[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="367"]
Source: www.sprottmoney.com[/caption]
Us American Middle Classers are shrinking.
The share of American adults in middle-income households decreased, from 55% in 2000 to 51% in 2014, Pew Research Center reports. At the same time, the share of adults in the upper-income tier increased from 17% to 20%.
I often read and think about class issues as you may surmise, considering the name of the blog that I finally selected after contemplating various names for years is Middle Class Guy.
If I were an Upper Class Guy, I would not bother typing words into this WordPress website via thoughts in my head communicated to my fingers on my Dell laptop's keyboard. I would be enjoying an upper class lifestyle and, honestly, would probably be swimming laps in my pool this evening or possibly dining at a fine establishment with my wife and/or friends. Perhaps attending a gala of some sort or the symphony or a a sporting event.
Not getting ready to watch a movie on our tube TV, although I have nothing bad to say about that TV that has lasted far longer than any tube TV should.
If I were a Lower Class Guy, I probably would not have spent the money on purchasing a domain name for three years and would be too busy trying to make ends meet to share my troubles with whoever stumbles across these posts.
I read an article on CNBC by Kathleen Elkins today via my Yahoo! feed entitled "Here's how much you have to earn to be considered middle class."
At least Ms. Elkins did mention that income is but a part of class structure.
I have often wondered about that. If I have met much of the criteria of the "How to Tell if You Are Middle Class" articles for many years and if I was born, raised and came of age as a Middle Class Guy, would I cease to be middle class next month should I be fired and become unemployed and go from making around one hundred grand per year to zero?
By most of the articles on our class, the answer would be a resounding Yes.
Even though I have worked for twenty-four years (as of this May) post college, obtained a master's degree, become married and have remained married for over twenty years, had two children, have saved around $200,000 for my two kids' college accounts, saved some for retirement even though I most likely should have saved more for retirement and less for college, "own" my house, go on vacations, shop at Kohl's and Target, eat at quick casual places 18 times or more per month, and shell out plus or minus ten grand per month just to live our suburban Middle Class lives, should I lose my job and income unexpectedly, I would be relegated to low class after spending nearly five decades as a Middle Class Guy.
I suppose to be more precise, I started as a lower Middle Class baby, was raised a rising into a more solid Middle Class kid, was a very solidly Middle Class high school kid, made it almost into the Upper Middle Class as a college kid, went back to lower Middle Class with my first several shitty jobs out of college, and have worked hard to remain solidly Middle Class for the past eighteen or so years.
Even though I am closer to fifty years old than forty, I still aspire to rising to Upper Middle Class status, which by my own definition would require me to make about twice as much as I do now, which is doubtful to come to fruition.
I am a long-time Middle Class Guy and will most likely spend the remainder of my life as one. But I do take issue with simplifying it into what one's income is.
The much-cited Pew Research Center report showed this table in 2014, indicating a very slight one percent uptick in adults in the lower income tier and a three percent increase in the percentage of adults in the upper income tier. Thus, us middle income people declined by that four percent to 51%.
In late 2015, Pew reported that the trend continued, and less than fifty percent are now middle income, per this CNBC article.
According to the article, "The beginning of 2015 saw 120.8 million adults living in middle-income homes, compared with 121.3 million Americans living in lower- and upper-income households, a significant shift that "could signal a tipping point."
The article further points out that "the hollowing of the American middle class has proceeded steadily for more than four decades," and that the share of Americans residing in middle-income homes "has fallen from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015."
Here's the breakdown of how much you have to earn each year to qualify as middle-income, depending on the size of your family:
Household of one: $24,042 to $72,126
Household of two: $34,000 to $102,001
Household of three: $41,641 to $124,925
Household of four: $48,083 to $144,251
Household of five: $53,759 to $161,277
The thing that I find interesting about this is that it breaks it down by household size. My job would not pay me a dollar more or a dollar less if I was single or married with six kids, but my status as a middle-income earner would change by household size.
