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Dad, Are We Rich?

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Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#111

Post by jedberg »

treis wrote: post #100
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…

>My measure of rich is "Can I live my current lifestyle without regular income from a job?" I would say that's wealthy. Rich, to me, is if you have the means to buy and do what you want for a reasonable set of desires. In other words, you can buy a nice house in a nice area, drive a new luxuryish (i.e. BMW level) car, go on vacations, and buy stuff like a big TV without worrying. Somewhere between 150k and 300k salar…

So then if you lose your job you're no longer rich? Are you then poor? The problem, to me, in differentiating rich vs wealthy based on how you get your money is that it makes things too fluid.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#112

Post by jedberg »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #45
jedberg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should have added a caveat that "my current lifestyle" needs to meet basic needs and make you at least relatively happy.

That also makes those with a truly extravagant lifestyle part of not-rich - I think you'd need to be in the billions to rich a level that you truly could maintain without working - one can always rack up an extraordinary bill buying a new personal jet or private yacht every week.

My definition throws away extreme outliers of people who buy a new yacht each week. But even if you include them, I suspect someone with that much money has figured out to set aside enough to eat and have very comfortable clothing and shelter.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#113

Post by sudosteph »

harryh wrote: post #97
sudosteph wrote: post #67

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 i…

The world income comparison thing at the end is not meaningful in the slightest. Why not? I would say that it's very important to understand that even middle class Americans are quite well off when compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world.

It's not meaningful because it doesn't address the heart of the question the kid was asking.

A child doesn't ask if their parents if they're rich because they looked up the GDP of various nations. They ask their parents if they're rich because they see differences between the things they have access to and the things their peers have access to.

Even a child knows that when they have a bigger house, receive better gifts, visit more places - that they are different from their peers and even families on TV. They deserve to know that most everyone they actually interact with will consider them "rich" and treat them accordingly. They also deserve to know that being "rich" is truly not the norm and that acting like everybody in the USA has the exact same opportunities as them is going to leave them out of touch with reality.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#114

Post by crispwafer »

g_sch wrote: post #9

I think the author is a bit too narrow in their definition of "political clout". They seem to define it as the ability to personally influence federal policy. However, as a class, people with $4M in wealth or more have an immense amount of political clout. Most contemporary US local, state, and even federal policies are geared toward attracting and retaining these people. Think property tax caps, mortgage interest de…

This is such a weird, backwards way of framing the situation.

People in that income/wealth group fund essentially the entire government budget while also costing essentially nothing, so of course there is an incentive to retain them, but generally governments are trying to just stop one cent short of bleeding them so dry that they move away.

In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#115

Post by jedberg »

sorokod wrote: post #106
jedberg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of "current" is to ground you and give you a baseline. If you're relatively happy with your current lifestyle, can you lock it in now and stop working? If yes, then rich, if no, then keep saving/investing/growing your income. My overall point is that there is an upper limit to that number, after which no lifestyle (barring crazy outliers like buying a yacht a week) would require you to keep working.

You are converting (like many of us do) something tangible - let's say money, to something less tangible, let's say happines. To simplify things it's like reducing a fraction where you focus on numerator and I am saying that denominator has a role in the overall result as well. You can work on achieving the desired numerator or consider that reducing the denominator can result in increased "happines" too.

> You are converting (like many of us do) something tangible - let's say money, to something less tangible, let's say happines.

I'm converting in the other direction, which is a big difference. I'm saying first reach happiness, then take that amount of money to set your baseline.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#116

Post by nostrademons »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #95
sudosteph wrote: post #67

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 i…

It must be where i grew up but in St.Louis and Kansas city, you could give your children most of these opportunities with roughly a middle class dual parent income. The smartest kids in my class became doctors, stanford phds, etc... None of them were what i consider upper middle class (provided they came from both parent educated households).

Curious what decade?

I was born in the 80s and that was the case in my Boston suburb - most people started out middle class, and where you ended up had more to with how smart & hardworking you were (and how much you took your good fortune for granted) than what your parents did.

I'm not sure that holds for kids today, looking around at my Silicon Valley suburb. If you're a tech worker with a Ph.D from MIT, IIT, or Chinghua that now works for Google, married to a fund manager from Stanford, your kid is going to have dramatically different opportunities from the children of a single immigrant mother from Mexico that cleans houses for a living. You'll likely grow up in a house with a yard rather than sharing an apartment with another family. All of your parents' friends will be similarly educated, and you'll have time to see them and socialize with them regularly. You'll go to an expensive preschool where kids get individualized attention, rather than a home daycare where one caregiver is trying to manage 8 kids. You'll end up in a different school district where everybody else had similar backgrounds and the teacher can teach to that level. Your parents will be able to help you with homework and do school projects for^H^H^Hwith you, and won't be exhausted and overworked when they come home.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#117

Post by trowawee »

harryh wrote: post #97
sudosteph wrote: post #67

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 i…

The world income comparison thing at the end is not meaningful in the slightest. Why not? I would say that it's very important to understand that even middle class Americans are quite well off when compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world.

Because Americans aren't buying groceries or paying rent in the rest of the world, they're doing that in America. Knowing that you're theoretically well-off in comparison to people living in other places doesn't put food in the fridge, and it tends to be deployed to shame people who are having a tough time making ends meet.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#118

Post by pnathan »

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…

I thought that the point of the article was that he was reflecting on wealth, and answering his children in such a way that they did not walk around like privileged gits, while still being truthful.

Comfortable is also my answer that I've prepared for the same question.

I'm considerably less wealthy than OP, I suspect, but, supposing things continue roughly as they have been, my child will never really know hunger or want.

We are _comfortable_. Which, in my understanding of my religion, gives us an obligation to help the less comfortable and to never take our assets for granted.

The distinction between rich and wealth that you point out is, I think, astute - it's something like the difference between poverty and being broke. For some of us, it's a state of being, for others, it is temporary.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#119

Post by themagician »

sudosteph wrote: post #67

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 i…

It's worth noting the median income in around $60k per household, not individual. That's split between single income households and dual income households. A large (and growing) portion of households are dual income and $60k is roughly equivalent to two people in minimum wage, or slightly above wage, jobs. Being single in the Bay Area and making $100k as a software developer and jokingly "feeling poor" is not the same as being middle class. It's not even in the same realm of possibilities for most middle class people.

I know that most people don't think about the people who make their coffee, butcher their meat, bring gasoline to their gas stations, package their products, stock shelves, and deliver their Amazon packages… but these are people. This is the "silent majority" of America. These aren't all young people doing temp jobs for the summer. These are people in their 30's and 40's living paycheck to paycheck working their ass off to support their kids.

Re: Dad, Are We Rich?

#120

Post by strikelaserclaw »

nostrademons wrote: post #116
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be where i grew up but in St.Louis and Kansas city, you could give your children most of these opportunities with roughly a middle class dual parent income. The smartest kids in my class became doctors, stanford phds, etc... None of them were what i consider upper middle class (provided they came from both parent educated households).

Curious what decade? I was born in the 80s and that was the case in my Boston suburb - most people started out middle class, and where you ended up had more to with how smart & hardworking you were (and how much you took your good fortune for granted) than what your parents did. I'm not sure that holds for kids today, looking around at my Silicon Valley suburb. If you're a tech worker with a Ph.D from MIT, IIT, or Ch…

I grew up during the 90's and 2000's. I would hate to use Silicon Valley as an example for a normal american life. In most of America, you could give your kids pretty good opportunities without earning 500k. As for the immigrant mother struggling, this was true even 30 years ago when things were supposedly better.
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