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peterburkimsher

Being rich is having a car. Even a scooter.

Being rich is being able to visit your family.

Being rich is having insurance.

Being rich is paying for a monthly phone subscription.

Being rich is hot lunches.

Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss.

Being rich is considering having children at all.

Being rich is buying alcohol.

Being rich is looking at house prices.

Being rich is saving money for the future.

Being rich is paying for a haircut.

Being rich is renting a house with a kitchen.

Being rich is making plans more than a few weeks ahead.

Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion.

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>> Being rich is considering having children at all.

This is it. I lost track on how many of my friends/peers/colleagues don't have children, because they live from paycheck to paycheck and simply cannot afford it, even if they wanted to. And this is in germany mind you, where you have a relativeley robust social security net...

Not being poor is not the same as being rich.

Being rich I having enough money/income to not need to work.

In between is the middle class. There are middle class people who can afford to buy some of the stuff rich people buy, but if they lose their job they’ll be broke in a month or two.

When you're poor, everyone else looks rich.

When I was a kid, I assumed if you had a house you were rich and if you had one with stairs, holy Moses you were rolling in it.

Ohhh, ok, I got it now. I took it literally and completely missed the point. Stupid me.

You don't have to be independently wealthy to be rich. Most middle-class people are neither poor nor rich, though they'll usually tell you that they're poor as fuck if the topic of money comes up. Very few of them have any perspective on where their income lies with respect to the median, and what a median lifestyle provides.

Yup, haircuts given by mother or sister and then even after a little money, trying to give yourself a haircut. Not knowing how to ask for a haircut.

Travel circumscribed by how far you can walk.

Being ashamed that your mother sewed up holes in her clothes.

Holes in the ceiling with water coming out of them.

No health insurance.

Being lucky to take one bath a week. Giving yourself washcloth baths.

Saving water by flushing the toilet with saved bath water.

I agree with what you have posted. An interesting point though is that poor women become pregnant at a rate far greater than that of their wealthy peers. Pregnancy rates and especially unplanned rates are far higher in 3rd world countries than in first world.

In the US this holds true as well due to a large incidence of unplanned pregnancies among the poor. Your point about the rich considering having children is apt as children are often planned by the wealthy.

I am not passing judgement on either side of the wealth divide but I think it is an interesting study.

A very interesting read: https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2011/disparities-uni...

> Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion

Are people in America actually worried that NK is going to nuke anyone? Kim Jong Un knows if he ever fires one of those, it's game over for him. They're a big-ass bargaining chip. Threatening to fire them is the only reason he has them at all. He'll never actually do it.

Not many, no. People in America are concerned that Trump is going to order an attack on NK, which will end up with the destruction of Seoul and the Chinese army moving in to newly-unified Korea for peacekeeping.

OK, I'm worried about that too. But like the nukes, the artillery pointed at Seoul is also a bargaining chip. If they start firing, its game over for them.

But I take your point that the idiot in the blond wig could start firing first

>> Being rich is considering having children at all.

There is a negative correlation between financial wealth and birth rate worldwide.

>Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss

If you have a 9-to-5, you're probably not rich.

You obviously missed the point of the GP

Yeah, didn't read it. Came straight to the comments to see all the righteous, selfless technocrats on HN tonight.

You're basically trolling this thread. Would please not do that, and please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion than that, and need all the help we can get.

The average household income in the US -- one of the wealthiest countries in the world -- is, like, $55k/yr.

If you've got some 9-to-5 job pulling down $80k/yr with no kids or dependencies, you're rich to a lot of people.

Being rich is having enough capital to escape the trap of wage slavery that is a 9-to-5. It is really hard to fathom the idea of money working for you instead of you working for money when $15/hour sounds like a lot of money though so I understand where "a lot of people" are coming from. However, raising the highest marginal income tax rates isn't raising taxes on the rich. It is raising taxes on the upper middle class - the most highly paid of the wage slaves.

The Micawber principle (from David Copperfield) comes to mind here: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, so the difference between happiness and misery is a single shilling (or 1/20 of a pound).

Remember hearing Dave Ramsey (who probably got it from someone else) saying that when your money makes more than you do, you're officialy rich. There might be something to it.

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