However, my salary is a little higher than the $102,001 cited as the high end of a middle -income earner in a Household of two. But since we have a household of four, I fall nearly forty thousand dollars shy of the $144,251 cited as the upper range.
Further proof of my Middle Classiness.
Of course, there are many more factors to consider when it comes to one's social class. One's education, vocabulary, habits, values, ethics, shopping habits (which granted is income-related), hobbies and interests are just a few. I suppose that you or I could think of many others.
I do see how it would be very difficult to make it in many parts of the country on $48,000 or less for a family of four. Not to complain, but where we live, it is not easy to get by on twice that amount.
Notre Dame Professor James X. Sullivan delineates class structures by a family's consumption rather than income and includes spending on food, transportation, entertainment, housing and other items. It excludes health care expenses and education, which Sullivan says might be considered investments. He defines the middle class as those in the middle fifth of spending.
The former President formed a task force to study and help the middle class and defined us Middle Classers through our aspirations, namely:
Home Ownership or as I call it home "ownership" since my lender still has more equity in our house after we have lived here for fifteen years, never missing a mortgage payment, than we do. Basically, our house is worth around $230 to $240 K and we owe about $130 K.
Car Ownership. Despite all of our cars' problems, and believe me, they have problems, we own them. My Nissan is no longer drivable. My trusty old Subaru has steering problems now and our van needs repair very soon to pass Illinois emissions this month. However, we do meet this criteria and own them all, not having made any car payments for about three years now.
Health and Retirement Security. I am not sure what to write about this because, as they say, "here today, gone tomorrow." Today we have health insurance, although a very difficult to deal with H.M.O. We need referrals to get our referrals, and none of our doctors like dealing with our particular H.M.O. But, we do have it and my employer currently pays about seventy percent of the premiums every month, with about four hundred or so deducted from my checks per month.
"Retirement Security" is an oxymoron for most of us middle class people, but I suppose that I technically would qualify for this, having contributed to a defined benefit pension plan for nearly twenty-four years. Again, if I lost my job, getting a meager pension ten years from now and social security, if it exists twenty years from now, would not be close to enough to live on, but if I can survive ten more years of doing what I do, I would have that "retirement security" that most of us Middle Class Guys can only dream of.
Family Vacations. We may not be able to check this box off this year, although I hope to take my family to the country some time this summer. Hopefully one of my favorite areas, Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We do not make it there every August, but have for several years running.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="469"]
Source: www.yooper-michigan.com[/caption]
We have taken the kids to Disney World six times and, as I often write, that will be the subject of at least one future post. We stayed on grounds all six times, in a Moderate resort since we are Middle Class people and not wealthy enough to stay at the Deluxe resort where I want to, the Polynesian or the Wilderness Lodge. We don't want to stay in one of the Value resorts for a host of reasons, but those are good for middle class families, as well.
Last Spring break, we traveled to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, via Las Vegas. We had a fantastic time and we would be going again in a little over a week except for the fact that our son's college will be on spring break next week, and our daughter's school district will be on spring break the following week. We are not the kind of family to go on a great vacation without both of our kids, so alas and alack, we are staying around home this month.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="545"]
Source: Havasu Realty[/caption]
A College Education for the Kids. This is a big one for me. When I graduated from high school, there was no question about my next step being going to University in the fall. It was simply a question of which one. Every single one of my friends and teammates from high school went straight to a four year University or college. I never knew that everyone did not do the same.
Long story short, I ended up at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Four-and-a-half years later, I left with a Bachelor's degree. I also had a very close girlfriend at the time of graduation, who has now been my spouse for nearly twenty-one years.
After toiling at deader than dead-end jobs for a few years in the early nineties after gaining my B.A., I enrolled part-time in a Master's degree program at the University of Illinois at Chicago while working full-time at a very difficult job that I hated. Four years later, I had a Master's degree in hand. Our son was born two months later.
Why I mention that is that we want and expect the same for our own children. It is a middle class imperative and, like me in the 80's, the vast majority of our son's friends and band mates went straight to solid, and some not-so-solid colleges and universities.
