[bamfly]

$300k (household) isn't upper-middle, before the term became diluted to mean "middle, but with a little left over every month"—the upper-middle of Fussell's Class and The Official Preppy Handbook

- Good private school for a kid or two (guess what one of the bribes to Thomas was...). Not gonna get away with much less than $25k/yr/kid, there, and it goes up from there.

- Long vacations expensive places a couple times a year (again...)

- House somewhere nice (notably, however, the public schools can be shit, which saves a little money here)

- Country club membership, or similar

- Don't have to do, at least, the ~50% of chores you hate the most (you pay to have them done). Ditto the worst parts of childcare.

- (optional, but recommended) Attendance of fancy functions (esp. e.g. charity events–what's the point of it all if you don't feel fancy?)

- Second property with housing on it (doesn't have to be lavish, but can't be quite as shit as a hillbilly fishing shack, which even poor country folk sometimes have)

- (optional, but recommended) Any money left over after that.

That's gonna be $400k+, household, in a cheap but not crazy cheap market (who wants to be fancy in truly bum-fuck nowhere? Though your vacation property might be there...) in 2023. Bare minimum ([EDIT] that won't get you much of the "optionals", I mean, and the rest is gonna be teetering right on the edge of having to start cutting items—and then, only if you're somewhere relatively low COL).

You aren't living, to a certain social class, if you start having to sacrifice much of that. That's how you're supposed to live.

[tptacek]

I don't know anything about the broader argument here. I responded to a comment that said that $300k/yr would only get you a small place in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Chicago. That's categorically false. Mortgage calculators are premised on other expenses scaling with your housing cost, and capture the other bulletpoints ("country club membership", really?).

Someone with a $300k/yr income will end up with an extraordinarily nice home, by any standards, in Chicago.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

$800k is not getting you anything spectacular in the nicer neighborhoods in Chicago unless you're looking at 1 and maybe 2 bedroom condos.

The median condo is not particularly great - and it goes for ~$660k in most of the nicer neighborhoods.

The median house is well over $800k in the nicer neighborhoods.

And, again, Chicago is one of the most affordable cities in the US.

[tptacek]

You can just look at Redfin to see that this isn't true. You can get a 4bdr in the Loop for ~$800k. I've spent most of my life here, including the last 19 years, and I just bought a new house here; I think you're going to have a hard time talking me down from my own lived experience.

The standard message board tactic for wriggling out of this position is to define "the nice neighborhoods" in Chicago ludicrously narrowly, like the only nice places to live here are Lincoln Park and... well that's it. But even Lincoln Park is doable at $800k.

[bamfly]

> ("country club membership", really?)

Yeah, I know. I wasn't raised part of that class and don't hang out with many people in it, either :-)

Books I've read on the topic and the handful of people I know in it, yeah, that's just what you do if you're in That Set. Country clubs.