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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, a million dollars a year is not anywhere close to where having more money doesn't impact you.

If that's $600K after taxes, and a year of college for a single child costs $80K at an excellent school, and you've got two or three kids, and housing in a major metropolitan area...

I mean you're definitely living very comfortably, but there are still lots of ways to spend money that have a big impact on your life, between your home and child care and your vacations and your comfort in traveling.

If the number is $25 million, then sure there isn't much more difference. Probably even $5 million. But $1 million still has plenty of room for very meaningful life improvement, that isn't anywhere near private jets. Not that you need, but that it's entirely normal to want.

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From my personal experience in my circle of friends in my expensive west coast city, there are very impactful differences between the lower end of annual household income (400K) to the upper end (1.5M). While everyone lives fairly comfortably and doesn't have much financial stress, there are things the upper end can do that the lower end can't:

- Send the kids to private schools (more and more important as public schools start to cancel gifted programs, focus on non-core subjects, tolerate misbehavior and disruption from students that wouldn't be accepted to private school, etc.)

- Live closer to work, shortening commutes from 2 hrs round trip to 45 minutes, saving more than an hour of stressful commute per day.

- Every major purchase other than a house requires no budgeting or planning

- Optional early retirement at 45 vs 60 or later

- Have a vacation house, which enables building social capital through hosting friends, and never having to compete with others to book lodging during peak season

- Freedom to leave a job that is too stressful/time-consuming

> Have a vacation house, which enables building social capital through hosting friends

Psychopath

It is unfortunately true. You cannot invite your social peers and pay for their lodging. It is only socially acceptable if you literally spend 3x as much for a rarely used guest room.

Not true. It's sad that you all quantify and gamify relationships.

Some people are just better about lying to themselves about it - the poor part of town literally depends on it.

I used a very sterile, transactional description of it but there’s no denying that this is the case. Of course it’s not the only benefit, and it’s not what motivates the purchase in the first place.

You can argue about the numbers and there is definitely the flying private jets and basically not thinking about the cost of hotels and schools, etc. echelon. But, yeah, $1m/yr probably isn't that given it's not that much out of the range of a lot of salaried senior worker bees in tech, etc. Sure, that's great comp and you can save a lot but it's not "costs don't matter" level of things.

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