Those making $200k-$500k are the new middle class. Are you making that much but only own one house? Are your cars more than 5 years old... Ding... you're in the middle class.
It sounds to me like you've got valley-vision. Time to travel and see the world, or at least more of the country you live in.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Just because you have to think about money sometimes doesn't make you middle class. Your neighbors having more money than you also doesn't make you middle class.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/15/income-inequality-in-...
The 2 br, 1 bath, 800 sq foot apartment I live in 3 years ago for $900/month would probably be $2,500 in SV. Likewise, the 1850 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 bath house I live in now that I bought for $338k in 2015 would probably have been over $1,000,000 in SV.
If you recently bought a $1M plus condo in SF, you are most certainly upper class. I don’t care if it was a 2 bedroom apartment.
I wouldn't consider working two jobs to be middle class unless you meant two people in the household working one job each, unless there are a lot of people working two jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle.
Hell, if you have a lawn in Sf you are super wealthy.
I wanted to back you up in that you are right that it's behavior that defines classes. But it's more the part that matters, your means of producing wealth. If your money works for you or employs others to work for you, you're investment class or capitalist class. Punching a clock, or picking up a salary check means you're working class. The third class are those who slip below maintaining employment, I call them "capitalism's reserve army" but there's probably a better term for the unemployed.
These little ego boosting distinctions people come up with "upper working class" are meaningless.
No, that means the middle class can't afford to live in SF. This isn't the first time I've heard this, and I don't know why anyone might think this. As a more extreme example, "middle-class in Pebble Beach is $1MM/year or $20MM net worth". No, there is no middle-class in Pebble Beach, only rich people live there.
It's why I try to define "middle-class" by specific behaviors and possessions, not by dollar amounts.
A 700 sq ft 1 bed/1 bath can easily be $3,000/mo in a desirable neighbourhood such as the East Village. A nicer doorman condo somewhere like Flatiron or the Upper West Side can be amywhere from $10k/mo to $30k/mo for 1000-1500 sq ft (or $3m to $5m for purchase).
And here I was thinking that SF or SV was expensive...
$200k-$500k of probably most often part of the classical capitalist-society middle class (petit bourgeoisie) in most of the country, though in some cases it will be high income proletariat (possibly proletarian intelligentsia), but at that level you are probably either driving a substantial share of your income from labor or forgoing income worth a substantial fraction of your current income by avoiding wage labor, so probably not the classical capitalist society upper class (pure capitalists / haut bourgeoisie.)
In the Bay area? Sure.
I live in suburbs outside Portland, OR. My wife and I together make about $150k/year. We both own cars less than 3 years old. We only own 1 house, but we take a 2-week vacation a 1-week vacation every year.
My point was that kidsnow said $200-500k is middle class, but it really depends on location. It often feels that the majority of people on Hacker News are living in a Silicon Valley bubble. They talk as if $1,000,000 for a 1500 sq ft house is normal, as if $150k is decent entry-level wage, and...you get the idea.
$200-500k is middle class for Silicon Valley, but the higher end of that range is definitely upper class where I live.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=8edfd12967...
If you have an investment account (That isn't a 401(k), 403(b), Roth IRA etc.) with hundreds of thousands that didn't happen from a single lucky investment (Like buying Apple or Amazon 10+ years ago), then you're probably more upper class.
Myself, outside my 401(k), I don't have any investments, mainly because I'm more concerned with eliminating my debts than taking on risks beyond my retirement account. But my wife and I make "only" $150k. If we made 300k, I might have some investments.
Again, though, we need to stop focusing on specific dollar amounts, since cost of living varies so wildly around the country. Get out of the SF Bay bubble.