Even though we both concede that gaining a Bachelor's degree is by no means the key to wealth and success, we both view it as a necessity, much the same way that high school graduation was in decades past.
Without that piece of paper saying that you were able to complete assignments and other tasks on time, and in many cases assume tens of thousands in debt, it is that much harder.
Again, I fully acknowledge that there are many highly successful people without college degrees. Even some tech billionaires. But for the vast, vast majority of us Middle Class Guys and those who strive to gain entry to the Middle Class or the Upper Class by lifestyle and/or income, a college degree is a must. Especially if you want to be a lawyer (like my brother), an educator (like my sister and her husband), and I.T. geek (like my best friend), an accountant (like my uncle), a doctor (like many of my Mom's cousins), an engineer or many other professional jobs.
Thus, I began squirreling away a few hundred here, five hundred there, month after month after month for years and years.
As those of you who have read previous posts, I have alluded to a goal that I sent when our children were young to save $100,000 per kid for their college. I have achieved that goal for our son, and currently send about $2,300 per month to our son's private college about a half hour away from our home.
Our daughter will be graduating from eighth grade in a few months, and I should be hitting my savings goal for her by the end of 2018, when she will be in the middle of her sophomore year of high school. That is, if I remain gainfully employed and continue sending $400 per month to her Bright Start account automatically on the first of every month.
I do not think that even that huge amount of savings for two kids by a Middle Class Guy is enough to cover their entire higher educations, but it is a damned good start!
Any way you look at it, I am a Middle Class Guy. I have worked hard for over two decades, I save for retirement but not enough, I have saved as much as we possibly could for our kids' college accounts, we drive three shitty as Hell cars that would not really qualify for middle class status, and we still watch tube TVs and most of our furniture needs replacing.
Nonetheless, if you want to qualify us by income per Pew Research's criteria, we fit well within the $48,083 to $144,251 range. I hope to surpass that number some day, which could only be due to my after-work writing making some extra dough, but I am a long, long way away.
Source: www.sprottmoney.com[/caption]Us American Middle Classers are shrinking.
The share of American adults in middle-income households decreased, from 55% in 2000 to 51% in 2014, Pew Research Center reports. At the same time, the share of adults in the upper-income tier increased from 17% to 20%.
I often read and think about class issues as you may surmise, considering the name of the blog that I finally selected after contemplating various names for years is Middle Class Guy.
If I were an Upper Class Guy, I would not bother typing words into this WordPress website via thoughts in my head communicated to my fingers on my Dell laptop's keyboard. I would be enjoying an upper class lifestyle and, honestly, would probably be swimming laps in my pool this evening or possibly dining at a fine establishment with my wife and/or friends. Perhaps attending a gala of some sort or the symphony or a a sporting event.
Not getting ready to watch a movie on our tube TV, although I have nothing bad to say about that TV that has lasted far longer than any tube TV should.
If I were a Lower Class Guy, I probably would not have spent the money on purchasing a domain name for three years and would be too busy trying to make ends meet to share my troubles with whoever stumbles across these posts.
I read an article on CNBC by Kathleen Elkins today via my Yahoo! feed entitled "Here's how much you have to earn to be considered middle class."
At least Ms. Elkins did mention that income is but a part of class structure.
I have often wondered about that. If I have met much of the criteria of the "How to Tell if You Are Middle Class" articles for many years and if I was born, raised and came of age as a Middle Class Guy, would I cease to be middle class next month should I be fired and become unemployed and go from making around one hundred grand per year to zero?
By most of the articles on our class, the answer would be a resounding Yes.
Even though I have worked for twenty-four years (as of this May) post college, obtained a master's degree, become married and have remained married for over twenty years, had two children, have saved around $200,000 for my two kids' college accounts, saved some for retirement even though I most likely should have saved more for retirement and less for college, "own" my house, go on vacations, shop at Kohl's and Target, eat at quick casual places 18 times or more per month, and shell out plus or minus ten grand per month just to live our suburban Middle Class lives, should I lose my job and income unexpectedly, I would be relegated to low class after spending nearly five decades as a Middle Class Guy.
