To answer the OP, the amount of income that is rich is $184,375.90. No more and no less.
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Naaaa. My cleaning lady and pool service is less than 300 per month total. That certainly won’t even allow me to lease a Lexus let alone buy two first class airline tickets per year.
I do like the definition of “rich” being that you don’t have to think about how you are going to pay for something you want. I am sure I will never get there but I’d sure love to know what it feels like. 
Certainly, it does depend on your location. I was offered a job in San Francisco recently for 150% my current salary. That amount wouldn’t let me live near the life style I live in Florida. I couldn’t even afford a small home without being “house poor”. So yes, absolutely, it is all relative.
My parents paid about that for their home just north of Boston. In 1978.
weeps softly
Along with **DrDeth ** and several others, I suspect.
Seriously though, Malitharn, good for you, and good luck. Moving is a great big expensive pain in the ass, but like you said, this too shall pass. Congrats on your new house!
How about the cost of putting in the pool in the first place, plus the cost of electricity to filter it, gas to heat it, etc? Do you get that your average non-rich person does not own a pool and hire someone to keep it clean? Just having one is a huge, huge luxury.
I know something about the cost of pools, because I was lucky enough to grow up with one…although my parents considered us kids the “cleaning service.” 
Being rich is not what you make, its what you keep. A lot of 30k per year folks can retire rich, and a lot of rich people can retire very poor.
Yes, but not softly. 
Gah. You’d have a real problem finding that house here for 10X that, and I am sure the esteemed Giraffe will back me up on that. 
I forget where I saw it but this seems apropos:
‘A man is rich if his income is more than his wife can spend; it behoves a woman to find such a man.’
Thanks. The house-buying nightmare began in early June; we finally closed on the house the first week in September, and the next day I managed to break my ankle, which made moving in just that much more fun. Such stress, oy, I never want to go through that again. But it’s MY house now; nothing fancy, but all mine, and I’ve got TWO ovens and a fireplace in my kitchen/dining room! And I’m sure eventually I’ll finish unpacking boxes. And I’ll get a kitten. It’s not a home without a kitten. We have a guinea pig, but she just sits on your chest and goes “wheek wheek” and then pees on you and refuses to chase the jingle ball.
I swore once I was all settled I was going to spend an evening drunk off my ass, but I haven’t been able to afford the booze.
[QUOTE=Foxy40]
$300.00 a month for a cleaning lady and a pool service? How often does the cleaning lady come? Thats pretty cheap. Our cleaning lady runs us about $240 a month. She comes every two weeks and cleans.
Income alone is only part of the story. Consider two different people:
Person A goes to college on student loans and working part time. He graduates with $50,000 in student loan debt. He marries a fellow student with loan debt and no assets. They live in a town away from their family and have no support system. They both land good jobs, and collectively make $120,000 per year. But from that money they have to build their entire life - cars, clothes, house, furniture, household goods, etc.
Person B comes from a nice upper class home. He goes to college on his parent’s nickel. His graduation present is a new car. He marries another person from a well-to-do background. They get married, and their wedding present from the folks is a down payment on a house. Collectively, they only make $80,000.
Which couple do you think will have a higher standard of living, for a long time to come? No debt, a good start on life, a family support system to help with everything from moving to babysitting to helping with home improvement projects and repairs?
The other couple has to pay close to $100 for dinner and a movie, because they have to get babysitters. And when their kids are old enough, they’ll go to daycare, which is getting more and more expensive. And after school care as well, once the kids get into elementary.
For at least the first five to ten years of their marriage, they’ll be putting more of their disposable income into paying off debt. And as their finances improve, they’ll just pick up new debt like a big mortgage and car payments. They’ll need a hell of a lot more than $120,000/yr to live even an upper middle class lifestyle.
Doesn’t the price of a new car depreciate 20 percent the second if goes off the lot? What kind of an investment is that?
Oh no, not again … that horse was recently beaten to death over here (starting with post #13). 
