On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class

I can relate to a lot of this, I was pretty stinking poor growing up. Now I make good money. (I still buy used tires from shady lots tho).<p>But even now that I&#x27;m making good money, it boggles my mind how richer everyone else still seems. Like, how do so many young people have a favorite island in Hawaii? How is everyone out there affording new cars? People actually picked a college major without thinking about cost?<p>One thing I have to constantly wrap my head around is that being <i>broke</i> doesn&#x27;t correlate to income. I have a family and a mortgage and savings and nothing left over for luxuries at the end of the month. But someone working as a bartender can afford a new Jeep and go to Vegas 4x a year because they have a good roommate situation and they are due to inherit their parent&#x27;s second house one day.

This is something I really struggle with. I&#x27;m now middle class, but the horror of growing up poor still sticks with me. I have severe nightmares about being poor again, I just can&#x27;t go back. I tend to overwork, and hoard thing at times.<p>The most difficult thing these days, is my kids. I&#x27;m extremely happy that they don&#x27;t know how bad things can be, but I get extremely worried by that too. I get worried, that they don&#x27;t try hard enough because they don&#x27;t understand how bad things in life can get. I get worried that they are far too trusting because times are so good and plentiful.<p>Life can change good or bad in an instant.

I have been poor in a poor country and now I’m not. I make mid-high six figures and just bought a house. I have five years of expenses saved up and could extend it to ten with the right moves. Still, sleeping at night is hard, imagining that everything could collapse at any moment - I don’t know how I would explain to my kid that “we don’t have money anymore”. This feeling permeates every interaction I have at work - will I fuck up this email to the VP, then get fired, then become poor again? Makes for a very unhealthy relationship with work. Sometimes I wish I won the lottery - not to buy boats and cars and houses, but simply to stop being worried every damn minute of my life.

&gt; Food is huge here<p>I thought about that recently when I went to the grocery store - when I was fresh out of college, making ~$30k&#x2F;year, I remember always going to the grocery store and keeping a running total in my head of how much I was spending so I didn&#x27;t go over $70, since I knew my debit card would be declined if I did. Now I don&#x27;t even pay attention to how much individual items cost - I just grab what I need.

I grew up upper middle class and earn a mid-low six figure salary. I used to be quite frugal. Now I&#x27;m just apathetic to it. I don&#x27;t care at all about money. I have no particular financial goals. I save a lot without trying. But savings scale linearly in non risky comp scenarios. And that&#x27;s kind of boring because there&#x27;s nothing that I could imagine wanting that doesn&#x27;t require orders of magnitude more money than I have now. Aside from the vague &quot;retire early&quot; thing.<p>Not a complaint.<p>&gt; There’s something that people with money say that doesn’t make sense: that regardless of how much money you have, you run out of it just as soon.<p>This is just a weird thing to me. I didn&#x27;t feel this was true on a five digit salary much less what I have now.

&gt; When you get a good job, someone will ask you how much money you want to dump into your 401k. You will probably say “none” because you are conditioned to believe that trouble is just around the corner<p>This was relatable. While never having to support a family of 4 on 35k, I did have a period of my life where I was very broke on my own. When I finally started to climb out of my situation, I remember thinking people were idiots for putting money in a 401k. You can’t get it out if you need it. It took 5 years of stable employment before I actually started putting money into a 401k.

Good lord I can relate.<p>The freaking idea that money makes problems go away is so powerful.<p>That&#x27;s basically what I noticed as I get less poor.<p>Automobile problems...pay for it. Medical problems...pay for it. Did you get a parking ticket? Pay it. Now you don&#x27;t have to worry about being towed.<p>America really crushes the poor in many respects.<p>If the poor had other options, like Job corps, or a sharecropper type situation where they can stay rent free and learn skills.... that would be one thing. But there&#x27;s nothing available to poor people other than to just fucking be poor or get lucky...and getting lucky seems like a rediculous way to build a society.<p>Then you combine that with massive offshoring and automation..... It makes you realize capitalism is kind of bullshit if there&#x27;s 7 billion people in the world willing to do the job.<p>It&#x27;s a total clown world.