I suppose to be more precise, I started as a lower Middle Class baby, was raised a rising into a more solid Middle Class kid, was a very solidly Middle Class high school kid, made it almost into the Upper Middle Class as a college kid, went back to lower Middle Class with my first several shitty jobs out of college, and have worked hard to remain solidly Middle Class for the past eighteen or so years.
Even though I am closer to fifty years old than forty, I still aspire to rising to Upper Middle Class status, which by my own definition would require me to make about twice as much as I do now, which is doubtful to come to fruition.
I am a long-time Middle Class Guy and will most likely spend the remainder of my life as one. But I do take issue with simplifying it into what one's income is.
The much-cited Pew Research Center report showed this table in 2014, indicating a very slight one percent uptick in adults in the lower income tier and a three percent increase in the percentage of adults in the upper income tier. Thus, us middle income people declined by that four percent to 51%.
In late 2015, Pew reported that the trend continued, and less than fifty percent are now middle income, per this CNBC article.
According to the article, "The beginning of 2015 saw 120.8 million adults living in middle-income homes, compared with 121.3 million Americans living in lower- and upper-income households, a significant shift that "could signal a tipping point."
The article further points out that "the hollowing of the American middle class has proceeded steadily for more than four decades," and that the share of Americans residing in middle-income homes "has fallen from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015."
Here's the breakdown of how much you have to earn each year to qualify as middle-income, depending on the size of your family:
Household of one: $24,042 to $72,126
Household of two: $34,000 to $102,001
Household of three: $41,641 to $124,925
Household of four: $48,083 to $144,251
Household of five: $53,759 to $161,277
The thing that I find interesting about this is that it breaks it down by household size. My job would not pay me a dollar more or a dollar less if I was single or married with six kids, but my status as a middle-income earner would change by household size.
However, my salary is a little higher than the $102,001 cited as the high end of a middle -income earner in a Household of two. But since we have a household of four, I fall nearly forty thousand dollars shy of the $144,251 cited as the upper range.
Further proof of my Middle Classiness.
Of course, there are many more factors to consider when it comes to one's social class. One's education, vocabulary, habits, values, ethics, shopping habits (which granted is income-related), hobbies and interests are just a few. I suppose that you or I could think of many others.
I do see how it would be very difficult to make it in many parts of the country on $48,000 or less for a family of four. Not to complain, but where we live, it is not easy to get by on twice that amount.
Notre Dame Professor James X. Sullivan delineates class structures by a family's consumption rather than income and includes spending on food, transportation, entertainment, housing and other items. It excludes health care expenses and education, which Sullivan says might be considered investments. He defines the middle class as those in the middle fifth of spending.
The former President formed a task force to study and help the middle class and defined us Middle Classers through our aspirations, namely:
Home Ownership or as I call it home "ownership" since my lender still has more equity in our house after we have lived here for fifteen years, never missing a mortgage payment, than we do. Basically, our house is worth around $230 to $240 K and we owe about $130 K.
Car Ownership. Despite all of our cars' problems, and believe me, they have problems, we own them. My Nissan is no longer drivable. My trusty old Subaru has steering problems now and our van needs repair very soon to pass Illinois emissions this month. However, we do meet this criteria and own them all, not having made any car payments for about three years now.
Health and Retirement Security. I am not sure what to write about this because, as they say, "here today, gone tomorrow." Today we have health insurance, although a very difficult to deal with H.M.O. We need referrals to get our referrals, and none of our doctors like dealing with our particular H.M.O. But, we do have it and my employer currently pays about seventy percent of the premiums every month, with about four hundred or so deducted from my checks per month.
"Retirement Security" is an oxymoron for most of us middle class people, but I suppose that I technically would qualify for this, having contributed to a defined benefit pension plan for nearly twenty-four years. Again, if I lost my job, getting a meager pension ten years from now and social security, if it exists twenty years from now, would not be close to enough to live on, but if I can survive ten more years of doing what I do, I would have that "retirement security" that most of us Middle Class Guys can only dream of.
