Probably Class X. or the people who are not too concerned with social classes. It really doesn’t take a ton of money to do a Kenya safari. But it does take a certain mindset. Not everyone fits neatly.
Same here. I’ve done most of these.
Camping is by far my favorite. While I prefer to rustic camp outside of the organized areas, do you have and idea how much money is invested by the people who don’t dry camp? Travel trailers, RV’s, ATV’s, boats, and all of the toys are not within the easy reach of the lower middle class.
What you describe for “middle class” actually reminds me more of the lower middle class (not necessarily financially). People that have no concept that there are better things out there, and go to these places just because they can’t think of something better. Keep in mind, I’ve done all of these except for a cruise (which doesn’t interest me).
Mexican resorts (the ones we know about) fall into the same category for me as Disneyland etc. Cancun is definitely middle class. Those with knowledge and money go to classier places.
I’m not trying to dispute your list; just offering my own perspective, because like for this whole thread, everything is relative!
I think that your class is dependent on your location, but not in the way most people think. Sure, there is some adjustment for local salaries and cost of living. But what seems to happen, more often than not, is that as neighborhoods or towns gentrify, the lower classes tend to be priced out.
Take NYC for example. There are few “middle class” or “working class” families in Manhattan. A few years ago, they may have lived in Alphabet City or Harlem or other less desirable neighborhoods. But for the most part, the Outer Boroughs like Brooklyn, Queens, Statan Island or the Bronx are where they live. Or they have moved out into the suburbs and take the train in.
Another example is Greenwich, CT. The average household income for Greenwich is about $150,000. That doesn’t mean people making $150,000 in Greenwich are middle class. It means there are few middle class people in Greenwich.
Yet living in Manhattan could be seen as a luxury. Take two people who work at the same place in Manhattan. Both make $200k. The first lives in Manhattan, the second lives farther out and commutes. It could be a pretty long commute; I know someone who lives in PA west of Trenton who did this for 20 years. Is the commuter any wealthier than the NYCer? The NYCer just decided to use her disposable income to live in a more expensive home that had desirable perks (short commute, being in Manhattan, etc.)
I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but at a certain point you have to consider that some things are not perks. My wife and I left Manhattan, and may leave San Francisco in the next year or so, because we wanted a family. We did our budget in Manhattan and couldn’t come up with a way to stay if we wanted to start having kids. So we moved. Is having kids a perk? Sort of, but I think that’s stretching the term a bit. Similar thing with commute.
So, I’ll add to my “middle class” definition that you have a reasonable commute and are financially able to support a reasonable number of children if you choose to. I guess, I mean thtat middle class is the ability to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.
We don’t have kids but we do have a lot of extra money that we spend on entertainment and the like. We spend lots of time at the theater, the opera, movies, buying books and other things like that. We also make weekly trips to Zabars because we just love it so much. All told we have several hundred dollars we spend just on entertaining ourselves after we’ve put money away for all of our savings and stuff. If we had a kid we could easily cut back on our spending. We also spend more on rent than we necessarily have to…we looked at lots of places and found several closer to $1200 but we wanted the ammenities that are part of our current place so we are glad to pay a bit more.
It should also be pointed out that we get paid a tremendous amount to work in NYC. I left Texas doing the exact same job I do here making $28,000 and started my job here at $41,000. Basically I got a $13,000 a year raise to move to NYC. My fiance couldn’t find work outside of waiting tables for almost 4 years before he moved here and got his job as an assistant in his office, so that is at least $15,000 a year more than he earned living in podunk CT. Our income would probably put us in the wealthy category instead of middle class if we lived somewhere like Kansas but in Kansas neither of us could command such a large salary, so we would probably be middle class there just like we are here.
Not everyone would benefit living in NYC. A huge reason I moved here was because I really love the cultural part of the city…the museums, theaters, operas, galleries, etc. are what I do in my spare time. There are lots of people who would hate that and are much happier going hunting on the weekends or planting a garden in their yard and they are better off living somewhere else. We’ve looked at the possiblility of having kids and it is completely doable for us in the city (so long as we make some adjustments to our budget) but for lots of people it wouldn’t be because they have different priorities. None of us are right or wrong, we just have different things that are important to us.
This, plus the “investment and savings” may be something like paying off debts, not necessarily putting away. And what line of work you’re in doesn’t define your socioeconomic class, to me. Among other things, because where does that leave my brother? He’s in construction (so… “worker class”? although in Spanish that covers everybody who works for a living); his wife is a doctor (so… “upper middle”?) - what do you guys do with a family like that, take the average?
Having lived in half a dozen countries, some of which have wildly varying costs from one place to another, it’s just not something I’ll try to represent with a figure or even a range of figures.
I’m floored by the idea that people are throwing numbers like 60k around for a definition of middle class. A household making 120k a year is middle class to you? 120k annual household income is RICH, and by such a big margin it’s embarrassing to consider the idea that people making that only think of themselves as middle class. Middle class people have to worry about bills. They don’t get to decide where to live, because their income and reliability of their vehicle and credit rating and commute time allowance conspire to force a particular location on them. Middle class people have to take the bus while they’re saving up to get the car fixed. Middle class people don’t have pensions, or stock accounts, or equity in a home. 120k for one household for one year is easily double what middle class people can expect to make before they’ve been with the same company for 15 years and been promoted five times, and even then a middle class person would be absolutely loony to imagine he and his wife could make 120k annual combined ever in their lifetime.
But ‘rich’ doesn’t necessarily equal upper class to me. Upper class is more about background and family than current financial circumstances. I could win the lottery tomorrow, but I’d still be middle class.
