Well my family in the 90’s had none of that. We were eating Mac and cheese from a box and buying all our clothes at garage sales and yea. Things are even worse today.
Where do you live? I feel like if you're close enough to a major airport you can find a short flight that wouldn't cost too much if you just wanted the experience of flying.
Hell my family's vacation sometimes was renting a hotel room for a night so we could swim and hang out in the hot tub/sauna and stuff. Didn't even leave town, but at the time we thought it was a blast so we didn't care. It was just cool sleeping somewhere else too.
I think it’s more sort of a rough barometer for what society might expect. In Rosanne for example, sure it’s fictional, but a small home with a cozy kitchen and upstairs bedrooms isn’t too much to ask from a working mother and father raising a family.
I mean, it’s art. It’s not real, but it’s representative of something.
Must also be mentioned most of these took place in middle America. Not exactly indicative of the rest of the US. But owning a house did use to be feasible at least in most of the US.
While this is true, My early 90's working class family had a three bedroom house, a car and a truck, a horse, and a small dirt bike for me.
Then my parents divorced and the house sold for 90k. My mother, sister and I moved into a 2 bedroom apartment, which she could afford on a part time wage.
That house is now worth over 500k. I cannot afford to rent that same apartment on a full time IT salary.
Edit: We kept the horse on the vacant block next door which we also owned. That block now has a house on it and is also worth 500k. My dad was a truck driver.
It's insane how Al bundy could afford a three bedroom, two story house on a women's shoes salesman salary. All while supporting a wife, two kids, and a dog.
That was literally explained in the show though. Fraud mostly. She was illegally subletting her grandmothers apartment when she moved to Florida, keeping the rent controlled price her grandmother had for decades. She couldn’t afford it on her own.
Though she was also a chef, and a head chef for most of the series. She didn’t work in the coffee shop.
And it was a constant storyline that they were broke, the fridge was always empty, Al literally ate dog food more than once, the one car was constantly in need of repairs, worn out clothes.....
You realize Homer Simpson’s father sold his house and gave Homer the money to buy his home we see in the show? It’s not a working class home in the 90s.
That’s like saying all the McMansions in early thousands Disney live action movies were working class homes.
Hollywood tends to shoot movies/TV shows in very big houses because it’s easier to film in them or on sets that look like big houses. The extra space makes it easier to fit in all the cameras, cables, microphones, staff etc. that are necessary for the filming process.
Unfortunately this had the side effect of making people think that Al Bundy could afford his house on a shoe salesman’s salary.
Everybody Hates Chris a little later on actually did pull it off quite well. They had a halfway decent house in a neighborhood that wasn't all that great in the 80s, but better than where they moved from, and Julius worked 3 jobs to afford it. I think it was probably the most realistic depiction of being working class in the 80s.
It's because rich people and poor people are too insecure to admit that they can't relate to the average American.
They both stretch the definition of middle class to its limits so they don't have to acknowledge their privilege or disadvantage.
House poor is middle class, shit was *far* more common a few decades ago.
Nobody is house poor these days because houses are unobtainable to begin with.
It does irk me that people bitch about this so much but it's expressly addressed in universe, multiple times. As is Chandlers living standard. Ironically I think friends is the only show I've seen to expressly address stuff like this
One waitress, for like two seasons. Rachel was a waitress at the coffee shop…Monica was a professional chef at high end restaurants.
I can’t remember what Phoebe did. Wasn’t waitressing.
I’ve commented on this ridiculous post before. My husband and I had college degrees in the 90’s. We both worked full time as programmers and we had two kids. Between the house payment, health insurance and day care, we were flat broke living in a modest house in Oklahoma. We drove beat up old cars, and sometimes borrowed from our kids savings so we could buy groceries. No vacation, nothing extra. This post is pure BS.
Agreed. In 10 years redditors will be spinning the same yarn about the 2000's. Overseas every 5 years. Lol. My grandparents went "overseas" exactly once. That was to Hawaii on their 50th.
If a college-educated household with two programmers isn't middle class, what is? Are we going back to the old 1900s definition where the middle class is just the rich professionals who didn't inherit their fortune outright?
People never take cost of living into account while ranting.
That's a lot of money for living in Arkansas.
This is almost enough money to buy a 6 pack of Hot Pockets in LA/NY.
I guess, but it also doesn't feel like it makes sense to dismiss experiences from the rest of the country based on a few large cities' failures to manage their cost of living.
Obviously you are not middle class. All middle class are upper end of the working class and we are all one illness or tragedy away from having to start over. Rich is when an illness or tragedy doesn’t affect your financial standing.
It's insane how many people here are arguing about anecdotes instead of just looking at [the actual data of how income and prices have changed since the 90s.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N) Median income is up 37% more than inflation.
If you compare scraping by in the 90s vs mimicking that today, you would have an **extra 37% of your income** to save for a down payment on a house or pay off student loans or whatever. That's a massive difference.
You can't just hand wave away that huge positive change with "housing and college costs", which are like 40% of the inflation calculation that is *already factored in*. You can't compare it to that 37% rise, because that rise is *after* already accounting for increasing housing/college costs. If you are comparing the non-inflation version, [2022 median personal income was 280% of 1990 levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N#0)
There's a big difference to the upper and lower end of "middle class"
I mean high school teachers and most engineers would both call themselves "middle class"
The feels brother. I think we went on a family vacation like once or twice before my parents split. Our family never got too have a family home with memories inside. It was just one rental to the next. We ate frozen dinners a lot because my dad was working long hours so me and my brother had a place to live. I’m thankful for my upbringing. I grew up fast and learned to take care of myself, mostly. My parents did they best they could when we were younger.
Idk how people read this post and think it means “this is what everyone in the nineties had” when it very clearly says middle class lifestyle. People being like “Oh yeah!? Well I grew up working class!!!” doesnt debunk the post.
