a lot of people are just idiots who don’t understand that money in has to be less than money out.

i’m not on their team. like I’m sorry you chose to be a bicycle mechanic because you think it’s ‘cool’ and you only make 30K a year, but if you choose to spend 20% of your yearly wage on traveling each year… and whine about how poor you are, you’re just an asshole. nobody is forcing you to spend 6000 traveling, you choose to do that and you choose to keep yourself poor by not saving and investing in yourself and/or seeking a career that offers better wages. even more so when you shit on other people who have better jobs than you for being ‘rich boring losers’. i won’t even go on about the ‘artist’ crowd I’m all too familiar with.

a lot of idiots love to be miserable and glorify their self-imposed poverty. no matter their income level. i’ve dated doctors who made 500K a year who did nothing but complain about how poor they were.

it’s relative to where you live and your lifestyle expectations.

where i live people make 300K a year and feel impoverished. if you go three hours away, making 30K a year is a good salary.

I make 150K a year, so to 25 year olds working for 15/hr i’m rich. but to many of my peers i’m living in poverty because I don’t have ten million in the bank.

there are some objective measure, for sure, but people’s lifestyles are radically different. the MIT cost of living calculator for my city is like 80K, but most everyone who lives here would consider that a poverty level wage.

no.

plenty of people rent their entire lives are fine. and plenty of people own homes get them foreclosed because they can’t afford the payments, or buy too much house.

owning a home isn’t really a huge economic benefit or security, unless your house massively goes up in value. a house is also a huge liability if it has problems. home owning nearly bankrupted my family at one point because of the crazy expensive repairs.

because middle class is good and noble.

being poor or wealthy means you’re an asshole and is considered shameful.

hence everyone is desperate to claim they are not rich and desperately afraid of being seen as poor by people richer than themselves.

most doctors come from wealthy families. and if you are anything above a PCP, you’re making like 300K+ a year, you’re not labor class. you’re part of the 1%. yeah being a resident and an intern sucks balls, but you’re taking a short term low age for a long term massive payoff.

80% of med students come from families making over 200K a year. that’s a hard fact.

most of us who grew up in middle/lower class families never even dreamed of being a doctor because we knew it was basically impossible for us without rich parents to help pay the bills for med school.

apparently you’re not in poverty if you donate plasma? that’s a new talking point.

pretty sure tons of people in poverty aren’t donating plasma and plenty of people who aren’t in poverty are doing it.

plenty of manual laborers make bank dude. a lot of office workers barely make a living wage.

it’s more about your wealth, education, and lifestyle, not your the type of work you do.

pretty much. this entire thread is just folks arguing over the meanings of middle class, and most of them denying it exists as if that is going to create class solidarity. it won’t. majority of posters probably are middle class folks who would never in a million years associate with truly working class people. esp because the working class is typically conservative and doesn’t have liberal/progressive values, at least in the USA.

yep. most of my co workers are like this. and socializing with them is miserable because they just complain how broke they are… and yet they are spend $1000s per month on stupid shit. and if you try to tell them life isn’t so hard… if they werent’ so stupid… they tell you your some rich asshole.

i have a home gym. it costs me 0 dollars per month after buying some basic equipment that cost me like $500. most gyms in my area want $200 sign up fees and monthly fees between 60-200 a month. it’s insane.

themselves.

there is no billionaire conspiracy dude. the average person is stupid and regularly does stupid shit that defaults their long term interests for perceived short term gains. it’s human nature. most people impulse spend on shit they don’t need or really want, but their monkey brain wants it because other monkey has it.

the few people who can value their long term gains at the expense of the short term tend to be those that are upwardly mobile economically.

pretty easy. if you had a million in the bank at 4% return you’d have a income of 40K a year. if you could live on that income you’d be all set and not have to work.

so scale that up a bit, say 5 million in the bank at 5% return, that would be an income of 250,000K a year.

but the issue is people’s spending scales with their income/wealth, and most people spend more than they make so they are constantly seeking greater wealth.

