Then there is me, who is single and in a cheap part of the country but who chooses to not upgrade my lifestyle despite the fact that I can afford to.
I agree that, at least on the margins like ourselves, you can consider lifestyle, profession, and relatives/connections, but it’s not as important compared to money as some behavior and social-circle driven classifiers would have us believe.
Oops. Palo Verde is a she. My apologies, Ms. Verde. 
I consider a nice restaurant anything with waitstaff and tablecloths. Most of the time eating out involves the phrase “do you want fries with that?” And we went out for my son’s birthday to a Chinese buffet, it cost over $80 for all 6 of us, which is a lot of money for just dinner. A place you need reservations and a tie? Unaffordable.
Yes, there’s a difference between middle income and middle class. I have a friend who makes about $50K a year doing skilled labor. Middle income even in NYC for a single person. But he’s not as educated as the rest of the group, doesn’t enjoy good food ( and by “good food” I don’t mean a $100 a person steakhouse- I mean he prefers McDonald’s and Wendy s to a better burger at Applebee’s and money is not the issue), only reads the sports section ,has no interest in current events,doesn’t watch the same type of movies as the rest of us, doesn’t have an email address and has no interest in travel except to watch or participate in sporting events, .He’s a great friend, but he’s not in the same class as the rest of us. (Which is why we usually only see him in the context of a sports event or a barbeque. )
As others have alluded to, what the upper class have is leverage. This was depicted in a scene from Barney Miller, where they were booking a high-on-the-hog dealer who had all the fancy trappings, and Detective Harris sputtered, “You may have all this but I have something worth a lot more: credit.”
For the truly wealthy, it is a sort of balancing game. It is not clear that they really do own all that stuff or have all that money, but they are very good at shifting the debt around to maintain their bailiwicks or empires. If a rich guy loses millions of dollars, it is often (though not always) a speed bump, and he has enough good faith credit to his name that he can refinance the loss without tremendous distress.
Which kind of defines the difference between middle and upper class. Middle class people become destitute when they lose everything, most upper class people just leverage their way back to where they were.
I would consider you upper or (if you have a family of 4 or 5) upper-middle. I earned that for a few years and at the time I considered myself upper. I now earn a lot less (about $100K and consider myself middle to upper middle.
Yep. I’ve found first hand this phenomenom a couple years ago. We’ve (Me and my bf) been at the poverty line, or just under, for a handful of years, our only regular income is welfare, but our way of living allow us to live ok on about 10 000 euros/year.
But up until a couple years ago, we were renting to a private landlord, the people living around us in the little village were all solidly middle class and we were feeling at ease, even with the difference in income. (we’re both from a middle class background)
But now we’ve been renting through social housing, and many of our neighbors are lower class and we basically don’t fit in at all. We have less money than many of them but our centers of interests and upbringing are just too different to form deep friendships with most of them.
I would say:
1% elite
4% upper
25% upper middle
25% middle
25% lower middle
20% lower