This might be a very non American problem, but people forget that there are social pressures to follow when you are middle class that cost more money.

<i>&gt; We are slightly terrified at all times of losing these things.</i><p>This is something that folks that came from The Other Side of the Tracks have. I came from there. People my age have grandparents (or, in some cases, parents) that lived through The Great Depression, and they have this, writ large.<p>I still basically live pretty low on the hog, even though it is not necessary. This recession is an annoyance; not a disaster. I lost more money, earlier this year, than many folks make all year. It sucks, and I&#x27;m not wealthy enough to &quot;shrug it off,&quot; but I am not existentially terrified. I know that things will be OK in a couple of years, and I&#x27;m not in danger of burning my principal before things start recovering.<p>I loved his previous article, and I&#x27;m glad he&#x27;s doing better.

I was suddenly middle-class-ish for a brief period last year. I have been mostly on the poor side for almost 14 years. To give you an example, I earned around $7,000 in all of 2014 and my average monthly income from 2016 through 2018 was $1800.<p>I did what was necessary - learned to cook, worked odd jobs, moved around frequently to find cheap accommodation, slept on all sorts of beddings and, sometimes, on the street, abstained from luxuries and travel etc - during this time.<p>Then, last year, I found a sweet gig and my income suddenly rose way beyond my expectations (around $6,000 per month). That was also the time I moved to a new apartment. I spent some of the new money on furnishings and living a comfortable life - not thinking twice about splurging on a meal or clothing. I invested in the stock market and opened an IRA account.<p>At the back of my mind, however, there was a nagging feeling that it wouldn&#x27;t last. Sure enough, I lost the gig in February this year and am surviving on IRA money and credit cards. I forgot to cash out of the stock market near the top and suffered losses of almost $3,000. I am loathe to move out of my current place though I have a feeling I will have to, eventually. I am back to cooking all my meals and thinking twice before making purchases.<p>I am not sure if it is a cycle but poverty is definitely a mindset. I&#x27;ve been on the other side where I was making decent money that allowed me to live comfortably (not ostentatiously). I was in a better mental state. Lately, I have been pretty depressed (although things are not as bad as they were in 2014) and exhausted all the time.

There is a difference between being nouveau rich-ish Vs being nouveau riche. The author is comparing two different wealth classes.<p>When you are middle class, it’s lower middle class, middle class and upper middle class. Only the UMC has being rich aspirations&#x2F;possibilities.

I can&#x27;t say my experience mirrors this. Yes, I spend more on things like food, but not so much that it makes a dent. I can still save far more than I ever could back then.<p>Getting decent pay is just so much more efficient at making you economically safe than any kind of clever frugality is. Maybe if you could figure out a way to live without paying rent or mortgage interest, it&#x27;d be worth it, but otherwise it&#x27;s the income side that matters more than the expenses side.

I can empathize with the author here. Ruin is always one bad move or freak accident away.<p>Importantly: you can always make it back.

dollar bill blues. i can relate and you are a good writer. you should consider writing a book. there are hungry people who need hope. cheers.

And this is why Sweden has a more creative economy than the US. The state takes a bit more from the rich so that those at the bottom have at least, decent housing, health care, nutrition and education.<p>In a capitalist system the top 10% will always be richer and the bottom 10% will always struggle. And this would still be true even if a magic genie came a long and made everyone ten times smarter.<p>This isn&#x27;t a knock on capitalism. Capitalism scales where many other systems don&#x27;t. (I&#x27;m looking at you communism.)