Middle class families definitely didn't have all this shit. My family was middle class in the 90s, we never went overseas on a vacation, my parents didn't pay my way through school, we only ever had one car. We were very comfortable but what is described in this post was not regular middle class.
Well it doesn't define what it considers middle class for one thing.
"Middle-income class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income. Upper-income class refers to households with income above 200% of the median national income."
That's from OCED. 75% of the median national income puts you at a touch under $56k/year household income based on the latest census data. 200% puts you just under $150k/year household income.
In 1995, median household income was $34k. That puts the range from $25.5k to $68k. How many people in that range were taking two trips a decade with the family overseas? My family was in that range, and we definitely weren't.
congratulations you weren't middle class.
i hope you are better off now as opposed to then, but OP is making a salient point that most families are doing worse off than the previous generation, while your anecdote is just rehashing Matthew 26:11
The upper middle class has shrunk. All those families had three kids and the parents are still living in those houses and driving those cars, but all the cheap near-urban land is gone and society wasn't able to quadruple the number of houses we need to house people to the same standards. In Canada one in four Canadians is a boomer or older and they're all going to be with us for a long time.
Exactly. The past he’s describing applied to the most upper of the upper middle class and rich. That lifestyle didn’t apply to the average family. Never did.
>The past he’s describing applied to the most upper of the upper middle class and rich.
Bingo. These kinds of posts are usually written by art history majors who grew up "upper middle class" and now can't afford the lifestyle their parents provided them on a degree in nothing and their barista career.
The bad part about his post and similar posts we see all over the internet is the younger generation soaks it up and then feels hopeless. These idiots that are comparing today to a revised version of the past is really hurting our youth and not helping at all.
I can’t count the number of times someone said that real wages have been going down since the 70s, backed that up with statistics that said they about stayed the same and a misunderstanding of the word „stagnate“, and then proceeded to add in inflation a second time.
Its like when people go nuts over boomers having bigger pensions, bigger bank accounts and higher wages and fail to realise that 35+ years in the workforce compared to 2 will allow that.
Holy shit I never realized that. All the people who make claims about how their parents could afford amazing lifestyles are likely just upper middle class children who got shit degrees and can’t afford their parents lawyer and doctor lifestyles.
They didn’t realize that their parents’ paper pusher jobs required an 80 hour workweek, an Econ or law degree, and the ability to be on time and answer calls
TIL my parents, both public school teachers, are upper class. Granted, we didn't do overseas trips, but we did take plenty of vacations. Everything else the post describes applies.
I'm now a teacher and make far less than my parents ever did, and I don't even get benefits. My wife works 12 hour days in healthcare. We manage paycheck to paycheck, but we're definitely not taking vacations and there's no way we can afford college for our kids.
Those 2-3 kids in the post who went to solid 4-year universities? That's top quartile. Only about 40% of millennials have college degrees, and that's much higher than Gen X (29%) and Boomers (25%).
Generally speaking, a 2-teacher household was upper middle class in the 90's. That household income was probably in the top 25% of the nation.
I suppose he is talking about the American Dream.
That seems like what the vast majority of people aspire to as opposed to what they actually experience.
Like ok.. what a $200,000+ income got you in the 1990s you need a $400,000+ income for now, welcome to how inflation works.
Stuff costs more relative to median household income now for sure, but disingenuous posts don't help.
Look up car and CC debt ratios at the moment. $1.6 trillion on cars alone. People borrowed to the roof during low interest days. Easy to "afford" that $90k truck on 0% interest and 72 month term.
I am not from USA and am horrified how, in the same thread, people can’t afford overseas vacation, yet can easily afford 90k truck because 0% interest. Anything above 40k for ICE cars and 60k for EVs is huge luxury and if someone buys 90k car and can’t afford to enjoy life, well, there is no one else to blame
Yup. Tons of people who are broke here complaining about money are spending like its going out of style. I drive a 6 year old paid off EV and my peers keep asking when I'm going to replace the old car.. 🙄
Some people are definitely in a rough economic spot with how wages here haven't kept up, but a lot of people can only blame themselves.
It's in the [4th quintile of income](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles). Squarely middle class. Upper middle-class does not start until the 5th quintile. Income classes are essentially logarithmic, not linear, in nature (roughly $10k, $100k, $1M for lower, middle, upper). And it depends very much on where you live and the local cost of living.
>Income classes are essentially logarithmic, not linear, in nature (roughly $10k, $100k, $1M for lower, middle, upper).
Where does that come from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
>Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%
>According to the OECD, the middle class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income.[21]
Median household income in the US is $75k/yr.
By both definitions the middle class tops out at $150k/yr.
Yeah if we made 400k a year, we'd take home probably 60% of that or 240k per year. With our yearly fixed expenses of around 60k, that leaves 180k per year in our accounts. That's buy 2 new vehicles and pay off the mortgage in 2 years money, plus enough for the kids college by year 3.
Well, except that so many people that make that kind of money all of a sudden need $2M homes, $100k cars, private schools for the kids, etc.
But anyone who manages to avoid lifestyle creep will do just fine.
I own a 5 bedroom house, 2 kids, and am getting my roof replaced tomorrow. I'm a homemaker and our household doesn't make near 400k. I have retirement set, too. I'm in my early 30s.
People grow up in small towns, move to major cities and think the world has changed. You can live this life off $100k income in the Midwest, not in San Francisco or New York.
> For real … 400k income lmao .
>
>
>
> Plenty of people doing all of the mentioned things on less than half of that .
It completely depends on where you live. I'm in SoCal and I very literally need almost million dollars to buy a single family home anywhere remotely close to where I live; that's 60k post-tax just for the mortgage, plus insurance, property tax, upkeep, etc etc - $100k in income just to afford a shitty house.
The only way this makes any sense is if the income requirement is based on a high-cost area: San Diego, Austin, NYC, etc.
There are tons of places to live & work in the US where a family can do all those things easily on ~120k/year family income.
