I’m noting you’re in the Bay Area, where a cup of coffee costs $49.95. That definitely makes this discussion tricky. I’ve seen cost-of-living calculators that compare two different urban areas. Is there one that compares a specific location to a generic location? That is, it says, “$120,000 in the Bay Area will get you the same standard of living as $15.95 in the median location in the United States” or whatever?
I can tell you at 46, I’m feeling a bit of angst that a quarter of my life is over.
In all seriousness, I’d say about 40 is about “middle aged”. You aren’t “old” but you’re not a 22 year old “young adult” anymore either. Nor could you convincingly pass for one. You’re kind of in the middle. It’s just that we have a negative connotation with a “middle aged” person being sort of frumpy, un-hip and past their “date of fuckability”.
“Middle” tends to have other negative connotations of “common” or “mediocrity”. Like a “middle manager” tends to be viewed as an officious tool without the talent or drive to hold a position of real authority or start their own business. Or “Middle America” being viewed as lacking culture or sophistication - a vast wasteland of Applebees restaurants and strip malls all selling the same cheap crap.
That’s why I tend to look at classes more in terms of societal structure than pure income or wealth. I didn’t mention it in my response to black rabbit (because it just occurred to me), but the main difference between David S. Taylor, the CEO of Proctor & Gamble and most of the other employees is that while his fortunes are tied to P&G, P&G’s fortunes are also tied to his ability to effectively run it. He belongs to a class of highly compensated people who are able to run large companies.
Most of the people who work for P&G tend to belong to a class of professionals who are probably competent and make good money, but don’t have the ability to be C or even VP level executives.
Many of those employees probably hire nannies and au pairs and cleaning ladies who make less money, but provide a service that allows those professionals to go to their professional jobs.
So on and so forth.
The extreme 1% UC has owns multiple residences and penthouses in vacation spots (i.e Aspen, Orlando, Miami, Las Vegas, The Bahamas) and rarely stay in hotels. When they do they rent out entire floors not just rooms. (An acquaintance told me about someone who spent $13000 a night to rent out a hotel floor.)
As has been stated, a lot depends upon where you live. I grew up in Fairfax County, VA. $150,000 per year in salary is not enough to buy a townhouse here. The tiniest studio condo starts around $250,000 and the condo fees would be at least $450 per month.
But yes, I do think that many of you are underestimating how high UM really is. There are many large towns that couldn’t support even one such family, because by definition, they are still working for a living. If they don’t have to work, they are UC.
Your first paragraph describes a solid Middle Class existence. Your second describes Lower Middle, where the day-to-day is handled but a small surprise expense could throw it all off. The decisions around size of house and type of car can throw this up or down the scale quite a bit. Choosing a small house and a used car can turn the same income into solid middle.
Not if they need a salary to support it. Rich means you can take a plane to another time zone because you heard about a really good restaurant there. Rich doesn’t vacation in Hawaii, they buy a house there and hire someone to take care of it.
If there is an “and” between all of those behaviors, then they might be described as rich, but certainly not wealthy. Again, wealthy doesn’t need a job. Rich still has to work. That’s UM. A lot of sports heroes and singers/musicians could be wealthy, but their spending habits keep them UM. If they lived off their interest and used that income to build a solid base for future generations, they might get there.
You are describing a UM person. Of course there are no hard lines that can be drawn, other than source of income. And yes, MC folks can do some of these things all of the time, and perhaps all of these things some of the time, but not all of these things every year.
Take for example a CEO who makes $15M per year over the next three years. If she saves all of it, and lives off of her interest, then she’ll leave the job wealthy. If she buys a $25M mansion the first year, she’s gonna be UM for life.
/Tangent
This is just incredibly sad. Please stop calling what you do “dating.” That is not dating; that is sniffing around for sex. An ape looking for a mate has higher values than this. Dating is a whole other process and requires the acknowledgement that personality exists in females too, and an appreciation for companionship and sharing ideas. There is so much more to human relationships, I hope you get the chance to find out. 
You think you’re angsty now, just wait till you realize how badly you fucked up the quotes in that post.
Having just bought a place, that seems an exaggeration. By the 30% of gross recommendation (which I don’t necessarily ascribe to; YMMV), you can borrow about $600k on that salary. There are plenty of townhouses listed right now for under $400k. Hell we looked at a giant (to me) single-family home within walking distance of the Franconia-Springfield metro for $600k, so not even borrowing that much. And not exactly in the boonies of Fairfax either.
This is what I mean about restricted definitions - I’m not talking about the CEO who makes $15 million a year. When I said
I was talking about the couple who make $80K combined, own the home they live in, own a vacation home in the Catskills worth $30K that they don’t rent out , spend a week on a vacation that costs $1K or less per person and drive to the vacation house for another week and a few long weekends each year. There is no way those folks are upper middle class simply because they own an inexpensive second home that they don’t rent out and take more than one inexpensive vacation a year.
Huh–that’s really interesting to me. Our household income is a little less than $90k for a family of four, and we have a cheap ($800) mortgage. And our vacations usually cost less than $1k total, and there’s no way we’d look at owning a second home that cost $30k.
The kids might be the difference–but are there really no-kids couples living the life you describe on the salary you describe?
The kids do make a big difference - and so does age or really time. I actually know people who live or lived like that , but they didn’t buy either their main house or the vacation house last year. A house that’s worth $30K now may have been only $10 or $15K 20 years ago.