they spend it.

a huge chunk of it IME is that they don’t cook so they eat out almost every meal. That runs up into 1000s pretty quick. eating out in my city can run you easily $100+ a day. they also impulse buy trendy and expensive things, like Pelotons.

everything is about the image. without the image of being successful they have nothing.

the rich are a lot more paranoid about money than the middle/working class.

no. they aren’t.

i have family in the 1%. they think they are middle class, but nothing about them is middle class. their perception is deeply distorted.

the only reason they need to continue to work is that they massively over consume. they have 6 cars, boats, four properties, etc. if they cut that down to one modest house, modest travel, and dumped all the cars and boats etc, they could have retired 10 years ago in their 40s. there are 100s of articles about these types of people in major newspaper in magazines. how ‘difficult’ the life of multi millionaires int he upper west side is because this year they had to cut back on their 50K ski vacation to a 30K ski vacation. the ‘struggle’ it is to own 10 million in property and how they are terrified they might need to sell the vacation home they use 2 weeks year because it’s not going up in value as fast as they want and the taxes went up.

but if you talk to them they think they are working class ordinary folks and all of this is entirely normal. and if you dare suggest it isn’t they will tell you are a jealous asshole who is just lazy and hasn’t worked hard like they did. they are also super mad right now that they have to pay full tuition to send their kids to college, they feel like they are being ‘punished’ my the schools because their children should go to free for being smarter and richer than other kids and the stupid poor kids should be the ones paying full tuition. they are being ‘punished’ for their success, and poor lazy people are being ‘rewarded’. they absolutely are stoked at what Trump is doing with colleges and removing DEI and international students, because it means their kids have a better chance of getting into an elite school.

and all of their 1% friends are like this. most of their friends are actually WAY weather than they are. but if you go to a party with them all they will do nothing but go on and on about how poor and unfortunate they are because they can’t afford condos in Hawaii or 100 ft yachts or how worried they are their kids might have to go to a public state school and not a ivy league school and what a horrible social embarrassment that would be for them because their friends/family will think they raised stupid shitty kids.

working class is dirty. middle class is clean.

my parents hated my working class friends and their parents because they saw them as dirty gross people. they adored my richer friends who had pools and nice cars.

my parents thought of themselves as middle class because we had a clean house and clean cars and didn’t do ‘dirty’ things that working class people do, like drink. they also didn’t have manual labor jobs.

it’s more than about money. it’s about lifestyle and branding.

i have a middle class job, but a lot of people think i’m a poor working class loser because i don’t have the lifestyle markers and consumption habits of middle class. like i only own a base model car, in don’t travel internationally 2x a year, i don’t live in a ‘new’ house/condo, i don’t go out to restaurants with $1000 bills, etc

the people i know that bitch the most about being poor are the ones who are saving like 30% of their income for retirement. who have seven figures in the bank already.

they are just straight up morons whose perception of their financial reality is deeply distorted and often isolated from everyone else by their perception that ‘comfort’ requires 8 figures of wealth, when really most people with six figures of wealth are quite comfortable.

plenty of rich people debt spend.

what’s the cut off?

most people middle aged people with six figure professional careers are millionaires. that’s why the number of millionaires keeps going up.

i’m not far off from being a millionaire myself. i probably would already be one had i started my current career at 22 and not 30.

however, most of my peers are of the NIMBY type who think growth and investment is bad because their homes will stop returning 5% gains year over year and they own stocks, so they also benefit massively from an inflated stock market.

most of my friends have turned from social progressives to social conservatives once they bought a house and had a kid. funny how that works. now they will bitch at you for there being too much business and too much change/development/growth. 5-10 years ago they were bitching about boring things were and there wasn’t enough development/change/growth.

actually most middle class voters voted and supported for the policies that destroyed themselves.

they started deinvesting our healthcare and education systems in the 70s, often as a part of the backlash of civil rights and the economic stagnation of the 70s.