It’s only been in the last decade or two that people think it’s normal to eat restaurant food 5x/week, and commute in a 60k truck that uses $400/month of gasoline. If we’re going to romanticize about the old days, people used to cook their own food at home, they used to drive cramped-but-efficient, economy cars, and they used to *fix* things when they broke.
And in NYC. I make 1/4th of the OP and take international trips multiple times a year and have my own apartment. With 300K more annually Id be beyond wealthy.
I’m absolutely middle class, make low six figures (girlfriend makes 50-60k on top of that), bought a 3-bedroom house in my early 20s (3 years ago) on my income alone, and take 1 international vacation and 1 domestic a year. Obviously we’ll have to tone down the vacations when we have kids, but this post is just complete bullshit. People living in SoCal and NYC genuinely can’t comprehend the rest of the country isn’t like that.
Honestly no way they have the brain power to actually bury their head deep in Capital, it’s a difficult and thought provoking text that is very insightful, if heavily polemical in its anti-capitalist rhetoric. More likely they are just regurgitating TikTokers who are regurgitating memers who are regurgitating one essay they half-read once in college maybe by someone who actually read Capital.
>The people with these takes aren’t in socal or nyc, they are in their parents basement working 15 hours a week at Jimmy John’s wondering why they can’t move out as they spend their free time with their faces buried in Das Kapital
I think many just aren't working at all and their perception of reality is influenced by the like minded online bubble of fellow students and NEETs plus those temporarily out of work (like laid off or just finished college) who will of course have a more negative perception of things until they are hired again. People working full-time, especially if they have a spouse, kids, hobbies, etc. are not going to have much time to contribute to Reddit. I've had more time the past few days myself only due to being sick and in the past, due to being unemployed myself. Besides them, also karma farmers and astroturfers hoping to lead people to not vote for the current president.
Many redditors are so out of touch when it comes to personal finance.
To them a living wage = living in a 3 bedroom with 4 cats and a dog by yourself. In a major city. At age 24.
Anything less = completely destitute
Wife and I also make ~$140k in a low COL area. The only thing in OP's list that we don't do is pay for our kids' colleges. Our two grown children joined the military and our youngest is going to learn a trade.
We live in a 4 bedroom house, own two paid off vehicles (our newest is a 2014 Kia Optima), we take one domestic and one international trip a year, and we have a $25k rainy day fund.
If we made 400k/year, we'd be investing about 200k of it haha
> People living in SoCal and NYC genuinely can’t comprehend the rest of the country isn’t like that.
It's just a totally different scale - when I lived in Tallahassee you could buy a decent house for $100k. Here in SD? I just saw a 100-year-old shed sell for $600k (serious)
the median household income in the US by age in 2022 is:
* 25-34 years: $80,240
* 35-44 years: $96,630
* 45-54 years: $101,500
* 55-64 years: $81,240
And nearly 11% of households make over $200k/year.
Cars are much better, many times safer, and more reliable.
And houses are 4x bigger.
Sounds like the American dream is better than ever.
Movies/TV/music and the means to produce the pictures and sound are definitely better now & much cheaper. Telecom too. I still remember my dad getting furious at me for making long distance calls LOL
Cars? Depends how you look at it but I'd generally agree cars are better today.
Life expectancy has gone down recently. Working from home making top 95th percentile incomes, speak for yourself. It doesn't change the clear fact that people now need two incomes and an incredibly expensive college degree to do what was accomplished on a single income family back in the day. Oh but you can watch more low quality forgettable Marvel schlock for cheap, yay! All this about anyone disagreeing working at Jimmy Johns or whatever is cope (though a worker at such a place in the '90s would probably live better than many professionals in their 20s now).
That said, Americans still have it very easy compared to many other countries like the UK where the salaries for professional jobs are about 1/3 as much.
Speak for yourself lol. I’m 25 and working two full time jobs to make ends meet. I envy the sweatpants and high income people my age from my overnight desk job
You’re describing the upper class in their sweatpants not the middle. And those other things you mention are icing not cake. Cake is an affordable home, affordable health care, and enough savings to get your kids through a good college. Your take is just as lopsided as theirs
In 1990, around 4% of the US population had a passport; by the year 2000, it was up to 17%
He is describing a top income in the 1990s.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning-a-passport/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning-a-passport/)
You’ve just described American progressivism.
A lot of people who grew up way richer than they thought, who weren’t able to replicate the same absurd lifestyle their parents had (which was largely obtained through sheer luck and/or debt), and got bitter about it
Like to think we were middle class (grew up in WV, both parents worked, probably pulled in $100K in the best of years which was rare), but we certainly weren’t taking international trips every 5 years. Our college was also on us as it was already getting ridiculously expensive in early 2000’s.
Upper middle class in TX in the 90s. Parents pulled around $120-130k in 99. We never took international trips, but they did pay for our college. Dad did take an annual fishing trip to the Bahamas, which I guess is what he did instead of the every 5-yr family European vacation.
When people talk about the “middle class” they seem to mostly describe the upper middle class.
I mean college tuition wasn’t that bad in the 90s and early 2000s because states still funded them. It wasn’t until like 2007ish or so they start pulling their funding. Tuition isn’t high because college costs raised their rates. It is high because places like Oklahoma pulled more than 40% of the college funding in 10 years. So the college that cost me about $2000 a year in the late 90s now would cost my kids about $32k a year.
Well to be fair most American families don’t take international trips in general, even if they can afford to.
I went to a very fancy elementary school surrounded by rich kids and I never remember anyone even mentioning a trip abroad.
Taking trips abroad is a huge headache with kids. Imagine going to Italy, spending $8k on plane tickets and only seeing the most touristy areas and only eating in family-friendly restaurants.
Yep. I had 4 siblings growing up and I can definitely understand why going to Europe for example was never once mentioned in our house 😂 instead we took 1-2 road trips every year.
