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Which class do you identify with?

Which social class do you 'fit'?


  • Total voters
    59
"when your 20 and your not a socialist, you have no heart".........."when your 40 ,and still a socialist, you have no brain"

this is a old saying, because what it says is over time your opinions on things change, and you look at the world a different way.

i cant wait until your 50 and see the world with different eyes.

by the way this is NO insult too you........its something for you too think about.

Ive thought about it. But then again that saying does not apply to many many many many people in this world.
 
Traditional-middle to middle. While we do not have professional degrees in my home, we have professional level careers and (with any luck) professional-level incomes in the next 6-8 months.

We live WELL under our means, however. Our home is at the very low end of the spectrum for the area in which we live, whether you go by appraisal price or selling price. Average home price in our town is $250k, and in the areas immediately surrounding, the average price shoots to $400k. We came in WELL below the median. We drive lower-end vehicles (I have a 2008 Focus and he has a 2011 Escape). We invest all of our extra money into our home for now, but after the first of the year we'll be heavily contributing to retirement funds. We don't take lavish vacations, we don't make large purchases (our max purchase on anything non-necessity in the last 12 months was $300 @ Kohl's for about $750 worth of clothing thanks to their awesome discount programs).
 
Traditional-middle to middle. While we do not have professional degrees in my home, we have professional level careers and (with any luck) professional-level incomes in the next 6-8 months.

We live WELL under our means, however. Our home is at the very low end of the spectrum for the area in which we live, whether you go by appraisal price or selling price. Average home price in our town is $250k, and in the areas immediately surrounding, the average price shoots to $400k. We came in WELL below the median. We drive lower-end vehicles (I have a 2008 Focus and he has a 2011 Escape). We invest all of our extra money into our home for now, but after the first of the year we'll be heavily contributing to retirement funds. We don't take lavish vacations, we don't make large purchases (our max purchase on anything non-necessity in the last 12 months was $300 @ Kohl's for about $750 worth of clothing thanks to their awesome discount programs).

Keep heading down that path and you will most likely end up on easy street in Retirement World, USA...and be accused of being lucky by others who didn't prepare very well for their retirement years.
We did what you are doing, somewhat differently maybe, but we ended up with 2 very good retirements...the only problem I have is shutting off the frugal mode and getting into the spend mode. Frugality is a hard habit to break...
 
Keep heading down that path and you will most likely end up on easy street in Retirement World, USA...and be accused of being lucky by others who didn't prepare very well for their retirement years.
We did what you are doing, somewhat differently maybe, but we ended up with 2 very good retirements...the only problem I have is shutting off the frugal mode and getting into the spend mode. Frugality is a hard habit to break...

I learned from my dad. He did everything he reasonably could being a lower-middle class struggling business owner. Circumstances beyond his control killed his savings...all of it...just gone. Money that had been "guaranteed" to him by his father was unceremoniously stolen from him by his vindictive step siblings. His personal retirement account was drained to save their house from foreclosure during the worst of the recession. He almost lost 10 acres of land in south Texas because his wife's family failed to pay their portion of the taxes on it, and he had to foot the bill to get things current. Health scares, car accidents, unscrupulous employers he agreed to work for when things got REALLY bad, who ended up in court for their fraudulent treatment of customers...

So I'm extra careful with my future. I've got to look out for myself, my future kids, and for my dad. He worked his ass off to take care of me, and I'm not going to let him fall down because he made the choice to work hard and with integrity for most of his life.
 
I am a working person. I happen to have a masters degree and have worked in white collar professional jobs my post college career. I also worked fast food in high school, was a janitor in a hospital, worked on a city park as a recreation director and even spent six months on a garbage truck before I got my teaching job.

I am a working person. Sorry, but none of the categories were an honest fit.
 
I'd call myself a member of the Bohemian class.
 
None. Or maybe business-class. What's social?

Maybe hermit-class, or family-class. I hang out with my family, I enjoy it, I also like and require my alone time. The rest is just a matter of practicality. Emotionally I probably prefer my roots, poor south with good food, drink, some music and some nature as the backdrop (bayou, lake, woods, whatever). Instead of bickering politics it's jokes and stories, I find that so much more pleasant a lot of the time. I can't handle it forever though, if I want to problem-solve as entertainment I prefer to post on DP or listen to NPR or research/read. If I want to shop and eat-out, I want to be in the upper-class areas that aren't quite super-snobbified, I feel safer, it's often got a lot of money thrown at it for asthetic and it's the type of stuff I buy these days.

