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Dad, Are We Rich?

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Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#61

Post by ac29 »

geggam wrote: post #15
bob33212 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans naturally anchor to their social network. If those people grew up in rural West Virginia with coal miner family income they would tell you that 250k/year is wealthy. You have to actively resist this anchoring behavior. You have to remind yourself that just because your neighbor has a 50k car, it doesn't mean that your 10k car is not a good fit for you.

I came from a poor area. I used to think 80k/yr was rich. Time passed, I got work in Silicon valley with a wife and kids. Living there I think 500k would be middle class. Not even upper middle class. Perspectives change as you are exposed

80th percentile household income in Santa Clara County is $200k/yr [0]. The linked dataset doesn't go any higher, but I suspect 500k/year is 95th percentile or above, which puts you in the upper class. Even in the Bay, $500k/yr is the "own two homes and a few Porches" level.

[0] http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/income

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#62

Post by empath75 »

throwayEngineer wrote: post #52
rb808 wrote: post #34

I think the HN bubble is far detached from the real world. If you own 100k+ of assets, most of the people in the world will see you as incredibly rich. If you own a house in the Bay Area even with a mortgage most Americans will see you as rich. Sure you might not feel rich because you have to go to the office each day and you dont have a sports car, but you are. Median and mean wealth per adult, in US dollars. USA: 6…

The Physician takes for granted that his profession has a monopoly on perscriptions and declaring medical necessity. >Laughably some consider me rich I know the article is supposed to hate on the 0.1%ers, but since Physicians always say this crap about their income, it's important to know Healthcare costs are terrible because he is paid so well.

Says the software developer that makes about as much as a doctor for writing Jenkins pipelines or something else essentially valueless to most people.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#63

Post by themagician »

docker_up wrote: post #6

My kids asked me this and I said we are "comfortable". We are easily 1%-ers in terms of income level but we don't consider ourselves rich. I consider someone rich who has the luxury of not working and still maintaining a very good lifestyle. In Silicon Valley you can't do that without substantial net worth. The reason why we don't consider ourselves rich is because both my wife and I have to work very hard. We love o…

You don’t consider yourself rich because you are tone deaf and lack perspective, not because you work hard. I doubt you have any idea what it means to work hard.

Jumping online to finish some work on a computer isn’t working hard. Lmao. Working hard is sitting on an assembly line putting clamshells together all day until your hands hurt, then having to wake up and do it again the next day.

I too get to live the luxury of pretending I work hard while sitting behind a computer in a comfortable environment. But seriously man, get some perspective.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#64

Post by teachrdan »

throwayEngineer wrote: post #52
rb808 wrote: post #34

I think the HN bubble is far detached from the real world. If you own 100k+ of assets, most of the people in the world will see you as incredibly rich. If you own a house in the Bay Area even with a mortgage most Americans will see you as rich. Sure you might not feel rich because you have to go to the office each day and you dont have a sports car, but you are. Median and mean wealth per adult, in US dollars. USA: 6…

The Physician takes for granted that his profession has a monopoly on perscriptions and declaring medical necessity. >Laughably some consider me rich I know the article is supposed to hate on the 0.1%ers, but since Physicians always say this crap about their income, it's important to know Healthcare costs are terrible because he is paid so well.

A small correction: In the US, Nurse Practitioners are able to write prescriptions. These are nominally under the authority of a supervising doctor, but in practice their scrips are mundane and approved with minimal scrutiny.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#65

Post by germanlee »

jedberg wrote: post #7

My measure of rich is "Can I live my current lifestyle without regular income from a job?". If the answer is yes, then you are rich. The trick here is to make sure to keep your lifestyle costs in line with your salary when you first start out, so that as your income grows you can save. So yeah, if you want a big house and nice cars and nice vacations, you wouldn't consider yourself rich compared to people who don't h…

Warren Buffet had an interesting take on "being rich". He defined it as being able to withstand economic, medical, etc catastrophe and still being able to maintain your standard of living and be able to rebuild your wealth in a reasonable amount of time. I think he set "rich" as having $25 million of liquid assets. He said have that amount of liquid assets will shelter you from a few medical or economic disasters and leave you enough to rebuild your wealth without affecting your standard of living.