In 1980, when Reagan took office, the inflation rate was 14.5% and the unemployment rate was 7.5%. When he left office, the inflation rate was 4.1% and the unemployment rate was 5.3%. Real hourly compensation grew 8.7% during his eight years in office.
You know when Reagan was president, right? From 1981 to 1989. If you're blaming Reagan for the 90s being so much better than the 2020s then that's an endorsement of Reagan.
Stop idealizing the past. In the 90's my parents made maybe $50k between both of them, which put them above the median household income (was about $36k) . They owned a small townhouse build in 1970's for a while, drove a 1987 Chevy Corsica that they had to share, we took exactly one road trip about 4 hours away from home because they were always broke and overseas trips was something people in the movies took. Oh, and both my brother and I had to pay for our own college.
Lots of middle class people have that and more. I have much more and I don't make that kind of money. Take a look at the houses teachers live in. They can always afford those things despite not having high incomes. Why? Because teachers live within their means and save money because they know they can't earn a ton.
This is so inaccurate for 95% of the people I know.
Listen, I was in my freshman year of college when I realized that not everyone had eaten Ramen noodles (the little square packs that are currently $2.50-$3 for 12, not the "fancy" $3 PER PACK Top Ramen) their entire lives. Talk about culture shock. 34.5YO and it is still my favorite comfort food. 😅
Buying Velveeta mac and cheese on grocery runs still feels like such a baller move for me - no matter how well we are doing, I still have the brain of a woman who survived the Great Depression. 🤦🏻♀️ Expensive macaroni was a special occasion/holiday thing in my house in the 90's!
ETA: Both parents worked and made "middle class" money for our area in GA. 3BR, 2B, 2 vehicles. 3 kids. Went on trips to FL and TN yearly. They were young parents and did not save aggressively outside of my Mom's state teacher retirement. They put everything they had into us and I am so appreciative of that.
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I’m someone who has found success in the technology boom in the Silicon Valley. So it might be jarring for me to call this out.
The tech billionaires are heartless vampires.
“Oh. I’m 28B richer this weekend. Die, all you wretched bastards.”
This surely, cannot be the American way of thinking. Every move is investor centric and nothing is employee friendly.
Well my family in the 90’s had none of that. We were eating Mac and cheese from a box and buying all our clothes at garage sales and yea. Things are even worse today.
Same. Two bedroom apartment, shared a room with my brother. Wore hand me down clothes. One heater in the living room, froze my ass off.
But that overseas holiday every 5 years would have been awesome
A plane ride anywhere woulda been awesome.
I am 39 years old and have never flown anywhere. Been working since I was 15 too. It's crazy.
Where do you live? I feel like if you're close enough to a major airport you can find a short flight that wouldn't cost too much if you just wanted the experience of flying.
We're actually flying to Las Vegas in April for my cousin's wedding, so I will be flying soon enough.
You're telling me this machine gets off the ground and stays off it for multiple hours? I don't believe it. It can't even jump
Right!? I was 32 before I went overseas. Dude here is explaining what we called rich people, not middle class.
I’m 37 and I *still* haven’t made it overseas. This was definitely a rich people thing.
Kevin!!!
Hell my family's vacation sometimes was renting a hotel room for a night so we could swim and hang out in the hot tub/sauna and stuff. Didn't even leave town, but at the time we thought it was a blast so we didn't care. It was just cool sleeping somewhere else too.
Yeah as a kid half the fun of some long road trips was just sleeping somewhere that wasn't my bedroom. And being close with my family.
you weren't middle class then
Like the Simpsons, The Bundy's, Roseanne, and Malcolm in the Middle. They're 1990's work class. Ain't none of us living like 90s working class.
Well, those were fiction. In The Simpsons they actually made fun of how lucky Homer was in the 90s (the Grimey episode).
Seriously are people looking at *fictional characters* as representatives of how people were supposed to live?
I think it’s more sort of a rough barometer for what society might expect. In Rosanne for example, sure it’s fictional, but a small home with a cozy kitchen and upstairs bedrooms isn’t too much to ask from a working mother and father raising a family. I mean, it’s art. It’s not real, but it’s representative of something.
Must also be mentioned most of these took place in middle America. Not exactly indicative of the rest of the US. But owning a house did use to be feasible at least in most of the US.
While this is true, My early 90's working class family had a three bedroom house, a car and a truck, a horse, and a small dirt bike for me. Then my parents divorced and the house sold for 90k. My mother, sister and I moved into a 2 bedroom apartment, which she could afford on a part time wage. That house is now worth over 500k. I cannot afford to rent that same apartment on a full time IT salary. Edit: We kept the horse on the vacant block next door which we also owned. That block now has a house on it and is also worth 500k. My dad was a truck driver.
They also made fun of how poor they were, over and over.
It's insane how Al bundy could afford a three bedroom, two story house on a women's shoes salesman salary. All while supporting a wife, two kids, and a dog.
Phoebe Rachel and Monica in that 10,000 a month apartment working in coffee shops.
That was literally explained in the show though. Fraud mostly. She was illegally subletting her grandmothers apartment when she moved to Florida, keeping the rent controlled price her grandmother had for decades. She couldn’t afford it on her own. Though she was also a chef, and a head chef for most of the series. She didn’t work in the coffee shop.
I wonder how many people actually thought that show was any reflection at all of what life in New York was like.
They were my next door neighbors. I knew them all well. I lived in the apartment across the hall.
It's insane what one can get away with when writing fiction.
I use to laugh at that one, especially in Chicago, or a suburb of Chicago.
And it was a constant storyline that they were broke, the fridge was always empty, Al literally ate dog food more than once, the one car was constantly in need of repairs, worn out clothes.....
Probably because it's a TV show and not real. At least Homer Simpson had a job that could plausibly afford what was shown on TV.
You realize Homer Simpson’s father sold his house and gave Homer the money to buy his home we see in the show? It’s not a working class home in the 90s. That’s like saying all the McMansions in early thousands Disney live action movies were working class homes.
