This might be a very non American problem, but people forget that there are social pressures to follow when you are middle class that cost more money.
On the other hand, you might have a CEO proudly drinks cheap beer and wears Kirkland Signature workboots to the office.
Sorry but it doesn’t go both ways.
At one point, he did have a car he got on discount because of hail damage. That's pretty ratty in my opinion.
Seriously? It happens all the time. Lots of very wealthy people get into the habit of penny-pinching to the extreme and "hiding" their wealth from everyone else.
If you can afford to live in one of these neighborhoods, you are already middle class.
Middle-class pressures, back when there was one, meant you were expected to get a new car every year. There were reasons for that, back then: tetraethyl lead additives in the gasoline destroyed engines in no time. But it was not a big drain on middle-class people, just an expense to keep up with.
"They" have been very, very good at convincing lower-class people they are now middle class. It worked! Fully half the voting population imagines, when they think they are voting to keep their own money away out of the poors' hands, really are voting to keep extreme rich peoples' money in the rich peoples' hands, along with most of what could have been the voters' money, besides.
They have got so good at it, people actually elected an out-and-out confidence grifter to the Presidency, and helped stage a coup attempt to keep him there.
I think, rather than "they" convincing people, that you have made up a definition of "middle class" that exists only in your own mind. It doesn't correspond to either the real world or to the definition that the rest of us are using.
They’re usually people working trades in the mid-west, but they own a nice house, have cars, and savings in the bank.
It’s still possible. But it seems like few people are interested in those careers or living in those locations any more. Usually because neither is prestigious enough.
If everyone wants an office job that pays enough to live in a trendy HCOL coastal city - yeah, a single income with high school only won’t cut it.
A wage-earner could be comfortably lower middle class. A professional could be upper-middle.