If you had $3 million, a medical crisis or a business failure could wipe it all out and it would affect our standard of living and make it difficult to rebuild your wealth. $25 million cushions you against catastrophes. Of course he noted that it doesn't shield you from self-afflicted disasters like drug or gambling problems.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#66

Post by Zaak »

gowld wrote: post #51
saltcured wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It sounds funny to have a 2x guestimate from many people though. Is that evidence of a common mental heuristic for estimating and mitigating future risk? I personally can think of a net worth figure which seems like it might be comfortable under lucky circumstances (no major crash or catastrophic health issue). And, right now I also feel like twice that would make me feel pretty secure. In spite of my concerns…

"2x" is the same thinking behind "if you don't have a backup for it, you only have it temporarily" , for anything "it" may be. The thread starter is ambiguous about whether "secure" means "secure in what you currently temporarily have" vs "secure to have a reasonably acceptable life".

> "if you don't have a backup for it, you only have it temporarily"

Fabulous line. Is that attributable to anyone in particular?

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#67

Post by sudosteph »

It's a bit ridiculous to see the hoops that some of the wealthy will jump through so they don't have to feel guilty about their position in the world.

The person writing this article is almost certainly "rich" by any reasonable standard. Meanwhile, most families making 60k in the US (especially in areas with the best job markets and high COL) - are not. The world income comparison thing at the end is not meaningful in the slightest. If that is actually what he's telling his children, he's doing a great disservice to them.

The difference between 60k income and 200k income matters for a lot more than vacations. It impacts things that will directly affect opportunities for your children. This includes:

- Being able to live in a neighborhood with good public schools - Being able to live in a home without having concerns about the safety of it (both neighborhood safety and environmental safety factors come into play) - Being able to afford additional educational experiences for your children - things like tutoring, summer camps, musical instrument lessons - Having higher status professional connections that can help your child get into schools, internships, jobs, or just expose your child to higher paying career options in general.

The difference in long-term opportunity between middle and upper-middle class is admittedly much smaller than the difference between middle class and poverty, but it's still a real difference. It doesn't do anybody any good to pretend like the children of the wealthy don't actually have a leg-up just because their parents worked hard to get there or achieved class mobility on their own.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#68

Post by scient »

themagician wrote: post #49

Only wealthy people have a hard time figuring out what the correct measurement is for rich. It’s a total lack of perspective. It’s always laughable to me what rich people consider “middle”. It’s like the word has a different meaning. Middle, to a wealthy person, extends from the middle all the way up to the top 10% by any measure. Maybe even to the top 5% of they want to talk about how expensive it is where they live…

I think you are the one lacking perspective here. The same way you are trying to make a point, I can make a counter point. The person making $20 is considered comparatively rich by someone making less than a dollar a day in some underdeveloped country. Everything is relative. If you make $100k and you live paycheck to paycheck because of housing costs, education costs, grocery cost etc., how can you claim their should shut up because they are rich?

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#69

Post by legitster »

> Using the popular “4% rule” 1M would generate 40K per year before taxes – hardly a way to live in style! That income is less than 80% of the average U.S. household income.

This is hands down the worst way to look at this number. That's income for not doing anything! That's also generational wealth! 1M dollars in the bank is an order of magnitude better than a 40k year salary and it's a bit of a joke to compare them against each other.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#70

Post by fucking_tragedy »

throwayEngineer wrote: post #52
rb808 wrote: post #34

I think the HN bubble is far detached from the real world. If you own 100k+ of assets, most of the people in the world will see you as incredibly rich. If you own a house in the Bay Area even with a mortgage most Americans will see you as rich. Sure you might not feel rich because you have to go to the office each day and you dont have a sports car, but you are. Median and mean wealth per adult, in US dollars. USA: 6…

The Physician takes for granted that his profession has a monopoly on perscriptions and declaring medical necessity. >Laughably some consider me rich I know the article is supposed to hate on the 0.1%ers, but since Physicians always say this crap about their income, it's important to know Healthcare costs are terrible because he is paid so well.

You can easily look at physician income over time to see that this isn't true. However, hospital administration and billing have shot up considerably over the last few decades.
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