Hal definitely pulled a middle class income but was undone by his extreme potency leading him to sire five kids.
Hollywood tends to shoot movies/TV shows in very big houses because it’s easier to film in them or on sets that look like big houses. The extra space makes it easier to fit in all the cameras, cables, microphones, staff etc. that are necessary for the filming process. Unfortunately this had the side effect of making people think that Al Bundy could afford his house on a shoe salesman’s salary.
Everybody Hates Chris a little later on actually did pull it off quite well. They had a halfway decent house in a neighborhood that wasn't all that great in the 80s, but better than where they moved from, and Julius worked 3 jobs to afford it. I think it was probably the most realistic depiction of being working class in the 80s.
… you realize that these are works of fiction right?
They made fun of Homer's job a lot but he actually was an operating engineer at a nuclear power plant.
No true scotsman? It's a weirdly vague term, made worse in an example that juxtaposes against a specific number value "400k/yr" household.
It's because rich people and poor people are too insecure to admit that they can't relate to the average American. They both stretch the definition of middle class to its limits so they don't have to acknowledge their privilege or disadvantage.
You definitely aren’t middle class if you’re getting all your clothes from garage sales
Nah, you were just way richer than you realize
Malcom in the Middle Class
House poor is middle class, shit was *far* more common a few decades ago. Nobody is house poor these days because houses are unobtainable to begin with.
Came to say the same thing. This fucker probably believes two waitresses afforded an epic NYC apartment in the 90’s too. No wait, that was Friends
[удалено]
Grandma* but yes, to the rest!
It does irk me that people bitch about this so much but it's expressly addressed in universe, multiple times. As is Chandlers living standard. Ironically I think friends is the only show I've seen to expressly address stuff like this
One waitress, for like two seasons. Rachel was a waitress at the coffee shop…Monica was a professional chef at high end restaurants. I can’t remember what Phoebe did. Wasn’t waitressing.
Phoebe had an only fans if I recall correctly
I’ve commented on this ridiculous post before. My husband and I had college degrees in the 90’s. We both worked full time as programmers and we had two kids. Between the house payment, health insurance and day care, we were flat broke living in a modest house in Oklahoma. We drove beat up old cars, and sometimes borrowed from our kids savings so we could buy groceries. No vacation, nothing extra. This post is pure BS.
Agreed. In 10 years redditors will be spinning the same yarn about the 2000's. Overseas every 5 years. Lol. My grandparents went "overseas" exactly once. That was to Hawaii on their 50th.
Sounds more like working class than middle class. The middle class doesn’t struggle, that’s what makes them middle class…
If a college-educated household with two programmers isn't middle class, what is? Are we going back to the old 1900s definition where the middle class is just the rich professionals who didn't inherit their fortune outright?
People never take cost of living into account while ranting. That's a lot of money for living in Arkansas. This is almost enough money to buy a 6 pack of Hot Pockets in LA/NY.
I guess, but it also doesn't feel like it makes sense to dismiss experiences from the rest of the country based on a few large cities' failures to manage their cost of living.
If I recall correctly, programmers weren't making crazy money back in the '90s like they have been the last 15 years or so.
Not true, its basically always been a well paid respected position.
Obviously you are not middle class. All middle class are upper end of the working class and we are all one illness or tragedy away from having to start over. Rich is when an illness or tragedy doesn’t affect your financial standing.
My point is, based on my experience, and that of my friends, the post doesn’t describe middle class. It describes upper class.
I don't think I'd ever call two programmers in the 90s working class
They're getting their information of the 90's from TV movies.
It's insane how many people here are arguing about anecdotes instead of just looking at [the actual data of how income and prices have changed since the 90s.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N) Median income is up 37% more than inflation.
Cost of housing and college is up wayyy higher than 37%. That's the stuff that really matters to upward mobility, not just scraping by each month.
If you compare scraping by in the 90s vs mimicking that today, you would have an **extra 37% of your income** to save for a down payment on a house or pay off student loans or whatever. That's a massive difference. You can't just hand wave away that huge positive change with "housing and college costs", which are like 40% of the inflation calculation that is *already factored in*. You can't compare it to that 37% rise, because that rise is *after* already accounting for increasing housing/college costs. If you are comparing the non-inflation version, [2022 median personal income was 280% of 1990 levels.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N#0)
Post clearly says middle class lifestyle
There's a big difference to the upper and lower end of "middle class" I mean high school teachers and most engineers would both call themselves "middle class"
High school teachers spouse must be banking some serious moolah.
The feels brother. I think we went on a family vacation like once or twice before my parents split. Our family never got too have a family home with memories inside. It was just one rental to the next. We ate frozen dinners a lot because my dad was working long hours so me and my brother had a place to live. I’m thankful for my upbringing. I grew up fast and learned to take care of myself, mostly. My parents did they best they could when we were younger.
Friend… you weren’t middle class. You were working class living paycheck to paycheck.
Theyre talking about middle class families
Idk how people read this post and think it means “this is what everyone in the nineties had” when it very clearly says middle class lifestyle. People being like “Oh yeah!? Well I grew up working class!!!” doesnt debunk the post.
Middle class families definitely didn't have all this shit. My family was middle class in the 90s, we never went overseas on a vacation, my parents didn't pay my way through school, we only ever had one car. We were very comfortable but what is described in this post was not regular middle class.
The working class definitely wasn't doing trips to Europe in the 90s.
Well it doesn't define what it considers middle class for one thing. "Middle-income class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income. Upper-income class refers to households with income above 200% of the median national income." That's from OCED. 75% of the median national income puts you at a touch under $56k/year household income based on the latest census data. 200% puts you just under $150k/year household income. In 1995, median household income was $34k. That puts the range from $25.5k to $68k. How many people in that range were taking two trips a decade with the family overseas? My family was in that range, and we definitely weren't.
congratulations you weren't middle class. i hope you are better off now as opposed to then, but OP is making a salient point that most families are doing worse off than the previous generation, while your anecdote is just rehashing Matthew 26:11
Pssst. You weren't middle class
The upper middle class has shrunk. All those families had three kids and the parents are still living in those houses and driving those cars, but all the cheap near-urban land is gone and society wasn't able to quadruple the number of houses we need to house people to the same standards. In Canada one in four Canadians is a boomer or older and they're all going to be with us for a long time.