I wonder if anyone here does regard themselves as rich, and what is the highest income of someone who believes themselves “not rich”. We have an income over the $250k benchmark but do not regard ourselves as rich.
We have several nice vacations a year (often long weekends), spend $150 - $200 on dinner for two maybe once a month, have a large home (not too expensive around here - $400k gets you 4,000 square feet) with a small mortgage and pay cash for new cars.
On the other hand, we buy modest cars and mine is over 6 years old. We have one of the smaller houses in our typical middle-class neighborhood. We do not use a lawn service or have a pool. We do have a cleaner, but only once every 2 weeks. We shop at Target and “value stores” and most certainly could not retire (I’m late 40s) and maintain our lifestyle. While I know nothing about my neighbors’ incomes, from the exterior we probably look to be typical for our neighborhood. Of course, our neighbors could be in debt up to their eyeballs to maintain their lifestyles.
It’s not just income but lifestyle. If you are working 60-80 a week to make a huge salary, you may be wealthy in terms of, um, wealth, but if practically your every waking moment is spent on the job, you’ve essentially sacrificed yourself to that job. You get to be wealthy, whatever that means, but your chances to be you are quite limited.
Then again, there are plenty of poor people working two full time jobs that pay minimum wage or thereabouts, or two minimum-wage part time jobs and commuting between them by bus, just to make enough money to survive. They have as little free time as the rich person, and their chances to be themselves are even more limited, because when they aren’t working their lack of income limits their chances for recreation. People with that much drive and energy are being wasted by our society … if they’re willing to work that hard, we ought to educate them and see what they can do for us. Of course, that’s just the foolish liberal social engineer in me …
Still, a money trap is a money trap, no matter the amount of money involved.
[QUOTE=Caffeine.addict]
We pay about the same amount of money for our cleaning lady and pool service. The pool service is about $60 a month or something like that (my wife handles all bills) and the cleaning lady/maid is dirt cheap. She is something like $250 a month, and of course we tip her nicely to attempt to keep some loyalty. But the 250 a month to her probably equals about 450 because of taxes. She works on 5 other homes and pulls in roughly 2500 a month.
I think the point is that you have to account for your car as an expense rather than an investment.
Assuming you’re not living in Bali or some other very low cost place with a weak local currency. To be at the bottom rung of wealthy (eg, fuck you money) you need:
-Nice house
-nice cars for all adults (not ferrari’s but a decent new set of wheels every 3-5 years)
-eat out all you want
-at least part time help in the home
-not worry about paying for your kids private education and university
-take a couple of nice overseas vacations per year staying in $200/night hotels but maybe flying economy class.
-buy any kind of standard consumer item any time you want without asking “how much does it cost”
-$2 million in net liquid assets above and beyond any debt
-you don’t have to work more than about a day a week overseeing your money working for you (when you get rich, you pay other people to oversee your money)
When I worked investment banking, $10m free and clear was FUCK YOU money. $5m was doable but only “drop dead” money. Now, in corporate America, most of my colleagues think debt free house, vacation house, your toys and $2m is fuck you money.
Me, I got 3 bambina’s to feed, and that probably blows out any shot I had at getting to fuck you money.
I guess I missed the part where anyone called it an investment. I thought Least Original User Name Ever was going off on a little tangent in response to Sam Stone’s post – all Sam did was call car payments “debt.”
If you are trying to live off this $2 million, current conventional wisdom is not to draw more than 4% of assets. $80k a year doesn’t come close to funding the rest of the lifestyle you mention.
I hear ya. After 23 years in the military, having very little and scraping to be able to retire with $30K in the bank (and a goodly part of that was acquired from my dead mother), I have little concept of how much is enough to have in the bank. Therefore, I don’t buy “toys” and I don’t have any debt. The latter probably makes me rich in the sense that income far exceeds outflow. I’m somewhat envious of people with boats/snowmachines/cabins, etc., but not enough to sink my ship with debt. With retirement looming, I’m nervous even with a substantial nest egg.