Now, I’m no fancy accountantmatician, but when counting the three vacations, payments on the second car, children’s lessons, and “miscellaneous” as part of their “left over” income, then this family actually has $52,100 left over every year. Throw in the additions to their food costs of their 26 date nights a year, and their left over income after all other expenses is probably at least $55,775, the median total income of American households.

This family can pay for all basic needs, a car, multiple forms of insurance, $18,000 a year in charitable donations, and a huge retirement savings account, and still have as much money as the average American family has total.

I’m sorry but $10,000 of “something always comes up” money is the fucking dream 

rich people are like, actual aliens. they really, fundamentally, do not live in the same world that I do. I feel so naive for really struggling to understand that, the huge gulf in experience is just…. so much

“after I buy literally everything I need for my family to thrive I am only left with about 7000 dollars” give them to me for making me read that

(1) why do you have two cars in Manhattan. Take the subway! honestly even if you take an uberpool everywhere it probably wouldn’t cost $17,000 a year.

(2) $9000 a year gets you some very nice vacations, particularly if you’re in the Northeast, where there’s lots of camping and history within reasonable train/greyhound/rental car distance

(3) how do you spend $10,000 a year on clothes. I get that I live in Silicon Valley and so my husband can, in fact, be 100% clothed in free shirts he gets from his employer but honestly that’s like ten pairs of NICE jeans EVERY YEAR FOR EVERY MEMBER OF YOUR FAMILY. honestly have you people never heard of a thrift store or a sales rack

(4) your children do not need $12,000 a year of lessons. they are probably overscheduled and stressed and will be much happier if you halve the lessons they have

there I just saved them thirty-five thousand dollars

Although part of me wants to not make fun of this.

The original post isn’t trying to say “feel sorry for these people” or “these people are basically poor”. It’s saying “here’s why this happens”.

From an economic point of view, you could imagine a world where rich people make $500,000, spend the first $50,000 on normal living expenses like everyone else, and then have $450,000 left over to buy yachts or whatever. In reality, according to a lot of different sources, most of them are more like these people; getting nice versions of things, but having surprisingly few savings and generally wondering where the money went at the end of the year.

Wealthy people are going to spend what they have, then feel, subjectively, like they don’t have enough. Then they’re going to feel like they need to be wealthier. And really, “wealthy people feel a surprisingly strong need to be wealthier” is a pretty important fact to know if you want to understand society.

Also, if (absent any countervailing force) budgeting expands to fit the space available, that’s an interesting principle that’s useful to know no matter how wealthy you are.

I feel like if your goal is to help people understand why rich people don’t feel rich, there are a lot better ways to convey that than the original article

most of which involve acknowledging that the instinctive reaction of people making $20,000 a year to people making $500,000 a year who don’t feel rich is “go fuck yourself”

and, like, I definitely feel rich as a person whose household income is way less than $500,000 a year and who lives in an expensive area, and I am not sure what my husband and I would do with more money other than donate. I think this is less about any objective difference between me and the people making $500,000 a year and more about our attitudes towards money. like, notably they aren’t thinking something like “we are choosing to spend money on violin lessons and vacations, because buying experiences is important to us, and that means we don’t have a lot of money for savings.” they’re thinking something like “we’re basically normal people who are spending money on basically normal things, but somehow there’s never enough money for savings.” they have a real problem, but their real problem is that they don’t feel a sense of agency or control over how they spend money. and I think part of identifying that problem does involve pointing out that they don’t have any money not because they don’t have enough money (which is a problem poor people have) but because of optional decisions they have made about how to spend it, and it is very possible for them to make different decisions. you don’t actually have to have violin lessons the same way you have to eat food.

I feel like this distinction might be too simplistic.

There is a really long way to go between what’s strictly necessary for life and what I consider “civilized”. For example, if I had to live in a house that was full of roaches, well, roaches never killed anyone, but it’s below the threshold at which I feel like the world is unfair and my life is miserable. Likewise, if I couldn’t afford hot water and I needed to take cold showers every day, that’s not going to kill me, but again, that would be below my personal threshold and I would put a lot of effort into making that not happen.

If I made enough money that I could easily live in a roach-infested house without hot water, or I could really stretch my budget to live in a clean house with the water, I think I would do the second one even if it meant my situation was financially precarious. I wouldn’t call this “not having a sense of agency over how I spend my money”, I would call it “having standards”.

And I guess my theory is that these “standards” expand to fit the space available - or depend heavily on what I grew up with and what everyone else is getting. Maybe if I were from rural India, being able to take cold showers whenever I wanted would seem like unbelievable luxury, and a house full of roaches would seem amazing because it was a solid roof over my head that didn’t leak. And maybe if I made $500,000/year, not being able to give my children private violin lessons would seem as horrifying as not being able to give them shoes do right now.

(Though against this theory, I should note that two years ago I felt like my budget was pretty tight, and now even though I’m only making about $10K more I feel like I’ve got more than enough. Also, I somehow managed to live in that horrible house with all the mice who would poop everywhere without my brain considering it a violation of my decency standards, so maybe it’s more flexible than I think)

Maybe the standards stretch to fit the space available, but in a world where the vast majority of people do not get to live in a clean house with hot water, metaphorically speaking, and are very far away indeed from being able to do so, complaining about not having all that much money at the end of the year because you are living in a clean house with hot water is irritating.

Also there is a significant difference between needs and wants, and violin lessons are just flat out not on the same level as shoes. For one thing, your child can stop taking the lessons and keep playing violin, as long as they know the basics.

This sounds kind of like the Republican talking point where being poor in America doesn’t count because “99% of poor people have refrigerators” - just substitute in “hot water” for “refrigerators”. I’m not sure this is a good way to think about things. It is possible to have more than the lowest conceivable amount of things that will not literally cause you to die of deprivation, and still feel stressed and like you’re missing something important, especially if everyone around you has more and a lot of society is built on the assumption that you have more. I don’t think the poor should stop being taken seriously if they feel like they need roach-free houses or hot water. I’m not exactly sure what the standard is, and I’m not sure it’s possible to have a consistent standard, but I think it’s higher than that.