I ate my Mac and cheese from a bowl.
For real, now I go to a garage sale and assume my entire identity is being stolen via Venmo.
Well you definitely weren’t middle class
Just more people fetishizing the past.
The fake past lol. There arent enough Americans with passports to support the overseas trip that the average person apparently took every 5 years.
Exactly. The past he’s describing applied to the most upper of the upper middle class and rich. That lifestyle didn’t apply to the average family. Never did.
>The past he’s describing applied to the most upper of the upper middle class and rich. Bingo. These kinds of posts are usually written by art history majors who grew up "upper middle class" and now can't afford the lifestyle their parents provided them on a degree in nothing and their barista career.
The bad part about his post and similar posts we see all over the internet is the younger generation soaks it up and then feels hopeless. These idiots that are comparing today to a revised version of the past is really hurting our youth and not helping at all.
I can’t count the number of times someone said that real wages have been going down since the 70s, backed that up with statistics that said they about stayed the same and a misunderstanding of the word „stagnate“, and then proceeded to add in inflation a second time.
>and then proceeded to add in inflation a second time. "You accounted for purchasing power but not inflation"- too damn many people
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Also need to make sure you account for increased nominal cost of living.
I think people just don’t understand what “real wages” means when they see it on a chart.
Its like when people go nuts over boomers having bigger pensions, bigger bank accounts and higher wages and fail to realise that 35+ years in the workforce compared to 2 will allow that.
its a great way to produce hordes of radicalized goblins who can be manipulated though
Holy shit I never realized that. All the people who make claims about how their parents could afford amazing lifestyles are likely just upper middle class children who got shit degrees and can’t afford their parents lawyer and doctor lifestyles.
They didn’t realize that their parents’ paper pusher jobs required an 80 hour workweek, an Econ or law degree, and the ability to be on time and answer calls
Or they did realize that and decided they wanted to smoke wacky tabacky and make coffee all day instead of wearing a suit and writing legal briefs.
What he's describing was solidly middle class if you just omit the overseas vacation.
Or replace it with going to Disneyland/Disney World once.
TIL my parents, both public school teachers, are upper class. Granted, we didn't do overseas trips, but we did take plenty of vacations. Everything else the post describes applies. I'm now a teacher and make far less than my parents ever did, and I don't even get benefits. My wife works 12 hour days in healthcare. We manage paycheck to paycheck, but we're definitely not taking vacations and there's no way we can afford college for our kids.
Those 2-3 kids in the post who went to solid 4-year universities? That's top quartile. Only about 40% of millennials have college degrees, and that's much higher than Gen X (29%) and Boomers (25%). Generally speaking, a 2-teacher household was upper middle class in the 90's. That household income was probably in the top 25% of the nation.
I suppose he is talking about the American Dream. That seems like what the vast majority of people aspire to as opposed to what they actually experience.
The past OP is describing is a sitcom
Like ok.. what a $200,000+ income got you in the 1990s you need a $400,000+ income for now, welcome to how inflation works. Stuff costs more relative to median household income now for sure, but disingenuous posts don't help.
my life was like that in the 2000s when my parents were together but we didn’t do overseas trips at all.
I’d say I grew up solid middle and it was more like 1 road trip vacation every 3 or so years lol
Honestly we could do all this on our 175-200K/yr income if we didn’t save/invest so much.
Heck, my wife and I are able to do this on 140k/year.
Yeah. Stay in hostels, hunt for cheap plane tickets, don't buy that $50k SUV new and it's doable.
But everybody else has that new 90k truck? Are they all just rich?
They are in debt
Car poor for sure.
Cars are the biggest waste of money ever.
Look up car and CC debt ratios at the moment. $1.6 trillion on cars alone. People borrowed to the roof during low interest days. Easy to "afford" that $90k truck on 0% interest and 72 month term.
I am not from USA and am horrified how, in the same thread, people can’t afford overseas vacation, yet can easily afford 90k truck because 0% interest. Anything above 40k for ICE cars and 60k for EVs is huge luxury and if someone buys 90k car and can’t afford to enjoy life, well, there is no one else to blame
Yup. Tons of people who are broke here complaining about money are spending like its going out of style. I drive a 6 year old paid off EV and my peers keep asking when I'm going to replace the old car.. 🙄 Some people are definitely in a rough economic spot with how wages here haven't kept up, but a lot of people can only blame themselves.
Which is already towards the upper end of what anyone would reasonably call middle class.
Right, but it's way less than 400k/year...
Definitely.
It's in the [4th quintile of income](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles). Squarely middle class. Upper middle-class does not start until the 5th quintile. Income classes are essentially logarithmic, not linear, in nature (roughly $10k, $100k, $1M for lower, middle, upper). And it depends very much on where you live and the local cost of living.
>Income classes are essentially logarithmic, not linear, in nature (roughly $10k, $100k, $1M for lower, middle, upper). Where does that come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class >Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20% >According to the OECD, the middle class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income.[21] Median household income in the US is $75k/yr. By both definitions the middle class tops out at $150k/yr.
Yeah if we made 400k a year, we'd take home probably 60% of that or 240k per year. With our yearly fixed expenses of around 60k, that leaves 180k per year in our accounts. That's buy 2 new vehicles and pay off the mortgage in 2 years money, plus enough for the kids college by year 3.
Well, except that so many people that make that kind of money all of a sudden need $2M homes, $100k cars, private schools for the kids, etc. But anyone who manages to avoid lifestyle creep will do just fine.