A working class person could be living off welfare, but could equally be a person who has a 40 hour job that pays the bills.
A middle class person could be in a well paid position, but be carrying a lot of debt, or could be extremely well off with plenty of spare cash to go around.
I think the definitions are broader than most people think.
“Class” is a really difficult concept to pin down. It’s entirely possible, for example, to be Lord Doublebarelled-Lastname but actually be completely skint and only have a house to live in because your Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather was given the family home by King Henry VIII or something like that.
Similarly, it’s also entirely possible to have vast sums of money, huge tracts of land, a diversified investment portfolio, and many objet d’art and still be a complete bogan/chav/redneck/you get the idea.
In short, it’s not about money or wealth, but about general attitude and the way someone goes about doing things, IMHO.
By your description I was “rich” when I was making $25k. Granted, it was just me; I chose not to have to support anyone else at the time.
That’s ok: by even sven’s, my mother and her widow’s pension are super rich.
I think that worrying about bills and living paycheck to paycheck are poor indicators of class, because people tend to spend in proportion to what they make, and some people overspend. Someone who has money problems when he makes $25k when his neighbor doesn’t is likely to continue to have money problems when he makes $50k.
Also, looking at a few luxuries as middle- or upper-class-only expenditures doesn’t work so well because people have different values. Some families may think it’s important to drive new, expensive cars, live in big houses, and wear expensive clothes. Others may prefer to send the kids to private school and spend money on music lessons. Fancy vacations? Maybe they did without during the rest of the year and survived on salami and cheese sandwiches during the trip.
People often think they could never afford X, but they often could if they did without Y. I don’t care about what I drive, as long as it works. I’d be surprised if I’ve spent >$200 on non-shoe clothing over the past five years. I DO care about visiting friends and family who are scattered around the country, so I don’t think twice about dropping $400 on a plane ticket several times a year. It has more value TO ME, so that’s what I spend money on.
Cutting back a few hundred a month wouldn’t approach the cost of daycare that would allow a couple to both keep their jobs. That was our problem. Running the numbers (1200 per month per kid MINIMUM for daycare, and that was for a place we weren’t terribly comfortable with. No one spoke any English on the day we visited. Closer to 1500 per month for a place that is clean) it became obvious that it wouldn’t work for us. I guess if one has family to take care of the kids, it might be possible.
Now that we’ve actually had the first kid a few months, it’s become obvious that we underestimated the cost! But, you’re right, if we hadn’t wanted kids, we could have pulled it off. I guess when you’re middle class, you have to pick which perks you want in life, including kids, and when you’re rich you can have all of them?
I am floored by the idea that you fail to take into account cost of living in different places. Yes, in French Lick, Indiana, I suppose $120K would be an embarrassment of riches. In pretty much any major city on the east coast though, you can make $60K each and definitely have the problems you’ve described.
Sorry dude… your numbers and concepts are a bit off there. My parents, while not making $120k, made about $100k (almost split 50/50 between their incomes), and BOTH of them have pensions, they decided where they got to live, they can get their car fixed, have their house almost paid off, etc…
And you know what they did before they retired? Mom was a elementary school teacher, and Dad was a middle-manager civil servant.
Those are hardly “rich” or even “upper middle class” type careers by any stretch.
What you’re describing is lower middle class, or even working class by most people’s definition, and by the government’s also, if I’m not mistaken.
This is especially true outside the U.S. in places where class is much more structured. Lord Doublebarelled-Lastname is noble by birth, regardless of how much money he has or doesn’t have. And where no matter how much money you have, if you were a commoner when you were born, a commoner you remain. In the U.S. where there is more social mobility and a dismissal of (and fascination with) the concept of “betters” social and income class are more closely tied.
In the U.S. social class is much more tied to wealth
Mosier’s not really that far off if we think about it a bit.
What has happened in the last 20-30 years is the “middle class” got hollowed out.
When I think “middle class”, note the words in the name, I think of the people in the middle, the center, of the income distribution.
If anyone goes back to that NY Times class calculator and fiddles with the settings to arrive at the 50th percentile, that’s middle class by that definition.
And that’s really pretty damn poor compared to many definitions of “middle class” we’ve seen in this thread which amount to “succeeding at the baseline American Dream of a house, 2 kids, 2 cars, & some savings after some modest toys.”
In the 50s and 60s, maybe 2/3rds of Americans could honestly define themselves as the latter. Now it’s more like a quarter. And it’s unattainable by the other 3/4ths, many of whom were raised to expect to be part of that definition of middle class.
I consider it “upper-middle class”. All these things people mention - commutes, where to live, getting their car fixed, education, credit ratings, where to work, etc. Having to worry about all these things is what makes you middle class.
Your belief in the impossibility of making $120,000 a year makes you middle or even working class.
Your “class” is defined by the traits and behaviors and thought processes that you associate with what is “normal”. These are established pretty much as you grow up by your interactions with and observations of the people around you. People outside of your class are typically viewed with derision and contempt. Lower classes are viewed as “losers”, “gheto”, “simple”, “rural” or “low-class”. Higher classes are viewed as “pretentious”, “extravagent”, “corrupt”, or “elitist”. In both instances, other classes are viewed as completely foreign.
Clearly people would rather not drop in class but rising in class often incurs the contempt and envy of their peers. IMHO, what keeps people “middle class” is an overwhelming need to “fit in” and “be normal” relative to everyone else.
Your mother had a career with what I assume was at least a bachelor’s degree, and possibly a master’s (my wife is an elementary school teacher with a master’s), and your father was a government employee in charge of other people. That’s much higher than average people can aspire to.