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StrangerThan -> RE: Almost everyone lost on the budget deal. (8/4/2011 6:11:30 AM)
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ORIGINAL: WyldHrt
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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy
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ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
250K a year around here and I have a 4000 SF house on the lake with My own boat dock and a couple of boats. Travel about anywhere and any time I want and no significant debt within 4 years.
I'd call that wealthy.
Location location location. $250k in TN is a totally different world than $250k in coastal CA. No offense, Willbe, but as someone making ends meet on about 1/10th of that (I live in coastal CA, too), I kind of have to call bullshit on the idea that $250K somehow isn't wealthy, even here.
TBH, watching those who rank in the top 1.5% as regards (US) income trying to pretend they are 'middle class' makes me a bit ill. HillWilliam is quite correct, regardless of location.
When I wrote that I wasn't sure if 250k was the right target in terms of defining the boundaries between those who wore the mantel of wealthy and everyone else, the immediate assumption was that I was trying to protect my wealth at the expense of all the poor and downtrodden, who have no options in life but to be poor and downtrodden. What I said was, that I wasn't so sure that figure was the right place where the notion of chanting crowds standing in front of a guillotine was acceptable, because that's essentially what the figure defines. The Democratic party, ever the purveyor of class warfare ideals, picked the figure around which to rally all of those who feel poor and downtrodden.
First, a couple of notes. 250k is the household income target, not the individual income target. One can make 199k, and as long as one's significant other doesn't exceed 51k, they are safe from the hordes. 200k is the individual income level at which one becomes vilified.
Second, I'm not one of the vaunted few. At the same time, our household income does not put the target completely out of reach, meaning it's not quite like standing on one side of a chasm, and gazing across at the other side, assuming it to be completely out of reach and destined only for the chosen or those of noble birth.
And finally, as someone else noted quite succinctly, everyone's reality differs. HillWilliam lives right down the road from me - somewhere. That somewhere isn't far though. I could just as easily post my hometown to be the same as his given that I live in the same three city triangle where he defines as home. The devil and difference, as they say, is in the details.
Without going into too many details, my own road is one that encompassed paying for three college educations, paying mortgage and utility bills for an ex for a year and half while she finished her degree, donating about 20k to another kids education. The first three is just something I have always considered my responsibility, one that goes past the basic raising to trying to give them the best foot forward in life. The last two, I was under no obligation to do, legally or personally. But the kid.. I was about the only father he ever knew even though I wasn't his father. That one deserted him when he was 5. The ex... no legal obligation there either but we didn't fight our way through a divorce and come out hating each other. Aside from all the other things life throws at you, these generated a fairly heavy debt load - one that I carried without making much progress at ending until about 7 years ago. When the success started coming, I didn't use it for excess. I used it in a fairly aggressive attack on that debt load. The last bit of it should be paid in full by early next year.
Like I said, income isn't at 250, but it's not like looking across the ocean either. It certainly doesn't feel wealthy though, nor does the marking of 250 appear excessively wealthy. Maybe it will in a year or two. Maybe how it feels then will be reshaped. Dunno. What I do know is that in defining the point at which class envy and class warfare is acceptable, that marker doesn't seem that high. It's odd too that the markers discourage long term commitment in official form, since two people who do not do so have an effective limit of 400k instead of 250.
Either way, I know exactly what it's like to live on next to nothing. I did it for many years. It may sound extravagant to say my house is close to the same size as hw's but truth is, I bought it after the last owner defaulted and trashed it. It was totally unlivable the day I signed papers on it. I had to replace every floor in the place just to walk in it. If that wasn't enough, the heat pump had been destroyed, the bathroom's denuded of fixtures, cabinets - to the point bare wires hung out of the walls where light fixtures once sat. So while it's a decent house on good property, the value on it stood well under 100k when I bought it. I bought it, using money I'd made off the sale of a house I built myself at a cost roughly 1/3rd of what a developer wanted to charge me.
So yeah, everyone's reality is different.
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