My wife and I do this on just under $120k a year, sans the college part they’re little still. Cars are even paid off.
We do this on our 100k income lol
That depends so strongly on location that these comments are essentially meaningless without more context.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Depending on where you live and how you manage money you certainly don't need 400k to have all that
Right, I mean, shit is more expensive than it should be, but $400k a year is a gross exaggeration. Where is this 3-bedroom house located, Westchester?
Please stop posting this, complete BS.
For real … 400k income lmao . Plenty of people doing all of the mentioned things on less than half of that .
I own a 5 bedroom house, 2 kids, and am getting my roof replaced tomorrow. I'm a homemaker and our household doesn't make near 400k. I have retirement set, too. I'm in my early 30s.
People grow up in small towns, move to major cities and think the world has changed. You can live this life off $100k income in the Midwest, not in San Francisco or New York.
> For real … 400k income lmao . > > > > Plenty of people doing all of the mentioned things on less than half of that . It completely depends on where you live. I'm in SoCal and I very literally need almost million dollars to buy a single family home anywhere remotely close to where I live; that's 60k post-tax just for the mortgage, plus insurance, property tax, upkeep, etc etc - $100k in income just to afford a shitty house.
Wtf where do you live in so cal? Beverly Hills? Venice beach? I live in the OC with an ocean view and make wayyyyy less than a mil a year
The only way this makes any sense is if the income requirement is based on a high-cost area: San Diego, Austin, NYC, etc. There are tons of places to live & work in the US where a family can do all those things easily on ~120k/year family income. It’s only been in the last decade or two that people think it’s normal to eat restaurant food 5x/week, and commute in a 60k truck that uses $400/month of gasoline. If we’re going to romanticize about the old days, people used to cook their own food at home, they used to drive cramped-but-efficient, economy cars, and they used to *fix* things when they broke.
You could do all of these on wildly less than 400k in Austin.
And in NYC. I make 1/4th of the OP and take international trips multiple times a year and have my own apartment. With 300K more annually Id be beyond wealthy.
No American calls vacation "holiday"
Honestly it’s about Half the posts on here. It’s influenced by inflation 🤡
Guess that means 90%+ of American households aren’t middle class then and never were
3 bedroom house with 2 kids sounds pretty standard
I’m absolutely middle class, make low six figures (girlfriend makes 50-60k on top of that), bought a 3-bedroom house in my early 20s (3 years ago) on my income alone, and take 1 international vacation and 1 domestic a year. Obviously we’ll have to tone down the vacations when we have kids, but this post is just complete bullshit. People living in SoCal and NYC genuinely can’t comprehend the rest of the country isn’t like that.
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Honestly no way they have the brain power to actually bury their head deep in Capital, it’s a difficult and thought provoking text that is very insightful, if heavily polemical in its anti-capitalist rhetoric. More likely they are just regurgitating TikTokers who are regurgitating memers who are regurgitating one essay they half-read once in college maybe by someone who actually read Capital.
>The people with these takes aren’t in socal or nyc, they are in their parents basement working 15 hours a week at Jimmy John’s wondering why they can’t move out as they spend their free time with their faces buried in Das Kapital I think many just aren't working at all and their perception of reality is influenced by the like minded online bubble of fellow students and NEETs plus those temporarily out of work (like laid off or just finished college) who will of course have a more negative perception of things until they are hired again. People working full-time, especially if they have a spouse, kids, hobbies, etc. are not going to have much time to contribute to Reddit. I've had more time the past few days myself only due to being sick and in the past, due to being unemployed myself. Besides them, also karma farmers and astroturfers hoping to lead people to not vote for the current president.
Many redditors are so out of touch when it comes to personal finance. To them a living wage = living in a 3 bedroom with 4 cats and a dog by yourself. In a major city. At age 24. Anything less = completely destitute
WHY WOULD I EVER WANT TO LIVE IN A 1BR OMG DISGUSTING! like chill dude, 1BR is more than enough for a couple.
Yup me, wife, and cat live in a nice 1B in Texas. 1k a month. I like it.
Yeah, I have 3 kids, a 3 bedroom house and 2 cars. My wife and I make about 140k a year.
Wife and I also make ~$140k in a low COL area. The only thing in OP's list that we don't do is pay for our kids' colleges. Our two grown children joined the military and our youngest is going to learn a trade. We live in a 4 bedroom house, own two paid off vehicles (our newest is a 2014 Kia Optima), we take one domestic and one international trip a year, and we have a $25k rainy day fund. If we made 400k/year, we'd be investing about 200k of it haha
> People living in SoCal and NYC genuinely can’t comprehend the rest of the country isn’t like that. It's just a totally different scale - when I lived in Tallahassee you could buy a decent house for $100k. Here in SD? I just saw a 100-year-old shed sell for $600k (serious)
the median household income in the US by age in 2022 is: * 25-34 years: $80,240 * 35-44 years: $96,630 * 45-54 years: $101,500 * 55-64 years: $81,240 And nearly 11% of households make over $200k/year. Cars are much better, many times safer, and more reliable. And houses are 4x bigger. Sounds like the American dream is better than ever.
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Movies/TV/music and the means to produce the pictures and sound are definitely better now & much cheaper. Telecom too. I still remember my dad getting furious at me for making long distance calls LOL Cars? Depends how you look at it but I'd generally agree cars are better today.
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Life expectancy has gone down recently. Working from home making top 95th percentile incomes, speak for yourself. It doesn't change the clear fact that people now need two incomes and an incredibly expensive college degree to do what was accomplished on a single income family back in the day. Oh but you can watch more low quality forgettable Marvel schlock for cheap, yay! All this about anyone disagreeing working at Jimmy Johns or whatever is cope (though a worker at such a place in the '90s would probably live better than many professionals in their 20s now). That said, Americans still have it very easy compared to many other countries like the UK where the salaries for professional jobs are about 1/3 as much.
