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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>By most western standards my family teeters on the line between middle and upper middle clas. (...) we are shopping for 4-6 unit buildings within 100km of Barcelona

I'm not sure this is what upper middle, much less middle, class is.

A family that can pay several millions for houses abroad just to get a visa to change citizenship is way above middle class, or even upper middle class for that matter.

Pew Research defines middle class: $53,413 - $106,827 year, and upper-middle class: $106,827 - $373,894.

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The Spanish golden visa will require a €550k housing investment, then the normal amount of accrued in-country time for citizenship.

Maybe we’re sort of upper midde-class then. We gross about $200k consulting. Not rich, not poor.

We live in the developing world now so here we are definitely upper middle class/rich, and do not have millions in assets.

You are upper class. Yes you're not rich, but you're not middle class.

The middle class American dream is a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, 2 cars, and a dog.

You're talking about buying a half million dollar house in Spain because of a moral concern about global geopolitics. You're not middle class.

The amount of the US where you can buy a detached single family home with a white picket fence and 2 car garage for significantly under half a million dollars is probably not as much of a majority as you seem to think.

Not everywhere is the bay area, where you'll struggle to find this for under $1.5M. But $500k is not that much for a house these days in a lot of the markets where huge percentages of the population live (from the tri-state area, to Boston, to Seattle, LA, Austin, etc.) and lots of middle class people live in houses valued at more than this.

Rich people love to say they're "middle class" or "comfortable"

To be fair to the poster, they said that they sold their US propert(ies|y) which if they are older Americans probably releases an amount of capital that substantially covers the cost of the building they may acquire in Spain.

But yeah, when the median US household income is about $68k, early $200k a year puts you far outside the middle class, even if it doesn't feel that way. [ yes, cost of living in NYC or SF has some impact on this, but not much, given the median household income in those cities not actually being much above the national figure ]

Just a nit, but the San Francisco median household income is around $112k [1] for the same year as the $68k you mentioned [2]. I think 50% more counts as “much above the national figure”.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

Sure by these measures I'm rich, but I don't feel that way. Our current income isn't really indicative of the whole picture. Since I was diagnosed as Bi-Polar 20 years ago, I have averaged 2 months of unemployment per year, and just spent 13 months without income due to my inability to cope with the stress of the world.

Today I'm rich. Tomorrow I could be living in a van for 6 months like I did after the 2001 bubble burst.

I think it's helpful to consider that just because you are upper class does not necessarily imply that you are rich.

I know plenty of people with upper class hobbies. I couldn't say for sure if they are rich, but they certainly don't live a lifestyle that I was ever familiar with growing up.

Even taking a year off to de-stress... Someone without financial means couldn't make those choices.

And I've known bipolar people too. They worked when they could, and went on disability when they couldn't. They were never rich. Even when they worked, they were always struggling.

I'd never met anyone taking about buying a house in the Spanish hills until becoming a techie.

> I'd never met anyone taking about buying a house in the Spanish hills until becoming a techie.

I'm still not sure that's the differentiating factor here. OP made clear their moral objections, and sketched out part of a picture in which what makes this possible is not so much "typical tech money", but possibly "having owned a home in the US for long enough".

I have extremely non-tech but upper-middle class friends who in the past have discussed buying entire villages in Spain and Italy (they can be had for as little as $2-300k on the low end. These are not people who ever made "a lot of money", but they have owned homes for long enough that if they sold their house, they'd have capital to put into such a move.

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