I’m not sure how old you are- but I bought my house over 30 years ago. At that time my husband and I had a combined income of $50K and we were able to afford this house with no problems. By six years later, our combined income had gone up to $80K, and if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids, we could have easily bought a second home in an inexpensive area in the Catskills and would still be able to afford it even if our income hadn’t gone up since. . But - and this is a big but-the people I know who have lived like this didn’t "trade-up’ their main house. None of this “sell the starter house and move to a better neighborhood, bigger house” . They either stayed in the original house or sold that one and moved to a place where houses are less expensive and used the excess to buy the vacation house.
ETA - Also, some of them got the main house super cheap because their parents sold it to them while retaining a life estate.
What this thread has taught me is that the term “middle class” is objectively and quantitatively useless.
If the guy driving a new GT-R that he paid for with cash, and the guy making 10% as much driving a new Altima that’s being paid off on a 5-year loan are both in the same class, plus or minus an adjective, then our hope for any kind of progressive economic reforms in this country are completely fucked.
My personal definition: The upper middle class of wage earners, consists, roughly, of the 24% tax bracket. Anything above that is upper class.
Capital gains are completely different. If your capital gains income were classified as ordinary income, and that put you in the 24% bracket, you’re probably rich. Having to work for $170,000 a year is completely different than not having to work for $170,000 a year.
Everybody wants to be middle class, but nobody wants to be middle class.
Apologies to Paul Mooney.
Part of the problem is that “middle class” is sort of defined by exclusion, in that the upper class is that strata of society whose income is primarily from investments/ownership - they don’t have to work for someone else to have steady income. The working class is defined by having a certain strata of relatively low paying/low security/highly controlled jobs that tend to be rote and don’t require a lot of education or experience.
So the guy who owns the factory would be upper class, presuming he makes enough to live on. The guys working on the assembly line making $9/hr and being told when, where and how to do their jobs are working class. Everyone else, from the guy running the factory to the shop managers, to the accounting staff are middle class, even though there might be 100k of income difference between them.
Everyone else is “middle class”. Within that, there are varying levels of pay & individual autonomy, with the upper end of that having a LOT of both. So there’s a lot of qualitative and quantitative differences between the jobs of a lower-middle and upper-middle person; probably more overall than between say… upper middle/upper class and lower-middle/working-class.
“You don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin. He’s broke…don’t do shit.”
How do you figure that? She would have a home worth (assuming she paid cash anything close to fair market value) $25M plus $20M in cash. That’s $45 million in assets. Extremely rich by any sane standard.
Well, I guess I’m one of the folks you mentioned. Pew ranks me upper class, at least for the DFW area. I disagree. I have a nice cabin cruiser in the marina, but I clean and drive it myself. One of the guys I play poker with has one twice the size, with a full time paid crew. He’s upper class. I’m just pretending.
I make enough money where I could hire a yard service. I can also afford a slightly bigger house, a newer car, and brand new Mephistos instead of second-hand ones bought on ebay.
But I wouldn’t consider my frugality in these specific areas to be indications of a “pretender” status, though. It just means that I don’t fit the stereotype of a comfortably middle class, single childless individual to a perfect T.
Pew is rating income rather than “class,” though. For my area, at least, their upper income tier encompasses 19% of households. I’d be surprised if the owner of a cabin cruiser parked at a marina is outside of the upper 20% of incomes locally. But that doesn’t make you upper class.
Class is determined by background, experiences, and expectations, and not simply income. Those often, but not always, go along with (family) wealth. A middle class kid might expect to go to college and hope to attend the state flagship school; an upper class kid expects to go to an Ivy League school. A middle class kid might work at a restaurant or for a construction company during summers through high school and college; an upper class kid will have a white collar volunteer internship at a law firm or government office. It takes money to have those experiences, but it’s the experiences and not the money that propel the kid into the upper class.
Those same experiences also perpetuate the upper class. The Ivy League education and internship turn into a top-flight entry level job on the fast track for promotion. A high-earning 22 year old can manage that income to set him or herself up for the future, and an upper class kid will have the knowledge and advice that (s)he needs to do that. They pay off student loans - if they had any to start with - quickly. Maybe they buy their first house at 25 (the average age of a first-time home buyer in the US is 33) and start building equity. They start contributing to a retirement plan early. If they make good decisions (and again, they’ve seen what that looks like and they have advisers to help with that), they set themselves up to raise kids who can volunteer rather than work while they’re in school, who can go to an Ivy League college without borrowing huge sums of money, and who can follow in their white collar footsteps.
You can’t do that without money, but it’s not the money that drives it.
I disagree.
I think “upper class” is defined as by having a larger income, by an order of magnitude, from the medium wage earner. That’s different from “wealthy.” Wealthy, to me, implies that one has a bunch of assets that generate income without one having to do anything but maybe sign some paperwork.
If you make $1m a year in salary and bonus from your job as the long snapper for the Bills, you are both “upper class” and “rich.” If you retire from that job after five years and buy a few Hooter’s franchises that net you $1m a year in personal profits, you are “upper class”, “rich”, and “wealthy.”
If you live in an extremely expensive location, that in itself can push you into another class. If I buy a house on a cliffside in San Fransisco, I don’t get to claim poverty or being in a lower class because I can’t also afford a luxury car. The house alone is enough if only 1% of the population could afford to buy it.
The “cliff house” is really specific. But there are plenty of low-wage workers in expensive areas, because the Bay Area needs someone to pour coffee, too. The tension between wages and housing costs is getting pretty extreme in some of these locations, and there are absolutely people living in poverty in very wealthy areas.
As long as by “area” you don’t mean “side of a cliff.”