What Did You Consider "Rich"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Buzzfeed had this question that was posed on (I think) Reddit.

When you were a kid, what was it that in your mind showed a family or person had lots of money?

I grew up in the 60s & 70s in Minnesota. My mom stayed home for most of my childhood (she was a telephone operator and worked as a cashier in a grocery store at different times for a year or 2 - PT jobs). My dad worked for the city water and gas company repairing furnaces, etc. So in my mind, a dad that wore a suit to work was the epitome of a rich family. Also, a household with 2 cars was pretty ritzy.

2

Someone with $300,000+ dollars a year in income.

OR

More than $2.5M in wealth.

3

Circa 1976 I would have said if you earned a million dollars over your lifetime, or six-figures a year, you were rich.

Now you could do the former and still qualify for public assistance half your life and the latter is more what I would call middle-class.

4

You thought that as a little kid?!

5

I’ll define “kid” as up until I became a teenager (born in 1969):

Your parents owned a home (we always rented).
You had a new car, or more than 1 car in your household. (we had clunkers)

6

My close friend’s dad was a doctor. They had a big house with a pool and a cabin in the mountains where they went for ski vacations.

Honestly, still a pretty good description of rich.

7

Someone that knew that the rent or mortgage could get paid without “Hell Week”. Hell Week was the week before the rent or mortgage payment. It was when all hell broke loose, the fights, the selling of the stuff around the house, rice for dinner. Going to bed when it was dark because the lights were “too damned expensive to run.”

A refrigerator with Sunny Delight or Kool-Aid in it. Lunch meat and stuff like that.

Central Heat and Air Conditioning. I grew up in Super Hot Fucking Texas, and there was a lack of air conditioning in my poor town. People died each summer because it was so hot. I guess they still do, but they report it as “heat related death” instead of “poverty.” It was required of the young people to go check on the old during the heat waves of over 105 degrees.

Wheat Bread. I don’t know why. You just knew you were in a house was better than yours if you saw Wheat Bread.

Driving a car that was new, or at least everything worked in. No bailing wire or tape or holes in the floor.

“Rich people” weren’t afraid of the police like everyone else was. I don’t remember my family ever breaking the law, but it didn’t stop the police from fucking with us on the daily.

People that went to the dentist at all.

People that had “check ups” at the doctor, I mean, why were people going to the doctor that weren’t sick?

Anyone that had a piano in their house. My dad’s brother did and I spent hours just staring at it. Something in a house that was so large and just to make music on?

Anyone that goes on a family vacation. Our travels were just because someone died or was getting married or going into our out of the military service.

Cable TV. I had never even seen cable TV until I got to college.

These are what me and my buddies used to think “rich” meant.

8

60s and into the 70s. Plenty of people had a house and two cars without being rich. We had a house and two cars but nothing else, when the old TV I remember stopped working we didn’t get another one for a long time. Short of being a millionaire it was that extra stuff, a vacation home, a boat of significant size, large multi-acre properties in the in the inner suburbs, really fancy old homes and mansions. I never really knew how much money people like that had though.

9

I grew up in a row house, back before realtors got all fancy and called them town homes. To my mind, if you lived in a detached house, you were doing pretty well.

And if you were really rich, you went on vacations that didn’t involve visiting relatives and sleeping on their floor.

When I was a kid, I thought we were typical middle class. As I matured, I realized we were pretty low down on the economic totem pole. We never went hungry, but we also didn’t have a vacation that involved a hotel stay till I was in high school.

10

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. Rich people took vacations on airplanes and stayed in hotels. We took driving vacations and pulled a trailer.

I didn’t even know how much my dad made until I applied for financial aid in college. He made $18,000 a year in 1974 as a middle manager at a defense plant.

11

Grew up in the 60’s.

Rich people had color TVs and drove Corvettes.

12

When I was a young person a million dollars would make you very rich. Now it is what you need to have in your 401k before retiring. My wife makes a million dollars every 10 years and that is a normal industry job.

Of course when I was young my parents bought this house and land I live in now for $2000. No I didn’t forget a zero. Now it is in the $350,000 range. There were minor improvements but no much more.

13

My parents bought our first house for about the same price in the late 50s. It’s worth about $1,000,000 now. Sure it was 60 years ago but a 500:1 increase in value is incredible.

14

When I was a kid, a rich person:
(1) Lived in a much nicer house than mine in a better neighborhood. Three bathrooms, central air, and a two-car garage were the minimum if you lived in the suburbs. A pool would be expected. An indoor pool was really nice. If you lived in the city, it should be at least a 3-bedroom in a nice doorman building in a good neighborhood and a parking spot in the garage.
(2) Had a nice vacation house.
(3) Traveled extensively. You had certainly flown to Europe many times and taken several beach vacations. You had opinions about restaurants and hotels in many American cities.
(4) Drove nice cars. Cadillac was good but an S-class Mercedes was better. You didn’t necessarily have to have a Rolls-Royce.
(5) Expected your kids to go to a competitive college, if not necessarily Harvard, and would never tell your kids there was any place they couldn’t attend for cost reasons if they got in.

I don’t think I knew any rich people by my definition although I knew people who checked most of those boxes.

15

When you can make at least ~150K off of investments without depleting your principal. So maybe around ~4 million in assets.

Obviously someone like that isn’t in the same league as mitt Romney but they will never have to worry about money again (barring some severe chronic illness that insurance doesn’t cover).

Plus a lot of the cost of living people face is debt. Mortgage debt, student loan debt, car loans, etc. If you eliminate those then you can live fairly reasonably.

16

Apparently I misread the OP. I am not rich in concentration. Or intelligence.

17

I think I’ve told the story before of when I overheard my father telling my mother that he had just gotten $100 in some way (I don’t remember how, and it’s not relevant to the story). I figured that meant we were rich, and could now afford anything. After all, there couldn’t possibly be more money in the world than that!

So at least at one point in my childhood, you were rich if you had $100.

Somewhat more broadly, I thought you were rich if you traveled by airplane. Our next-door neighbors, on both sides, regularly took vacations to far-off, exotic places like Florida and California, and did so by flying in planes. My family’s vacations were always by car, and tended to be limited to places you could drive to within a single day.

My parents were both teachers. They made a decent, but not extravagant, living. One of our neighbors was a lawyer, the other was an engineer. They weren’t hugely wealthy (they lived in the same neighborhood we did, after all), but it always felt like they had a lot more money than we did.

18

The family had a big house, lived an affluent lifestyle, and the grownups didn’t have to work.

19

A million dollars.

I didn’t think of folks with hundreds of thousands of dollars as rich because I had no concept of “hundreds of thousands”. But of a million, I did. Vaguely.

20

They had name brand food, ate fancy stuff like olives, and often ate out at restaurants when it wasn’t even someone’s birthday. They had multiple pairs of shoes- not just the ‘good’ pair and the junky old pair with holes for doing grubby things like painting. In fact, they paid other people to do the painting and things. The household would have at least 2 cars, and not because they were always breaking down. Pools are rare here (too cold) but they’d have a play room for the kid or kids, as well as their own bedroom each. They probably went skiing every year, or to exotic resorts, rather than camping or the YHA.

Snobs.

Ironically, the richest person I knew as a kid turns out to have been my Grandpa, who ate and dressed worse than the family living in a caravan in their parents back yard two doors down.