Thread by @polotek

"A middle-class lifestyle is defined as: owning a home, having two kids, saving for retirement, saving for college, going on modest vacations several weeks a year, and retiring in one's early 60s."

GTFOH cnbc.com/2020/10/06/bid…

Media in a few years: “Middle class is defined as only having one Lamborghini...”

This is the thread where I got the article from. I’m sharing it because the mentions are entertaining.

A lot of people from really cheap areas in the Midwest are BIG MAD that other areas are not as cheap. (Sorry Dr. Keira. RIP your mentions)

https://twitter.com/rasmansa/status/1373040285517807616

Dr. Keita. Damn autocorrect.

I remember the sticker shock when I came to the Bay Area. I was flabbergasted at getting the salary I asked for. Then I immediately understood why once we had to start paying for shit. Cost is relative. You can easily spend $40 at McDonalds trying to feed 3 adults and a toddler.

You can try to resist it for a while. Then you just have to accept that’s how much things cost. Let me pay $15 for this hot dog. Coming out the grocery store with one bag of groceries for $80. I’m still mad about it, but I gotta eat.

I’m from Georgia. I mean ATL has gotten more expensive, but everywhere else is still pretty cheap. And when I was growing up? If you were paying $1000/mo for your apartment you were *balling out*. Our first place here was a studio loft for $2300/mo. And the hot water didn’t work.

I could barely fathom paying $500K for a house. But you can’t get anything for that here. I remember looking at a place that had burned down. It was literally a charred shell, and it cost half a million dollars just for the lot before you could even start building another house.

We ended up finding our house for around $700K. It was a steal because it’s in one of few remaining neighborhoods in all of San Francisco with a significant population of Black people. They are trying real hard to gentrify this neighborhood and houses here now sell for over $1M.

I say all of that to come back around and say what should be obvious. $400K a year is still a lot of fucking money even in one of the most expensive cities on earth. And anybody who makes that is more than fine.