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Comment by dinobones | Hacker News Reader

Upper middle class as a household earning between 75k-127k is pretty surprising to me.

Here in Phoenix, $127k is about the household earning you need to afford a 4 bedroom home ~500k/~2500 mortgage). I wouldn’t consider that an upper middle class lifestyle.

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I would guess that they're defining "upper middle class" via income quintiles rather than via lifestyle. Those numbers roughly line up with the boundaries for the 4th quintile in 2017, 77k-126k. 2020's fourth quintile was 85k-141k.

> I wouldn’t consider that an upper middle class lifestyle.

I don't know that the conceptual upper middle class lifestyle actually matches the reality anymore. I think that's true of most quintiles. The upper middle class lives like the middle class used to, the middle class lives like the lower middle class used to, etc.

That "upper middle class lifestyle" upshifted and is the domain of the lower rungs of the top quintile now.

Definitions for this are all over the place. Fussell's "upper middle class" lifestyle couldn't be stably maintained by households under the top quintile (probably not under the top 10%, even), nor could the upper-middle (also upper, but largely upper-middle) described in the jokey-but-fairly-accurate Official Preppy Handbook, and those books are ~40 years old now. For one thing, both paint decent-or-better private prep school as key for that class, and that's never really been within the reach of the lower four quintiles, to say nothing of the other things you'll need to spend money on to stay in that class.

And this is, in fact, the realized effect of the squeezing of the entire middle class over the past decades.

$127K household income in NYC will qualify you for rent-stabilized apartments... so this seems very off in terms of measurement for larger cities

Reminds me of Covid stimulus checks that that median Silicon Valley househould didn't qualify for.

I agree, it looks low, especially in cities with high housing prices. Looking at income distribution, you'd think a floor for upper middle would be at least 100k for a household.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...

That’s what I was thinking. I was riding around a few days ago thinking, “what is considered the middle class?” And I definitely would consider this range around it.

Maybe I’m just out of touch with the situation but 75k for a household seems like borderline poverty.

In the “deep South” middle income would start below 75k.

Funnily enough, I live in the “Deep South”.

drive out to a rural area and ask ppl their household income, not a boomer retiree, but a middle aged couple with a few kids.

averages: georgia 61980 tennessee 54665 alabama 51734 south carolina 56227

now, people with these incomes would have a house and a car or two. they would shop at regular stores and do more or less okay until quite recently with inflation. to put this in a more real sense, in several of these states, you could until 2019 find large (around 1300 sqft) two bedroom apartments for less than 1k/mo if you left major cities out of your search. if you wanted to buy a home, you could get one at around 2000 sqft for less than 200k.

It depends how you define things.

I find it more useful to talk about “security” than “class”.

Are you or do you feel secure in your ability to secure shelter? Water? Food? Transportation? Land? Education? Healthcare? Retirement income? Vacation? Disability income? Legal services? Ability to give friends and family money? Permits and political access/favors?

I doubt any household with $75k income in the US is securing their retirement, or even healthcare.

"No war but security war?"

Sure, that works, too. Throws the rhythm off, though.

Yeah, seems low to me. The multimillion dollar houses I think about when I think successful high-paying career for upper middle class seem to be out of reach for that income bracket.

I think your perspective is off. To me, "multimillion dollar houses" are upper class, not upper middle class.

People use "upper middle" to mean different things. Some use it to mean the upper portion of the middle class, by income. Others use it to mean a distinct (and much smaller) class between the middle and upper, with distinct tendencies and preferences, comprising people who live something close to a "rich" lifestyle but are distinguished from the actually-rich by having to work to maintain it, rather than being able to live a very nice life off investment income alone. Doctors, lawyers, other very-well-paid white-collar types, constituting perhaps a single-digit percentage of the population. I'm not sure which, if any, definition has a credible claim to being, in some sense, most-correct.

It depends on context. A household of two earners working for big techs living in a $2M home in Bay Area is definitely comfortable, but by no means upper class. Most of their incomes are still from a W2 form and they still have to budget for kids' school, retirement, etc.

Owning a $2M home in the most expensive area of the US is upper class.

Can you quickly give your definitions for different classes. Salary bands and lifestyles?

Upper class -> buys land/property/house, (solidly 6+ figure stuff) to signal an image to others in their class

Upper middle class -> selects their car or children's education (5, sometimes just brushing 6, figure stuff) to project an image to others in their class

Middle class -> selects their clothes and consumer goods (2-3, occasionally 4 figure stuff) to project an image to others in their class

Roughly speaking, of course.

For salary bands, Wikipedia does a better job for middle class as opposed to middle income, which the article seems to deliberately conflate. Middle income is near the floor of the income range of the "middle class."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class#/media/File:Globa...

Upper class: makes money with money

Upper middle class: has a job and alternate income source, doesn't even consider not taking a family vacation

Middle class: has a job, doesn't worry about root canal or car repair, saves money for a family vacation

Lower middle class: has a job with healthcare, barely past paycheck to paycheck

Below that: has multiple part time jobs or full time hourly position, each check is already spent

This sounds about right

It is upper middle class if everyone else around you is poorer than that no?

they forgot to adjust for inflation. I bet 100k today is roughly 50k in the year 2000.

> I bet 100k today is roughly 50k in the year 2000.

Mean inflation from 2000-2021 (last year on record) was ~2.24%, including a 4.7% increase in 2021.[1]

$50k inflated at this rate would be approximately $80k.

I'm sure others are more qualified to discuss implications, but consider that while inflation erodes nominal purchasing power, it cannot account for effectively deflationary impacts of technology (for an example, see[2]). Of course, we cannot eat technology, at least not exactly; so we probably want to look at metrics related to how easy it is to live. It might be worth looking at cost per calorie, for example, or for commonly-available proxies (e.g., fast food prices).

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i...

[2] In 1999, hard drives were sized in the hundreds of megabytes and cost more than they do today. See, i.a., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives#20....

Who cares about inflation if your rent/mortgage is 3 or 4 times higher?

> Who cares about inflation if your rent/mortgage is 3 or 4 times higher?

Oh, for sure: inflation is challenging to measure, and it probably isn't very descriptive for a lot of common situations. (I think the Consumer Price Index is an attempt to help solve this issue. CPI compounded about about 2.1% per year between 2000 and 2021.[1,2] The CPI includes measures of rent, but it also adjusts for seasonal changes.[3])

Inflation and CPI both obscure a lot of ground-level realities for people--the nature of all summary statistics is that they fail to capture the totality of reality in favor of giving us a broad sense for what's going on. Anecdotally my folks moved after their rent increased by 50% when their lease expired. (That was last year.) These are obviously nontrivial increases that have dramatic impacts on people.

[1]: https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/usa-histo...

[2]: (270.97/172.2)*(1/22.) ≈ 1.021

[3]: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cpi-consumer-price-...

These are not numbers I'm used to seeing when discussing middle class in the U.S. The middle class in the U.S. has income from $100K to $1M [1]. Middle class is not the same as middle income. The lower threshold for upper middle class is greater than $100K [2].

Are they using adjusted numbers perhaps? Adjusted to what? Ahh... The non-paywalled article uses "middle income" the moment it starts giving numbers, so the title is click-bait.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_middle_class

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