Their budget includes things like maxing out 401ks and 529s, spending almost $10K on vacations per year, $4K to charity, $2 million home, and it explicitly says things like “Old Navy instead of Gucci” for the clothing item to demonstrate that they’re being
frugal. Even if you subtract out the housing cost, this lifestyle is really stretching the definition of “middle class”.
Their example of a couple who makes this much money is a pair of Bay Area Rapid Transit employees who have a combined income of over $500K. Their professions? Janitor and elevator technician. They clearly went out of their way to find the most controversially high paid public employees they could find in order to feed the clickbait fire.
> But this family buys disposable (not washable) diapers, tons of baby-proofing material, lots of educational toys, the best car seats and two strollers.
> Date night can easily cost $200 per outing for two once you include tickets to a ball game or an Off-Broadway show and transportation.
This really highlights priorities. Not everyone gets to make these decisions. I agree the definition of middle class is getting stretched. This isn't the budget of someone with breathing room who gets to enjoy something nice from time to time.
I think their budget including a reasonable percentage of income to 401ks and charity is actually a fine thing. Sure, call out the vacation if you like, but saying "people should be putting 5% away for retirement (most companies max match) and donating 2% to charity at the middle class level" is a perfectly reasonable statement. Well, feel free to argue about tweaking the percentages.
> In order to raise a family in an expensive coastal city like San Francisco or New York, you’ve now got to make $350,000 or more a year.
So, not just "a big city". Not Chicago, not Atlanta, not Houston, not Denver. Just the super-high-cost-of-living cities. Um, yeah, high cost of living cities have high costs of living. But it's not "a big city", it's specific big cities.
In fact, it's not even big cities. It probably takes a lot of money to live a middle-class lifestyle in Aspen, too.
So, yeah, like PragmaticPulp said, it's clickbait.
That said, this article uses a cost breakdown from an actual family. The expenses are reasonable, IMO. Some might criticize spending $70/day on food and budgeting for groceries, but I think $70/day in an expensive city is perfectly within "middle-class lifestyle" territory.
Note that the expenses in San Francisco (which is not a big city, just an expensive one, but for which the numbers cited are roughly reasonable) aren’t at all typical of California, or even “the part of California from which people commute to work in the core cities of the Bay Area”.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadTheir budget includes things like maxing out 401ks and 529s, spending almost $10K on vacations per year, $4K to charity, $2 million home, and it explicitly says things like “Old Navy instead of Gucci” for the clothing item to demonstrate that they’re being frugal. Even if you subtract out the housing cost, this lifestyle is really stretching the definition of “middle class”.
Their example of a couple who makes this much money is a pair of Bay Area Rapid Transit employees who have a combined income of over $500K. Their professions? Janitor and elevator technician. They clearly went out of their way to find the most controversially high paid public employees they could find in order to feed the clickbait fire.
> Date night can easily cost $200 per outing for two once you include tickets to a ball game or an Off-Broadway show and transportation.
This really highlights priorities. Not everyone gets to make these decisions. I agree the definition of middle class is getting stretched. This isn't the budget of someone with breathing room who gets to enjoy something nice from time to time.
So, not just "a big city". Not Chicago, not Atlanta, not Houston, not Denver. Just the super-high-cost-of-living cities. Um, yeah, high cost of living cities have high costs of living. But it's not "a big city", it's specific big cities.
In fact, it's not even big cities. It probably takes a lot of money to live a middle-class lifestyle in Aspen, too.
So, yeah, like PragmaticPulp said, it's clickbait.
1. I'm not having kids, and
2. I'm not moving to Cali!
That said, this article uses a cost breakdown from an actual family. The expenses are reasonable, IMO. Some might criticize spending $70/day on food and budgeting for groceries, but I think $70/day in an expensive city is perfectly within "middle-class lifestyle" territory.
Note that the expenses in San Francisco (which is not a big city, just an expensive one, but for which the numbers cited are roughly reasonable) aren’t at all typical of California, or even “the part of California from which people commute to work in the core cities of the Bay Area”.