This seems to agree with what I’m saying. My opinion is that if the loss of an income could impact your life that severely, you are not upper middle class, just regular middle class (a situation where you are managing resources month-to-month). To me the defining feature of upper middle class is wealth security.
Maybe we have a different definition of these classes. I am deliberately avoiding dollar figures because they vary so much from location to location. I prefer to talk about things like how secure your basic needs are, the quality of the amenities you have, and the prospects of your retirement or kids education. To me that’s a more apples-to-apples comparision.
To me the defining feature of the upper class is wealth security. They are not dependent on employment.
The upper-middle class enjoy the trappings of the upper class, but are dependent on earned income and can fall out of that class if they can no longer work. Whether it takes one or two incomes to achieve upper-middle class status to me seems a bit irrelevant, because families operate as a unit. But it is worth noting that I live in a very expensive area where two high-end professional incomes may in fact be absolutely necessary to achieve those upper-class trappings.
Lots of reasons to move here. A big one is that when you switch jobs, your life is not disrupted. I moved here from NJ, which was a big change. Turned out the job I got here was awful, but when I moved to a new one the only change my family saw was a shorter commute. Not to mention that interviewing could be done over lunch. I only changed jobs once, for those who change a lot the advantage is even bigger.
We agree that the difference between true upper class and upper-middle class is the need for one person to have a job. True upper-class people require less than one job to stay afloat. (here I don’t mean somebody is working part-time at Starbucks to make helicopter payments, just the bullshit necessary to keep the financial plumbing in order).
But yeah, I’m staying with my opinion that upper-middle-class means you have a very comfortable life, but one person has to have a well-paying job to go with it. There might be two incomes but the second income is all gravy.
I agree with both of these posts. They jibe with my experience growing up UMC and living in an UMC town for 20 years. If you mow your own lawn, it’s because you want to, not because you need to.
The first thing I thought of was that UMC means you can afford top-notch medical and dental without having to sacrifice too much elsewhere. Maybe you take a less-expensive vacation the year you get hit with that huge dental bill, but you still take the vacation. It goes without saying that you can pay the dental bill.
To be fair, a lot of the people on Reddit are absolute twits. I got into it with a person on there who was bitterly bitching about affordable housing because they couldn’t find an apartment that was affordable on their entry level salary within 20 minutes of their workplace. :smack:
I pointed out that sometimes when you’re starting out, you have to make sacrifices- longer commutes, smaller apartments, roommates, etc… and got griped at because their problem HAD to be a systemic issue, and couldn’t possibly be inflexibility and unrealistic expectations on their part. :rolleyes:
Definitely. I was just noting that there are more features than a lot of people think.
The optimal situation is a job that has to pay at a national scale that lets you live in a low cost area. Then you make out like a bandit. Not many of those, but they exist.
Yeah, this is true. And a lot of 20-somethings on Reddit seem to think that they are oppressed just because they can’t afford to buy a house before they turn 30. It’s really hard to sympathize with that kind of “woe”. And when they throw out the word “oppressed”, I want to strangle them.
But it is also true that a lot of those 20-somethings were brought up by parents who taught them that only “losers” rent or that you’re throwing away money if you rent. And their parents are still telling them this, despite the fact that they have enormous student loan debt that needs to be paid off before they can even consider a mortgage. These 20-somethings grew up in suburban homes with big backyards and attended “good” schools and had all the trappings of a middle class life, and thus have specific images in mind when they think of “success”. So their angst over not being able to afford a house is actually rooted in concerns that are quite relatable. No one wants to be a disappointment to their parents. No one wants to be a “loser”.
Come on… it means you’re in the 99th income percentile for Columbus. You’re rich. Not super rich, of course, and it may not feel like it on a day to day basis, but you’re rich.
I live in similar neighborhood about and hour and a half down I-71. Many of my neighbors make the same amount you do. They’re rich too.
We’re comfortably upper middle class. 97th percentile. My wife has a 2019 Impreza and I have a 2009 Outback. We send our kid to an okayish private daycare but are really counting on getting in to one of the local public magnet preschools / kindergartens. We take maybe vacation per year where we fly somewhere domestic for a week. I pay somebody $30 to cut the grass in the summer, and somebody $75 to clean the house for four hours every two weeks. We save about 15% of gross income between retirement and cash savings. We’re budgeting for between 5-10k per year in necessary home improvements over the next few years (fixing the chimney, minor elective asbestos remediation, etc…) that we absolutely have to do before we would even consider something so frivolous as remodeling a bathroom.
If your family can afford a stay at home spouse AND regular vacations to Europe / Hawaii / whatever AND new Audis every few years, your family is “rich”, not any kind of “middle class.”
I didn’t say overseas vacations, I didn’t say luxury cars, I didn’t say cycling through new cars every few years. If you can’t argue with my scenario without adding in a whole bunch of wealth and luxury that I didn’t stipulate, please don’t bother, it only helps prove my point.
This is totally true. You can’t even tell people it’s a myth that the benefits of owning often wash out after factoring in all the costs (not least is the opportunity cost when you can’t take that sweet job in Seattle until you sell your money pit in Raleigh.
That is all true, yet I can sympathize their sense of betrayal that the “perfect life” requires a lot more investment than it used to, starting upfront with a painfully large education debt.
I will be the first to tell them “yeah, you’re way more screwed than we were” instead of saying “reduce your expectations”. And consider renting long-term instead of owning, for chrissakes.
I think that depends. I spent most of my 20s in Boston and later New York. Very few of my friends had any delusions of owning homes before turning 30 or so, unless we moved way out into the suburbs. I just sort of always assumed that most people in their 20s spent their first years out of college living with roommates in crappy apartments. THEN you find a crappy 1BR or studio in a trendy neighborhood.
