"On your level" just screams pretentiousness. Since when is money the measure of a man anyways?
If you want to be the one-eyed man amongst the blind, go for it, but not everyone wants that.
Socioeconomic groupings exist in the metro areas too. Senior management hanging out with the workers is relatively rare. Because it's just a pain in the arse to guard yourself in every conversation and not seem like a twat lacking empathy when you talk about some benign thing you did last week.
If you have never experienced or observed stratification, then you may simply not get around much (in terms of social circles). It's not that strange, I cannot afford it either, I just made some chance acquintances, mostly through my socially far more capabele partner.
Class had become the most useful criterion to distinguish groups to me. It's not about guarding oneself explicitly, or avoiding interaction, but more in happening to frequent different kinds of sports/events, having different types of interest and being able to afford those types of hobbies. You won't see a working class person drive up to the club in his jaguar old timer for a game of golf and going for a Michelin star afterwards with friends, talking over a new investment opportunity. You see what I mean?
People from richer social classes, on the other hand, typically either dislike poorer classes for a variety of more or less obvious prejudices, or they dislike them because they project their own antagonisms, and thus feel disliked, then become disliked because they act 'guarded'.
My general basis for friendship is common interests and interpersonal chemistry. I think if people assume they have no common interests with people from different backgrounds, or they sabotage interpersonal chemistry by acting guarded, then they're cheating themselves.
Michelin star food is generally not all that much better than other food, golf is no different to mini-golf (aside from being less eco-friendly and less fun), and a jaguar old timer is just a particularly unreliable, unsafe and low mile-per-gallon Honda. Personally, I don't have much in common with people who define themselves by their career success, whether that's shown by fancy sneakers, or fancy cars.
Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor). Sometimes people like that are hard to find.
We end up saving amazing amounts of money, relatively speaking, but our social life has been difficult to fill in. College vibe helps, but there are vast benefits to large cities and I'm certainly missing those.
This is an pretty narrow definition of friendship.
anybody instead of peers
some shared experiences or some shared values and forget about humour.
FWIW, I'm probably not qualified as I probably have more activity partners, or context friends, than true friends but your definition seemed incredibly limiting.