Middle-Class Families Making Less Than $250K A Year Struggle In Some Very Challenging Ways
halfpoint | CanvaMaking less than $250K a year can still feel tight for middle-class families.
My husband teaches public high school, and thanks to the vagaries of geography, his salary puts us firmly in the middle class. We own a home and don't lack for much, but we also don't have much extra. Anyone who assumes families making a cool quarter of a million dollars live the way we do is kidding themselves. Our house is a three-bedroom ranch with a backyard big enough for dogs and kids, but the den still has linoleum floors we can't afford to replace, one of our two refrigerators is broken, and every repair makes us do the math. This is what a real middle-class life often looks like: constant worry, constant scrambling, and a long list of things we have to handle ourselves.
Middle-class families making less than $250K a year struggle in their own, very challenging, ways
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We're one broken appliance away from trouble
When our water heater broke, we faced a bill that ran into the thousands. Luckily, our parents paid for it. Otherwise, we'd have needed a loan (which is hard to get right now), or just dealt with cold showers. We hope our cars won't break down. We have something put away, but it's not much. God forbid a transmission croaks.
Real middle-class life looks nothing like a quarter-million-dollar lifestyle
That's a different life from the one people making $250,000 a year live. Their annual household income, first of all, would have topped the cost of our house. No one hesitates to lend them money on the off chance they need it. But they shouldn't if they live within their means.
They can pay contractors to fix their houses. Their new cars (they don't buy used) are less likely to die on the highway. If they do, it's a minor annoyance. They write a check. They likely have an extra vehicle to drive while the car's in the shop.
Moreover, if you make $250,000 a year, you don't mow your lawn, you probably don't always clean your own house, and despite exorbitant babysitting rates, you don't cancel weekly date nights. You can afford to have someone watch your kids, no matter how many you have or how young they are.
In other words, you can farm out unwanted tasks. Your money absolves you of certain responsibilities.
We do almost everything ourselves
Not us. Our median-income family needs to mow its lawn, thank you. A task that takes considerable time, and hence, doesn't always get done. Because of that, my backyard hovers just this side of the jungle.
We can't afford a maid, so cleaning, even deep cleaning, like baseboards and ovens and under couches, falls squarely on the heads of my husband and me. Cleaning takes time. Deep cleaning takes even longer. That's why the floor beneath my couches remains an uncharted treasure trove of toys, books, and assorted childhood detritus.
Date nights are few and far between. We have friends to watch our kids, of course, but we don't want to take advantage of them too often. Because we don't want to impose on friends and don't have the money to pay babysitters, Target trips always involve three kids. We're lucky. We don't have to shop at Walmart. We wear a lot of Target or thrift-store clothes, too. We don't want to support oppressive garment industries, but we can't afford the pricier ethical brands.
Whole Foods was never built for our budget
We can afford some organic foods, which is nice, but no way can we go all-organic, or no GMO, or no high-fructose corn syrup. Well, maybe we could do the last one, but it's not realistic: neither the shopping nor the cooking takes up time we don't have.
We could, of course, buy all our food at stores that don't stock non-organic food, or food with HFCS, but we can't afford those places. A new Whole Foods came to town, but that didn't mean much to us. Two hundred bucks is a substantial grocery run for us, not two meals and some quick snacks.
The real middle class is scrambling
This isn't the case for the five percenters. They're the ones filling their carts at Whole Foods; they're the ones lecturing us on the dangers of GMOs and the benefits of expensive cleanses. They can buy designer labels without doing the kind of math we do in the aisle.
These people only shop at the mall. They can do more than ogle that purse at the Coach store; they can buy it without saving up or cutting corners. Put it on the credit card. Cha-ching!
We move in different economic circles, these five percenters and me.
They don't gulp at eighty-dollar jeans. People who make over $250,000 a year combined are often removed from our daily concerns, our lawn mowing and Target shopping, and date night postponement. The real middle class is scrambling. We could actually use a tax break. And reality check: If you're shopping at Whole Foods with your Gucci purse, you don't.
Elizabeth Broadbent is a writer, journalist, and speculative fiction author. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Insider, and Romper, among many others, where she writes about parenting, mental health, and lifestyle topics.
