like me saying that minus my car, my dining-out expenses, and my Comcast bill, I’m in the same financial boat as someone making minimum wage. I’d have to be delusional to believe something like this, let alone say it out loud.
Princeton did some study that concluded 75 thousand is the magic number. Though I have known thrifty people who do well with considerably less.
And arguably, there are only two classes. Those with enough money, and those without enough money.
And frankly, while I understand it, its hard to feel sorry for a family who made $150k for a few years, then face a layoff and have no savings and no equity, but quickly picked of the trappings of affluence. Where when a family who is making $50k suddenly faces a layoff, I do feel for them - it requires incredibly frugality from that family to have saved a cushion.
Because average household income is like $50k a year?
But you’re right. $100k isn’t particularly “rich”. It’s upper-middle class. That is to say, it is towards the upper end of the vast majority of people who work for a living and whose livelihood is tied to the whims and fortunes of their employer. If you live someplace like New York or San Francisco, it’s “getting by”.
$100k doesn’t even seem that particular hard to achieve. I would expect with most professions requiring a college degree, one would achieve a six figure salary at some point in their career. Then again, there are a lot of crappy dead-end jobs.
The director of my division, who is a lawyer, makes six figures. And of course the agency director makes that much, as do the regional directors.
But most state government employees will never make that much. Neither my boss or his boss make that much, nor do I. And we are scientists and engineers (Ph.Ds and P.Es). We do enjoy great benefits and job security, so I’m not complaining. But it is quite easy to never make above six figures if you work for the government.
You’re flashing your elitism when you imply a professional job that doesn’t earn six figures is a “crappy dead-end” one. Notions like this need to go extinct right now.
Even at that, the article they’re using (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf)
shows the 75th percentile to be 5’11.5" and the 85th percentile to be 6’1.6", so the midpoint between them is just a hair over 6’ tall.
Which doesn’t really disprove my point- a 6’ tall man isn’t what people typically call “tall”- that’s reserved for 6’2" and over, just like “rich” isn’t 100k… that’s reserved for something else- generally speaking, not income but wealth.
They are talking about household income rather than personal income though. That commonly includes two income earner households. 100K for two people here (suburban Boston) is definitely middle-middle class. When I was married, I don’t think we could have survived (figuratively) on less than 100K and I am not talking about pointless luxuries. It is just that expensive for basic needs and a lot of people move to lower cost of living areas for that reason. I make over 100K personally as a single with kids and my ex makes much more than that. I am not going to claim that we are poor by any stretch but money definitely gets tight with two youngish children.
The thing that many people don’t understand is just how much it costs to live what was once a typical ‘American Dream’ type life. That is, not a rich one, just things that a middle-class family was once able to easily afford even without higher degrees or any degree at all.
- A house
- Retirement savings (up to 20+ years funded mostly by you personally if you work in the private sector; add that huge benefit to your pay if you work in government or have a pension)
- Savings for kid’s college
- An occasional vacation (optional)
- Health, property and other insurance
- Vehicles for commuting + gas + car insurance
- Emergency savings
- Food
Those costs vary by location and circumstances but I knew my break-even point was more than $10K a month when I was married. That is before you can buy anything whatsoever for yourself including food, entertainment, clothes for work or anything else. Everything else was a bill that you had to work for to afford or you would start to fall into a hole that was very difficult to get out of.
It is a little better since I got divorced because I can control my own circumstances and expenditures but I could not take any job that pays less than 75K because it is essentially the same as nothing. I couldn’t pay my bills and would have to try something else very drastic.
The most free cash I ever had to this day even in absolute terms 25 years ago was when I was a bartender in college and could make a few hundred dollars in tips on a shift with nobody else making a claim to it. High income definitely doesn’t scale up the way some people think it does especially once you have more people to support.