Anyone who really tries to be a particular social class, including "intellectual" would probably annoy me/nauseate me. I can't stand acting or social positioning, I just want to destroy it every time I see it. So, I usually avoid it, happily. It's like which cuisine do I associate with. I have no idea, I try to eat from all of them if the dish is good...
 
The problem is education has nothing to do with pay or class.........

It has to do with how high up the Corp structure you are, and how much they "value" you.
 
The problem is education has nothing to do with pay or class.........

It has to do with how high up the Corp structure you are, and how much they "value" you.

Absolutely right. There are unemployed Ivy Leaguers who came from upper class families, and there are rich people who don't have a college education. They're the exceptions, not the rules, but class level is not educational per se.

I called myself "Upper Middle" because 1) my wife and I have advanced degrees, 2) we have never had any debt for more than a few months (we even own our home outright, and we're under 30 years old), and 3) we make more money than any of our graduate school classmates (as far as we know). On the other hand, our home is rustic and does not even have a real toilet (we burn our poop), we shop at thrift stores, we share a car that's more than 10 years old, and we have no kids or pets. We were just really, really strategic, like obsessive-compulsively strategic, and willing to live a lifestyle most people would not even begin to consider. Since our circumstances are so rare among our age group, it's hard to compare ourselves to others in the tit-for-tat sense. But I consider the advantages of our lifestyle to essentially put us in competition with upper middle class or even upper class peers. A lot of middle-upper and upper class couples our age make more money than we do, but they don't collect their own water, harvest their own heat source, live a debt-free life, and I even think that some people with triple our salaries actually FEEL poorer than we are.

I don't say any of this to brag. Remember, I have a graduate degree and yet I build fires to incinerate my own ****. One of the coolest things I ever discovered in life was that I could FEEL richer than someone who was considerably richer than me in the literal sense. It's quite an empowering thing when people who earn significantly more than you ask "how do you DO that??"

I have no desire to redistribute wealth to make poor people richer. What I want to redistribute is an empowered attitude, so that people can feel richer than their technically richer counterparts. If I could do that, I would die happy.

You don't just have to think about privilege and education. There's also gross income, and then there's net income, and then there's discretionary income, there's net worth, and even deeper than that, there's true security, and a little farther still, I'd say there's self-actualization.
 
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I don't think class is defined by your degree. I know plenty of "underpaid" MBA's, out-of-work people with liberal arts degrees, etc, and I know many wealthy people with only a high school diploma (and a couple who don't even have that).

The wealthiest people are typically entrepreneurs. They then hire the folks with fancy degrees to work for them.

This election year, the economic focus seems to be on the "middle class". Strange, because if you really think about it, the middle class is really several "classes" in and of itself. Where do you fall in the U.S. social class rankings and WHICH middle class are all the pundits referring to?

How do you fit into the income/social class in the United States?

Upper (old money/privileged upbringing/ivy league school)
Upper-Middle (Higher degree than a BA/BS)
Middle (white collar professional degree)
Traditional Middle (working - blue/pink collar -4 year college degree)
Working (no college degree)
Poor (HS, GED)



I consider myself in the traditional middle class.
 
I'm your typical parisate but I put prefume and dress up.
 
None of the above.

Middle class by income (although taxable income is below poverty level), some college and I'm retired due to disabilities. As an enlisted member of the Armed Forces, I was well under the poverty level for most of my career.
 
I look at these things a lot differently, at least in my opinion.
Last year I was making $25k a year, just bought my house, living well enough.

While some of my new neighbors were earning twice or more than I was and they were loosing their house.

What class does that make us?

The INTELLIGENT class ;)

I think all this talk of Class can be summed up by saying, you either have Class or you want "class" warfare.

Equal opportunity vs Equal results
 
Right now we're just below the poverty level, and I'm not sure if my parents are ever going to get out of that, I hope so, but I can't say they are for sure. I am currently going to school, and will hopefully be on my own making much more money than what my parents live off of right now soon enough.
 
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