TALES FROM THE MIDDLEish CLASS

Earning $243,000 a year to cover the basics. Not you? Trade-off choices, then, we face.

Would earning $243,000 annually make you feel cash poor? In a bleak look at the cost of raising two young children in a US metro area, the answer might just be ‘yes’.

In 2017, my wife and found ourselves taking part in an increasingly-popular San Francisco activity: running for our lives to find a lower cost of living. We relocated to Denver, Colorado, and started a family. I’m a pretty self-aware guy and realize that by moving here with the rest of the California flock, we helped drive up many of the costs I’m about to walk through with you. For the purposes of this piece, I’d ask that you set aside any animosity towards our choices and indulge this Californian who got pushed out of the Bay Area as he reflects on what it means to be successful in today’s American middle class.

As I’ve listened to political campaigns throughout 2020, there is a lot of talk about “Main Street”, suburbia and gentrification — all often interchanged with the term middle class. I began wondering what was meant by “middle class” since a common definition seems elusive. Upper-middle, middle-middle, lower-middle? Is it based on income, wealth, culture or education — maybe all of these combined? This lack of common definition and resulting benchmark data left me feeling…