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Well, and most people have fucked up views on what defines "upper middle class". There was a topic on reddit the other night where the most popular posts were
by mywittyname 5y ago
Well, and most people have fucked up views on what defines "upper middle class". There was a topic on reddit the other night where the most popular posts were saying, without jest, that upper middle class starts at $10 million bucks in liquid savings (and ends around $50MM).
That seems to be a typical view on income and wealth in this country: people's opinions are wealth are out or proportion with reality by factors of like 100. For reference, upper middle class technically starts at around $120k/yr, so $10MM could pay 80 years of an upper middle class income. So there's no conceivable way an actual upper middle class family could actually save enough to be consider what the public thinks of as upper middle class.
- shadilay 5y agoI think a bigger factor is that wealth is almost entirely defined by where you live. 120k/yr would be a lot in Iowa but not so much in SF.
- antognini 5y agoIndeed, in San Francisco the low income threshold for a family of four is $117,400 / yr. [1] [1]: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/poverty-san-francisco https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/poverty-san-francisc...
- gamegoblin 5y agoIn my mental model, I’ve always considered upper middle class to be people who still do their own grocery shopping, but don’t really look too closely at the prices. In my experience the kind of people this heuristic selects for is around the same monetary threshold you’ve noted in the low 6 figures.
- rayiner 5y agoYes! My wife and my families both crossed that boundary (on opposite sides of the country) around when we were in high school and we both remember grocery shopping as a key difference.