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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

i expect spending here to mean cash you spend while enjoying your free time outside. from that 6000 you need to subtract rent/mortgage, and any other living expenses. if you then still have enough money that you can go out and spend $100 in an afternoon on average, then you are no longer middle class i would say.

the "problem" here is the average. sure, a middle class income can afford to spend $100 in an afternoon once in a while. but unless you limit your discretionary spending to only these afternoons, you'll spend money on other things too. hobbies, travel, etc. if after all that you still can afford $100 every afternoon (even if only on weekends that's already $800 a month), you got to earn enough that you simply never worry about money.

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> then you are no longer middle class i would say

Well what are they then?

You can't seriously claim that having just $100 a day of disposable income makes you part of the upper class?

if you have $100 a day of disposable income, you are not going to spend all of it every afternoon. if you do, your actual disposable income is much higher.

money for discretionary spending is not the same as disposable income.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/disposableincome.asp defines disposable income as net income, that means after taxes but before living expenses.

https://www.investopedia.com/insights/americas-slowly-disapp... defines middle class in the US as a disposable income from 35k to 106k a year.

if you spend all your discretionary money on going out with your friends and not on any other hobbies, traveling, gifts, etc, then maybe you can spend $100 every weekend afternoon.

Ok... but this still isn't even within orders of magnitude of 'upper class', is it?

EDIT: i used the terms middle class and upper class, when i should have used middle income and upper income.

middle class and middle income are often mixed up. upper class and upper income less so.

old text:

well if the definition of middle class ends at 106k income per year then anything above that must be upper class. the problem here is that obviously upper class has a very wide range which skews the perception of what makes upper class.

of course definitions are just that. the reality is not so clear cut.

Upper class means different things in different cultures. In UK more of an association with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landed_gentry than a level of income.

Upper class starting at around 100k would give America an upper class of around a third of the population! I guess we're meaning entirely different things since an upper class of a third of the population seems like a contradiction in terms to me!

I assume they're talking about 100k individual income as opposed to household income?

household of three. the 106k number comes from data from 2010. in the same article the range for 2016 is $45,200 to $135,600 annually for a household of three.

The upper class doesn't need to work for their money. Of course the line draws different in every location, but the difference between the upper-middle class lawyer and the upper-class lawyer is that the upper-class lawyer could quit and still pass this privelege onto their children.

what often gets mixed up is middle income vs middle class and consequently upper income and upper class.

apparently, middle income and middle class are often used interchangeably even though they don't mean quite the same thing, while arguable upper income and upper class are much more different.

Well I will call them Lower-Upper-Middle class.

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