My brother and his wife have similar income living out in Cincinnati as mid-level executives for Proctor & Gamble. They live what I consider to be an “upper middle class” lifestyle. A nice house in a nice neighborhood with two kids and pretty much able to afford most reasonable things. They are still part of the “middle class” because their fortunes are still tied to their jobs at a big company. If his company decided to send him to New York, he would have to make a choice of quitting (I don’t know what other large corporations are in Cincinnati) or trying to eke out a living in New York on a few hundred thousand dollars a year (like my wife and I )
And do you think their parents just had their houses handed to them? Our kid grew up in a nice house that we own. He has no desire to own a house at his age. But the idea that having to live in rented places and share living space when young is something new to millennials is crazy. All of my friends lived in apartments in their 20’s. A lot of us shared basement suites and such. First homes were purchased years after my friends were married and working and saving.
We had challenges millennials don’t have. For example, we bought our first home when mortgage rates were at 13%. Even though it was a modest house, the payments were huge because of the interest. And because of high interest rates house prices went down for years, and after living in that house for ten years we actually took a loss when selling it. Our money would have been much better off in the bank.
Millennials are also living in a time of historically low unemployment. When my wife and I were starting out, unemployment was over 8%, and getting a job - even a crap job in fast food or something - was not guaranteed. The idea that you had a right to live in expensive places was ridiculous - of all my friends, only one of them stayed in the city we were raised in. The rest of us all had to move to seek opportunity.
Don’t like the cost of living in San Fransisco? MOVE. You can get good jobs in any state. You can find cosmopolitan cities with good restaurants and lots of activities in many places in the U.S., and some of them are very affordable. My son was thinking of moving to Huntsville Alabama, and you can get a nice place there for less than we paid for our first home 30 years ago. No one has a right to live in a place they can’t afford - especially when millions of other people demand the same right.
Then there’s consumer goods. Clothes have never been cheaper. Mass transit has never been more available. Airplane travel has never been cheaper. Cars have never been better. They sucked back in the 80’s, and being young in the 80’s meant we drove cars made in the 60’s and 70’s, and learned how to maintain them ourselves because they were always breaking down. And they were relatively much more expensive than they are now. And of course, no cell phones and no internet.
And I should add that my parent’s generation had it worse, and my grandparent’s generation even worse. They grew up in the depression and their adult lives were spent in the era of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. My parent’s generation faced the draft and being sent to war, plus the stagflation of the 70’s, sky-high interest rates, etc. Before deregulation, flying was so expensive that most people in the lower middle class and below had never been in a plane. I didn’t get my first airline flight until I was in my late 20’s, and that was after prices had already come down.
A few things are worse today than they were then - the cost of education is one of them. I blame government and widespread student loan availability, plus the increased wealth of society in general for the spike in education costs. But in general, there has been no better time than today to be alive, and that is also true for millennials. Every generation has its own unique challenges, but financially Millennials got a better start in life than any generation that came before them.
Nah, there are plenty of large firms in Cincinnati that they could work for - none quite Proctor sized, but close to it. Or, more likely, they would end up working for one of the small-to-medium sized firms in the are that provide services to Proctor. I used to work for one, and we’d hire any P&G alumni that walked through the door.
Anyway, I don’t think having one’s fortune tied to a job at a big company is a meaningful indicator of one is upper class or upper middle class. By that definition, David S. Taylor, the CEO of Proctor, is in at least some sense upper middle class.
You’re the one who used the phrase “high status.” If Audis and fancy vacations too much wealth and luxury, then please quantify what you’re talking about.
I suppose the distinction is that David S Taylor presumably has some agreement with P&G where even if his job at P&G ends, he will still “parachute” out with a big payout. Your average VP of Whatever making $200k a year generally isn’t so fortunate.
To me “class” is not just about how much money you have, although that is a part of it. People often grow up around people from similar income brackets. By virtue of living in the same communities, they often participate in the same activities, go to the same schools, share the same experiences, etc.
The other side of the issue is the productivity-wage gap means since the late 1960s, almost all of the increasing economic pie of the last 50 years has gone into the pockets of the owners (of land, corporation, etc). And the top 1% (and 0.1%) own most of the total assets.
It’s easy to see how this can happen, the richer you are, the less you have to spend every year to stay alive and the faster that compound interest works in your favor. Even better if you inherited wealth because then that interest clocks is ticking from birth.
So wages have stayed almost the same, while of course housing and education and healthcare costs have all skyrocketed.
So the real standard of living: income minus expenses, has arguably dropped for most Americans. This is why it takes 2 parents working to get by, this is why you have to borrow so much money to get a decent job that it can take 20+ years to pay it back, this is why bankruptcies from medical debt are common.
With that said, yes, there are new jobs that pay better than almost anything available in the past. Top tier software engineers are making 200k+, as much as doctors without needing the 10+ years of education. And yes, some of the sting of the worsening economic picture for most Americans is taken out of it by all the cheap gadgets we have.
Most of your income might be going to housing and student loan and health insurance payments, but with the trickle left, you can buy gadgets that give you HD television entertainment, with great sound, and new content being created faster than you can watch it. And you can choose to watch anything you want, at any time, without commercials, and usually a whole season at once. And efficient online retailers plus Chinese manufactured goods mean that less money is lost to inefficiencies, unlike when your parents shopped at a department store or Sears.
Back in reality, real household income is the highest it’s ever been. Despite the percentage of multi-earner households having decreased since, what, 1980?
US Census Income and Poverty in the United States
US Census Table H-12.
The Trumpist doom-and-gloom narrative that he used to get elected isn’t real.
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