Family Vacations. We may not be able to check this box off this year, although I hope to take my family to the country some time this summer. Hopefully one of my favorite areas, Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We do not make it there every August, but have for several years running.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="469"]
Source: www.yooper-michigan.com[/caption]We have taken the kids to Disney World six times and, as I often write, that will be the subject of at least one future post. We stayed on grounds all six times, in a Moderate resort since we are Middle Class people and not wealthy enough to stay at the Deluxe resort where I want to, the Polynesian or the Wilderness Lodge. We don't want to stay in one of the Value resorts for a host of reasons, but those are good for middle class families, as well.
Last Spring break, we traveled to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, via Las Vegas. We had a fantastic time and we would be going again in a little over a week except for the fact that our son's college will be on spring break next week, and our daughter's school district will be on spring break the following week. We are not the kind of family to go on a great vacation without both of our kids, so alas and alack, we are staying around home this month.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="545"]
Source: Havasu Realty[/caption]A College Education for the Kids. This is a big one for me. When I graduated from high school, there was no question about my next step being going to University in the fall. It was simply a question of which one. Every single one of my friends and teammates from high school went straight to a four year University or college. I never knew that everyone did not do the same.
Long story short, I ended up at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Four-and-a-half years later, I left with a Bachelor's degree. I also had a very close girlfriend at the time of graduation, who has now been my spouse for nearly twenty-one years.
After toiling at deader than dead-end jobs for a few years in the early nineties after gaining my B.A., I enrolled part-time in a Master's degree program at the University of Illinois at Chicago while working full-time at a very difficult job that I hated. Four years later, I had a Master's degree in hand. Our son was born two months later.
Why I mention that is that we want and expect the same for our own children. It is a middle class imperative and, like me in the 80's, the vast majority of our son's friends and band mates went straight to solid, and some not-so-solid colleges and universities.
Even though we both concede that gaining a Bachelor's degree is by no means the key to wealth and success, we both view it as a necessity, much the same way that high school graduation was in decades past.
Without that piece of paper saying that you were able to complete assignments and other tasks on time, and in many cases assume tens of thousands in debt, it is that much harder.
Again, I fully acknowledge that there are many highly successful people without college degrees. Even some tech billionaires. But for the vast, vast majority of us Middle Class Guys and those who strive to gain entry to the Middle Class or the Upper Class by lifestyle and/or income, a college degree is a must. Especially if you want to be a lawyer (like my brother), an educator (like my sister and her husband), and I.T. geek (like my best friend), an accountant (like my uncle), a doctor (like many of my Mom's cousins), an engineer or many other professional jobs.
Thus, I began squirreling away a few hundred here, five hundred there, month after month after month for years and years.
As those of you who have read previous posts, I have alluded to a goal that I sent when our children were young to save $100,000 per kid for their college. I have achieved that goal for our son, and currently send about $2,300 per month to our son's private college about a half hour away from our home.
Our daughter will be graduating from eighth grade in a few months, and I should be hitting my savings goal for her by the end of 2018, when she will be in the middle of her sophomore year of high school. That is, if I remain gainfully employed and continue sending $400 per month to her Bright Start account automatically on the first of every month.
I do not think that even that huge amount of savings for two kids by a Middle Class Guy is enough to cover their entire higher educations, but it is a damned good start!
Any way you look at it, I am a Middle Class Guy. I have worked hard for over two decades, I save for retirement but not enough, I have saved as much as we possibly could for our kids' college accounts, we drive three shitty as Hell cars that would not really qualify for middle class status, and we still watch tube TVs and most of our furniture needs replacing.
Nonetheless, if you want to qualify us by income per Pew Research's criteria, we fit well within the $48,083 to $144,251 range. I hope to surpass that number some day, which could only be due to my after-work writing making some extra dough, but I am a long, long way away.
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