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.
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.
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 ]
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
Today I'm rich. Tomorrow I could be living in a van for 6 months like I did after the 2001 bubble burst.
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'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.
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.