The most important thing I learned in grad school was that it's possible to live comfortably on $14,000 per year.
I grew up in NYC with parents making around $90k together, and we were solidly middle class. I thought that sorta income was normal. Today I'm making more than the $14k and less than the $45k and I would say my lifestyle is somewhere around lower-middle or upper-lower class, living in a lower class neighborhood. Of course, "lifestyle" is hard to quantify, as people making much less than I have much better entertainment centers and cars. Being in the Education sector, I've heard various other ways to quantify class, including education earned or goals, or just job type - working class or manual labor instead of lower class; skilled professions instead of middle class. Not sure what we'd call the rich in that scheme.
Skilled manual labor can be rather lucrative. My uncle is a mechanic at EuroMotors Bethesda, his wife is a hairdresser at an Aveda salon, and they own a big house in Germantown (which, granted, they bought about 15-20 years ago, new construction) with an in-ground pool. They're probably the most well-off of my mom and her brothers, since they're the ones who would take vacations to Cancun and the like. And they own 3 or 4 Mercedes. (Not new, mostly; Karl bought some trade-ins with good bodies but maybe needing some mechanical fixing and fixed them up himself. My cousin got one for his birthday.) My cousin is going to school to be an HVAC tech
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I do think education throws a whole other monkey wrench into the mix. As a teacher at a prep school, I find that I and my colleagues have a lot more in common in terms of tastes, assumptions, lifestyle, etc. with our students' families than with other people in our income bracket. By no means everything -- I visited exactly zero foreign countries over the summer, for instance. My students' families by and large have staggering amounts of money and that makes a difference, cultural as well as practical. But in terms of, well, cultural capital, in terms of understanding of and to an extent access to cultural and educational institutions (and networking), in terms of ideas of a good time...yeah.
I suspect a similar thing is true, but to a lesser extent, in the world of public school teaching.
(Of course, I'm also living near Boston, where the housing market has a whole other set of things to say on what constitutes middle or upper class...You're from NYC; you understand.)
Cost of living is bigger than you think. According to the percentiles, I'm well into the lower class -- I have more debt than assets and make about $20k per year. However, I support only myself on that salary and live in a relatively cheap area of the country; I would put myself firmly in the lower middle class -- I can easily afford a cell phone, a (crappy) car, cable, heating bills, and even the odd medical expense (though that bout with kidney stones would have tanked me if I hadn't had insurance) If I lived in Boston or New York, I'd consider myself much poorer than a change of 20% would indicate.
Lifestyle have a huge effect on class (or at least the perception of class). I lived very well without cable, high-speed internet, and a cell phone, particularly when I still had the time and the desire to cook. In a lot of ways, I was living better than my parents, who make more than five times what I do (though partly supporting my two brothers).
The problem with factoring in cost of living is that it seems to fail at the low end. The trend of that bottom 20% is either to congregate in burned out areas of the inner city, or else to live in a backwoods area. For example, housing can be had in NYC's Chinatown for under $250/month. You'd live four to a bedroom in a tenement above a restaurant.
There are a lot of other factors. I grew up somewhere between upper middle class and upper class... my father didn't talk about his income. We were probably upper class. Of course, having 5 kids took something out of that, but we were still quite well off
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Yeah. As you probably know, I'm a big fan of Amartya Sen's ideas. I define class in terms of capabilities...and yours are clearly limited at the moment, unfortunately.
215K as the threshold for upper class? The mind boggles. My parents thought of themselves as "upper middle class" when I was growing up, and my father (the breadwinner) made then about what I do now, adjusted for inflation. (I'd call myself just-barely upper-class at this point -- my salary is way more than plenty for someone who has no kids, but I have no investments to speak of
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I grew up in NYC with parents making around $90k together, and we were solidly middle class. I thought that sorta income was normal. Today I'm making more than the $14k and less than the $45k and I would say my lifestyle is somewhere around lower-middle or upper-lower class, living in a lower class neighborhood. Of course, "lifestyle" is hard to quantify, as people making much less than I have much better entertainment centers and cars. Being in the Education sector, I've heard various other ways to quantify class, including education earned or goals, or just job type - working class or manual labor instead of lower class; skilled professions instead of middle class. Not sure what we'd call the rich in that scheme.
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I suspect a similar thing is true, but to a lesser extent, in the world of public school teaching.
(Of course, I'm also living near Boston, where the housing market has a whole other set of things to say on what constitutes middle or upper class...You're from NYC; you understand.)
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Lifestyle have a huge effect on class (or at least the perception of class). I lived very well without cable, high-speed internet, and a cell phone, particularly when I still had the time and the desire to cook. In a lot of ways, I was living better than my parents, who make more than five times what I do (though partly supporting my two brothers).
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Really, it makes the term "upper middle class" meaningless if someone who makes 500k/year- the upper portion of the top percentile- can use that term.
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