I’m not “disturbed” by the middle class discussion, and of course, we can all get along. My point was that there is a troubling moving of the goal posts that happens on CC when we talk income. And that helps NOBODY.
I have friends in the Bay area and they have “normal” jobs (think school teacher and nurse, those kinds of jobs). Of course they feel poor, because they are surrounded by people who have made millions of dollars and have cashed out their stock at age 35. And buying a “normal” house is a nightmare because no such thing exists. So when they whine that their kid who graduated from college with a solid degree got job offers for “only” 100K and how is he supposed to live on that-- and you remind them that 100K is a very nice lifestyle for a 22 year old in Tulsa or Cincinnati or St. Louis (three of the locations that the kid could choose from-- in addition to SF and Boston) they react with horror.
OK, so perpetuate the feeling that you are “poor” for another generation by insisting that your adult kid replicate your lifestyle in SF.
You can feel poor in SF on 100K but you can live VERY nicely in Tulsa (buy a house, join a tennis club if that’s your thing) for the same salary and not have to commute 45 minutes each way.
Choices. We all have choices. Snowball- the kids you teach have fewer choices than affluent kids so its’ great they have you in their corner. But if we start acting as though 400K is “middle class”, we’ve lost ALL perspective on how people in America actually live.