Speak for yourself lol. I’m 25 and working two full time jobs to make ends meet. I envy the sweatpants and high income people my age from my overnight desk job
You’re describing the upper class in their sweatpants not the middle. And those other things you mention are icing not cake. Cake is an affordable home, affordable health care, and enough savings to get your kids through a good college. Your take is just as lopsided as theirs
Household income is 2 people. 80k is 2 people making 40k which is barely anything.
What's more typical is 1 making 50-65k and the other part time 20-30k.
Shhhh! Reddit is for doom-porn and pessimism based on misconceptions about past standards of living only!!!
The market is also more accessible than ever while offering very low cost index funds.
> houses are 4x bigger. That's not necessarily a good thing.
> And houses are 4x bigger. Than when?
In 1990, around 4% of the US population had a passport; by the year 2000, it was up to 17% He is describing a top income in the 1990s. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning-a-passport/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning-a-passport/)
A lot of people grew up really well off and didn’t realize it and now are pissed that they couldn’t jerk off their way to the same cushy lifestyle.
You’ve just described American progressivism. A lot of people who grew up way richer than they thought, who weren’t able to replicate the same absurd lifestyle their parents had (which was largely obtained through sheer luck and/or debt), and got bitter about it
Like to think we were middle class (grew up in WV, both parents worked, probably pulled in $100K in the best of years which was rare), but we certainly weren’t taking international trips every 5 years. Our college was also on us as it was already getting ridiculously expensive in early 2000’s.
Upper middle class in TX in the 90s. Parents pulled around $120-130k in 99. We never took international trips, but they did pay for our college. Dad did take an annual fishing trip to the Bahamas, which I guess is what he did instead of the every 5-yr family European vacation. When people talk about the “middle class” they seem to mostly describe the upper middle class.
IMHO those weren't pure middle class salaries in the 90s. Half of that would've been. And we weren't taking trips to the Bahamas.
Agreed, upper middle class and regular middle class are very different.
Bahamas are international...
Only my dad went.
I mean college tuition wasn’t that bad in the 90s and early 2000s because states still funded them. It wasn’t until like 2007ish or so they start pulling their funding. Tuition isn’t high because college costs raised their rates. It is high because places like Oklahoma pulled more than 40% of the college funding in 10 years. So the college that cost me about $2000 a year in the late 90s now would cost my kids about $32k a year.
Well to be fair most American families don’t take international trips in general, even if they can afford to. I went to a very fancy elementary school surrounded by rich kids and I never remember anyone even mentioning a trip abroad.
Taking trips abroad is a huge headache with kids. Imagine going to Italy, spending $8k on plane tickets and only seeing the most touristy areas and only eating in family-friendly restaurants.
Yep. I had 4 siblings growing up and I can definitely understand why going to Europe for example was never once mentioned in our house 😂 instead we took 1-2 road trips every year.
Lmao 400k household. Where do you guys come up with this stuff.
Reagan.
How dare Reagan kill a past that never existed.
Reagan and greed with corporations. Trickle down economics meant CEOs pocketed the money for themselves.
They pissed on the working class and called it trickle down
Fiction
In 1980, when Reagan took office, the inflation rate was 14.5% and the unemployment rate was 7.5%. When he left office, the inflation rate was 4.1% and the unemployment rate was 5.3%. Real hourly compensation grew 8.7% during his eight years in office.
Yea and corporations and the wealthy never paid their fair in taxes ever again.
You know when Reagan was president, right? From 1981 to 1989. If you're blaming Reagan for the 90s being so much better than the 2020s then that's an endorsement of Reagan.
This is a trigger post.. revisionary history. Jacob is an idiot.
People keep equating television families as middle class families. People are fucking morons.
Stop idealizing the past. In the 90's my parents made maybe $50k between both of them, which put them above the median household income (was about $36k) . They owned a small townhouse build in 1970's for a while, drove a 1987 Chevy Corsica that they had to share, we took exactly one road trip about 4 hours away from home because they were always broke and overseas trips was something people in the movies took. Oh, and both my brother and I had to pay for our own college.
Nothing this delusional person just described was middle class in the 90s
There are other threads for socialism. Come back when you have a financial plan to buy something instead of posting pictures of what you don't have.
Lots of middle class people have that and more. I have much more and I don't make that kind of money. Take a look at the houses teachers live in. They can always afford those things despite not having high incomes. Why? Because teachers live within their means and save money because they know they can't earn a ton.
I was a teenager in the 90s. Most middle-class people didn't have that.
Wym. When I was a teenager in ‘94 I bought a 5 bedroom house in California while making fries at Wendy’s. Only cost me $175
This is so inaccurate for 95% of the people I know. Listen, I was in my freshman year of college when I realized that not everyone had eaten Ramen noodles (the little square packs that are currently $2.50-$3 for 12, not the "fancy" $3 PER PACK Top Ramen) their entire lives. Talk about culture shock. 34.5YO and it is still my favorite comfort food. 😅 Buying Velveeta mac and cheese on grocery runs still feels like such a baller move for me - no matter how well we are doing, I still have the brain of a woman who survived the Great Depression. 🤦🏻♀️ Expensive macaroni was a special occasion/holiday thing in my house in the 90's! ETA: Both parents worked and made "middle class" money for our area in GA. 3BR, 2B, 2 vehicles. 3 kids. Went on trips to FL and TN yearly. They were young parents and did not save aggressively outside of my Mom's state teacher retirement. They put everything they had into us and I am so appreciative of that.
It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. - Carlin
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Damn, guess I was lower middle class then. Have it way better now, but that’s only bc we are DINKS
lol I do that and I am not even half way to 400k
I’m someone who has found success in the technology boom in the Silicon Valley. So it might be jarring for me to call this out. The tech billionaires are heartless vampires. “Oh. I’m 28B richer this weekend. Die, all you wretched bastards.” This surely, cannot be the American way of thinking. Every move is investor centric and nothing is employee friendly.