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Are you middle class?

Donkey Deac Doug said:
Playing with the numbers, it looks like the "gross income" tipper is $185,000. That seems reasonable. I've long maintained that every dollar you make over $130,000/yr. matters way more than every dollar before it. Folks that make 200,000/yr are WAY better off than folks that make 150,000 a year. Difference is much less noticeable between $50,000 and $100,000; or $100,000 and $150,000.
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It helps when you hit that social security cap and it's no longer taken out of your paycheck.
 
deacon14 said:
The stipend is enough to have a decent quality of life given you are willing to have roommates, so yeah I suppose so.

It's still pretty close to paycheck to paycheck though, which I don't really associate with middle class, although maybe my idea of the definition of lower middle class is just wrong.
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most stipends in social sciences at my public institution land grad students firmly in lower class by this calculator

that’s pretty outrageous
 
my stipend places me firmly in lower class territory so idk
 
Strickland33 said:
most stipends in social sciences at my public institution land grad students firmly in lower class by this calculator

that’s pretty outrageous
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I’m STEM not social sciences which I assume is the difference, but yeah. I played with it more and I’m pretty close to the lower/middle class line on this calculator.
 
My wife and I both just got a little raise and I'm being told by this calculation that we are in the upper income 15%. If we do the boards then we are probably in the bottom 15%
 
I'm considered upper but it doesn't consider how much of my income flows out for child support.

I consider myself firmly middle class.
 
sounds like some of y'all just need to buy more money
 
Donkey Deac Doug said:
Playing with the numbers, it looks like the "gross income" tipper is $185,000. That seems reasonable. I've long maintained that every dollar you make over $130,000/yr. matters way more than every dollar before it. Folks that make 200,000/yr are WAY better off than folks that make 150,000 a year. Difference is much less noticeable between $50,000 and $100,000; or $100,000 and $150,000.
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The thing I noticed is that once we bought our house our mortgage was our mortgage. Our student loans are our student loans. Our expenses really haven’t gone up. So basically, anything that comes in now is just kind of gravy.

Before it was like we got a raise, let’s go from an apartment to a townhome. Another raise, let’s save up for a down payment. Another raise, let’s buy that house.
 
DeaconCav06 said:
The thing I noticed is that once we bought our house our mortgage was our mortgage. Our student loans are our student loans. Our expenses really haven’t gone up. So basically, anything that comes in now is just kind of gravy.

Before it was like we got a raise, let’s go from an apartment to a townhome. Another raise, let’s save up for a down payment. Another raise, let’s buy that house.
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There's always a bigger house in a better neighborhood (or a beach house!)
 
DeaconCav06 said:
The thing I noticed is that once we bought our house our mortgage was our mortgage. Our student loans are our student loans. Our expenses really haven’t gone up. So basically, anything that comes in now is just kind of gravy.

Before it was like we got a raise, let’s go from an apartment to a townhome. Another raise, let’s save up for a down payment. Another raise, let’s buy that house.
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Yep. Our salaries go up and our expenses have steadily gone down. When we bought our house, we had to furnish it, pay for two kids in day care, among plenty of other random expenses. Now the boys are older, so instead of paying five digits for day care or after school for both boys, we pay a few thousand for after school and we won’t even have to pay that in a little over a year.


Strickland33 said:
mine, too

really puts the persistent labor exploitation and career uncertainty into perspective lol
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Yeah. The labor practices and expectations haven't changed enough in the last 15-20 years as global inequality has become much more stark.
 
Damn one person making 1mil a year doesn't even get you out of the top 26% in Austin. I have never felt so poor.
 
That's not how those numbers work. You could type in 1 billion per year and get the same thing. 26% of people in Austin are in the top income tier, which for that metro is like 120K for a 2 person household. That's all they are saying.
 
tiltdeac said:
That's not how those numbers work. You could type in 1 billion per year and get the same thing. 26% of people in Austin are in the top income tier, which for that metro is like 120K for a 2 person household. That's all they are saying.
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Niiiiiice. Not poor again.
 
Buy affordable house. Double up on payments. Then you feel rich once that's done.
 
mako1331 said:
Buy affordable house. Double up on payments. Then you feel rich once that's done.
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Don't you have a super low rate mortgage? Put the extra payments in the market (or pinball machines or whatever) instead, especially if you are itemizing.
 
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