20 years ago I was living in a $100 car with 3 immovable doors that I had to push start and repair every day. I was working 80 hour weeks doing day labor in the mornings and telemarketing in the evenings. I also sometimes did truck deliveries, street magic, random tech gigs from craigslist, PC repair. If there was a craigslist ad with a problem I would learn enough to solve it well enough to get paid and get referrals.<p>Any free day I was trying to get better at programming on college library computers I was able to use by copying other peoples student IDs off sign in sheets.<p>I made maybe $1500 a month which barely covered food, gas, and helping out people even poorer than me while trying to slowly save for a vehicle that could make a cross country trip to somewhere with other work options.<p>I eventually got a $1000 vehicle that only needed weekly repair, used it to relocate to a more populated area, upgraded to an abandoned trailer with borrowed electricity and no septic, and got a retail job.<p>Now I had more time to build tech skills. Eventually got the confidence to take on contract coding jobs, and then the confidence to do that full time.<p>Eventually I knew enough to pass interviews and get a salaried software engineering role. Then another. Turns out there was plenty of demand for some of the skills developed along the way doing random coding and infosec gigs, managing cheap DIY servers for thousands of users of random open source side projects of mine, and building custom Linux kernels for whatever random old hardware I could find.<p>Worked my from software engineering roles into running security departments for a series of well known companies by finding major security bugs at every employer. Turns out security is one of those things everyone seems to think is someone else&#x27;s job, so I always made it mine.<p>Now I own a home and have a family in Silicon Valley. I own a security consulting company where my team and I have several audit projects and retainer contracts at any given time helping major companies spot security flaws, and build defenses.<p>Going from homeless to the comfort I currently enjoy was a long road. I never fully shake the fear I could lose it all and be back on the streets at any time. That is only amplified now that others depend on me. I never took 401ks because I expect life or the institutions will fail me before I ever see it back. Never 100% trust banks because I worry funds will be stolen via identity theft or go negative into overdraft hell I can never pay back, no matter how high the balance. I always have the need to have multiple income sources so no single one of them drying up can sink me. The need to learn new skills constantly so I always deliver results most others cannot so people keep paying me. The need to prep for every worst case scenario I can think of always for myself and those that pay me.<p>In the end, I think this pressure of always feeling a bit chased has served me well and still does. I also do not know that I would recommend this path to anyone, but I am generally pretty happy these days so I will take it.

A couple lessons I&#x27;ve learned:<p>&quot;A king is but a foolish labourer &#x2F; Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream&quot; (Yeats)<p>&quot;As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital.&quot; (Marx)

&gt; Middle-class-or-better people don’t like to talk about money... You realize you are talking to people who have a problem you can’t solve for them.<p>This extends to not wanting to discuss salary with coworkers, by the way. The common conception is the bosses want to hold us down so they tell us not to talk about it. But I’ve been in multiple situations where I didn’t want to.<p>I knew I was making more, and it wasn’t because i was the best- in some cases I was lucky, sometimes I just negotiated better. But in either case there’s really no upside to disclosing.

The hell of it is, he <i>still</i> isn&#x27;t middle class. The US doesn&#x27;t even have a middle class anymore. He is just no longer at the very bottom of the underclass. He is now mid-lower lower class.<p>It is impossibly hard for most people not in the upper class in the US to conceive of just how impossibly far they are from that upper class. $100k&#x2F;yr? Lower class. $200k&#x2F;yr? <i>Still</i> lower class: you still can&#x27;t afford to send your kids through college, and still make your house and car payments, replacing your car every year or two. <i>Yes</i>, that was what middle-class people <i>used to</i> do.<p>What happened to the middle class? It was eliminated, by explicit political policy. The US income curve is now strongly bi-modal. One hump for upper class, another for lower. Very few people are near the middle, where the middle class once was. Those few are either tacking to get to the upper class, probably futilely, or are well on their way out of it, and won&#x27;t be back.<p>The Republican Party discovered that they could get lower-class people to vote against their own interests, and for the interests of the upper class, by convincing them they were not lower class. Now half the country votes mainly to try to keep the desperately poor from taking what <i>they</i> have managed to scrabble together, and in the process ensure the extremely rich get extremely richer and don&#x27;t have to pay for anything, and especially not let any of it go to those same voters.<p>Up until around 1970, Americans&#x27; income was on a relentless rise. That had stopped by 1980, and has been more or less level, since. The income didn&#x27;t go away, at all. The total amount has skyrocketed, since, going up at the same rate as before. Just, rich people get all of the difference, everything from that line down to the flat line describing what they have left for the rest of us. All this is policy, and the program to get there was spelled out in the Powell Memorandum, which you can read online.<p>During COVID lockdown and supply-chain upsets, they got insanely more money, somehow, again at the rest of our expense.