Comment by jcater | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcater | Hacker News Reader

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That's not at all consistent with my experience. I'm from rural MS, but was educated in Memphis. I went back to a small town (population: 4,500) to run a business there. Before I moved on, we had built it up to just over 40 employees. Except for technical jobs (finding programmers was damn near impossible), general labor jobs were easy to fill with a variety of skill levels.

The people we paid $35,000 were quite well off in that in that town. Hell, I rented one of the largest houses in the area when I moved, and only paid $800/mo (for 4,000 sqft). Nice two bedrooms ran $400-450, with three bedrooms running a hundred or so more.

The single wide culture fell into three main camps, as far as I could see:

1) Those who bought land and put a single wide on it, so they could own their place. Usually the intention was to some day build a house. Not a horrible decision.

2) Those who were renting, and opted to have a smaller trailer on a lot of property (to be able to have horses, etc), instead of going for a real house in town. I can respect that decision too.

3) Those trapped in the "pay weekly" rent treadmill. I feel bad for this group, because they're paying as much or more overall for their trailer rent as a decent rental house ran. But it's almost as bad as the payday loan treadmill .. once you get on, it's hard to get off.

I didn't notice your reply otherwise I wouldn't have deleted my post. In my home town in northwestern MN there is an agricultural experiment station which paid $35,000 for a programming job a couple years ago. I made a spreadsheet and even as a single guy with my car paid off I'd only be able to save about $700 a month on that salary. And that's as a renter. Granted, heating costs are much more expensive in northwestern MN than they are in the south and a rental is a bit more expensive than $400. That said, if I had kids to support I would have had to live in a trailer park and would have qualified for food stamps.

I don't think that living in a rental and saving $700 a month is "solidly middle class" in the USA. Perhaps it is now, though, in a world of permanently diminished expectations.

$35k individual income is solidly middle class. If your wife works and makes $20k, you're at the median household income.

For some weird definition of "middle", I guess. "Middle class" is a designation without meaning, the kind of label that nearly everyone is eager to claim for themselves. Hardly anybody but the most indigent will admit they are poor, because in the US it's like admitting a moral failure. Otherwise you'd be middle class, just like everyone else.

To me, referring to a "middle" when the distribution looks like this is not very useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_Annual_Ho...

Is the median $55k household in the US reasonably comfortable, able to have a family and buy a home without frequent financial stress over expenses like buying groceries, filling up the tank, or paying the water bill? If it's true that most Americans could not quickly produce $2000 in an emergency, I find that hard to believe. $55k DINKs are doing okay, but add a couple babies to the mix (not unreasonable for a "solidly middle class" family), and I think you're in for a rough time if you're saving for college and retirement like you ought.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_22490345/kline-americas...

Median or average is hardly a weird definition for "Middle" in terms of salary/place in society.

You may be slightly out of touch if you think saving $700 a month is poor. Huge portions of America have no savings and live paycheck to paycheck. Many more have only a few hundred in savings total.

50% of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 in an emergency (citation: http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/24/news/economy/americans_lack_...). Only 25% were "certain" they could come up with the funds.

Perhaps it's not "poor" but I was questioning whether it is really considered "solidly middle class." If it is, I guess I am out of touch.

Where would you place the middle class? While it might not seem abnormal around here, a $100K income puts you in the top 3-5% of earners.

Not being able to save $700/month or to come up with $2,000 in an emergency situation in the USA is poor, no matter how much useless crap you bought with the rest of your money.

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