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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Only on HN will you find someone seriously arguing that a salary of over 400K USD a year does not make you upper class. Sure, you can't afford to stop working for the rest of your life, but with a salary like that you're only a few years away from being able to if you wanted.

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No amount of salary makes you upper class when the class boundary is defined by having passive income sufficient to meet all expenses.

A salary of 2x expenses will put you in the upper class within 22 years (with average market returns), and passive income will fully replace the salary within another 8 years, but until then, that's still middle class.

Basically, if you can afford to invest 1/6 or more of your income, you can make it to upper class within your lifetime, and still have time left to enjoy it.

I make $20k-$30k/year, and though I don't fly very often, I do enjoy traveling and seeing new places. I have flown to quite a number of destinations and I'm definitely not upper class. I would fly still more if ticket prices continue coming down, though I'll want window seats.

> Only on HN will you find someone seriously arguing that a salary of over 400K USD a year does not make you upper class. Sure, you can't afford to stop working for the rest of your life, but with a salary like that you're only a few years away from being able to if you wanted.

Sorry but I think we need to be real. We are not the middle class. We are poor working class people. Most of the 10% is squarely the middle class. I'd imagine a big chunk of the 1% is middle class because one medical crisis could likely bankrupt them. Look at the wealth distribution graph.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Wealth_d...

400k a year is not "poor working class" by any definition of the word. The median salary in America is 45,000. "Poor working class" is significantly below that. 400k is upper middle class, and if you've not managed to save up for a rainy day on those kinds of wages, it really is your own fault. Actually poor people manage it.

People from the Bay Area really need to get out more. Source: I come from the actual poor working class.

I meant to say those making 400k are the middle class. I don't make anywhere near that much.

400k is not "middle class" -it's upper (upper upper) middles, and yes, there is a huge difference. It's literally top 1% of income!

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-incom...

I'm all for fighting inequalities but the way you frame this argument is frankly obscene to me. The average salary in the US is about $60k/year. Worldwide average is hard to establish precisely due to the many factors to consider but it must be around $10k to $20k.

Saying that you're part of "poor working class people" when you earn in a year what a significant number of your compatriots wouldn't earn in a decade is a ridiculous thing to say.

I commend you for being outraged at the insane inequalities in our civilization and I largely share your concerns but you really need to work on framing that better IMO.

A well-paid peasant is still a peasant.

Remember when the big tech co's were conspiring together against their own employees?

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

You're just buying into "The Man"'s propaganda to keep the working class divided, yo.

(It reminds me of a joke from Futurama. Leela gets a bunch of valuable stock and says, "Wow! I suddenly have an opinion about the capital gains tax!")

You need to spent a year of two being really middle class in the US.

I wasn't completely serious just then, eh?

Anyway, I am "really middle class".

Heck, I was homeless for about four or five years.

When poor serfs complain about less-poor serfs I like to point out that it's the lords they should be grumbling about, if anyone.

The existence of the mega-rich doesn't make the "merely wealthy" middle-class.

Here's a bit from the Washington Post in 2017 talking about the difficulty of defining what is "middle class" in the modern era. They arrive at an umbrella of $35k-$122k. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/25/is-10...

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