I'm not really sure what to make of this. The article is conflating tradeoffs people make. People typically overbid on housing for access to good public schools. Folks sending their kids to private school live in a cheaper home with a better commute. They're optimizing for commute time, perceived safety, education, and access to child care.
The real way for everyone to escape this perceived hedonic treadmill is to build more housing, invest in public transit infrastructure, and have affordable childcare.
It’s a soft form of segregation that hangs around because the upper classes benefit from it.
For example, the practice of funding public schools with property taxes was found unconstitutional in Ohio back in ‘97, but the Republican-held legislature ignored the ruling and refused to create an alternative. The practice continues even today.
I guess this depends what you mean by issue. One can pay for it but eventually (especially for multiple children) it crowds out other things.
The price forces a consideration of marginal costs and benefits instead of being able to think about it in terms like "my child would be happier here" or "I value education in classics/fine arts/religion/whatever else a private school teaches for non-financial reasons."
I grew up in an upper middle class household, and the vast majority of my cohort in high school were also upper middle class, judging by the professions of their parents and the nature of their homes when I visited for group projects and the like.
Most of the kids took the bus, unless they were old enough to drive themselves.
I was figuring upper middle class was around 2x that (250-400k) in desirable areas like the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC. Which after mortgage/rent, car payments, school fees... still isn't private-limo or even stay-at-home-parent money
> I was figuring upper middle class was around 2x that (250-400k) in desirable areas like the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC. Which after mortgage/rent, car payments, school fees... still isn't private-limo or even stay-at-home-parent money
Nobody said anybody is taking a limo, I have no clue where this straw man obsession of yours even came from.
Depending on which part of the country you’re in, 160k absolutely is stay at home money for the (most likely) wife, who would also be picking up the kid(s). Sure, that isn’t upper middle class money in San Francisco or NYC, but it was surely obvious nobody was saying it was in this context lol.
Legit this thing with you and limos is so weird. You realise limos basically don’t even exist anymore except as a gag for high school proms, right?
> Sure, that isn’t upper middle class money in San Francisco or NYC, but it was surely obvious nobody was saying it was in this context lol
The article is written by the COO of a NYC-based wealth management firm, so it very explicitly is the context.
> Nobody said anybody is taking a limo
"limo" in this context is a shorthand for whatever form of 3rd-party individual transport you choose. Taxis, uber black, or the nanny dropping the kids off at school all work out much the same (albeit the old-money NYC folks are absolutely still rolling with their private drivers)
It's absurd to say the upper middle class doesn't use public transportation. Of course they do. My commute is $8 each way on public transportation and would be significantly worse or more expensive if I drove (traffic) or used Uber. I could afford to live closer to work, but I wouldn't have nearly a nice home or sense of safety for my family. Childcare also is still a major consideration when deciding how many children to have. No one wants to earn upper middle class wages and still end up living paycheck to paycheck.
I also take public transportation into work because parking is expensive and work pays for a commuter card. But for literally everything else I have to drive, even to get to public transportation. It does feel like a upper middle class privilege. If I were poorer I'd be renting close to work to save
Household incomes exceed $100,000 (equivalent to $164,849 in 2025).[5] Professions for this class may include: judges, senior military officers, financial planners, engineers, professors, architects, airline pilots, and businessmen.
How do they pickup their kids towards the end of the workday?
Commute times are a real factor in deciding where to live, and which schools to pick. In the Bay Area, the only real solution is living closer to work, which requires over bidding & selecting private schools if they picked the wrong area.
Why are you using the metropolis with the highest cost of living in the US as some kind of benchmark? SF is an extreme outlier. Why do you keep mentioning it?
Almost everybody who is upper middle class in the US doesn’t live in San Fransisco, so find a better comparator.
Sure, now map that income to transit usage in any major American city that actually has public transit.
Also $160k household can be very different in terms of childcare costs depending on how many people in that household are working, and is an actual problem for double income families with young kids in HCOL areas.
I am not sure where I am on the stack, but I make more than most families in my area and I heavily rely on public transport. It's also why I can afford to a lot of things others cannot -- I am not sinking money into a car payment, car insurance, gas, etc. every month.
I don't really buy the distinction between "upper middle class" and "lower middle class" and "lower upper class" and "upper lower middle class" or whatever other variations people can dream up. These just seem like people trying to find a more granular place to stick themselves on the economic totem pole.
In my view, we have two classes: People who have to work for a living, and people who don't. Most of us are in the first class: Our wealth (net of spending) does not grow unless we are working. We're N missed paychecks away from being broke. That N may be a high number (what some people call middle class) and that N may be a low number, but everyone in this class has a similar set of problems. Yes, small-N is more difficult living than big-N, but we are more similar than different.
The second group, the people whose wealth net of spending grows without them working, live in a totally different world than the rest of us and have totally different life experiences and problems. They simple don't worry about paychecks the way the rest of us do.
So this whole "upper middle class" distinction is IMO not very important. Now, more than ever, we need class solidarity, not more labels.
I like this framing. The differences between these two groups is much bigger than the differences within these groups, at least at some fundamental level. There is as always, nuances, and a grey area somewhere at the transition.. but overall yeah. You are either in need of some sort of income related to something you actively do, or not. There are of course ways to distinguish subgroups, but that is often as much or more culturally / socially than purely economical / financial.
It's an interesting question, we often talk of 'socioeconomic class' but in reality social and economic class are quite distinct things I think. This is particularly pronounced in countries like the UK where the social class system is very entrenched; it correlates with wealth but can be fairly independent of it, it's much more about the subculture you belong to and the way you see yourself within the world. You're born into your social class and you can't really change it within one generation no matter how much wealth you acquire.
Economic class is the more useful framing and it's exactly as you say I think, you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you. There's other features of economic class but that's the dominant one. This is the class difference that matters the most in my opinion when it comes to explaining aggregate motivations.
> you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you
I would propose a slight correction: you either work to put bread on the table, or someone else works to put bread on your table.
The capital return from investments does not come from the assets themselves, it is extracted from the labor of workers and from the externalization of costs onto public or shared resources, for which the working class ultimately, and disproportionately, foots the bill.
One of the things Marx got right was to analyze society in terms of economic interests, and realizing that there was an intermediate class whose interests are more linked to that of the upper class than to the interests of the masses.
In feudal times, kings and barons needed lesser gentry to carry out their plans. "Billionaires" likewise need armies of professionals to run their organizations. This group "works for a living," but that's a superficial distinction. In reality, those peoples' financial interests are strongly linked to the interests of the billionaires. There's a lot of people who "work for a living" that sent their kids to college by helping paper up deals that moved factories and jobs to China. The fact that those lawyers and accountants and bankers also "work for a living" was only a superficial similarity they shared with the factory workers whose jobs were outsourced. What dominated was the material interest--one group had skills that enabled them to benefit from globalization. And another group lacked those skills and suffered from globalization. You'll see the same from AI.
Your "class solidarity" has had the opposite effect of what you probably intend. The more the upper middle class started seeing themselves as "part of the 99%," the more they diluted the mission of organizations that advocate for working class interests.
Perhaps incentives among workers will align better as those lawyers, accountants, bankers and other billionaire-supporting professionals themselves also start getting discarded by the billionaires in favor of AI and automation. The material interest alignment will evaporate the second the billionaires don't need those professionals.
I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class has gotten much richer in material terms over the past 50 years. The top 0.01% has obviously gotten richer much faster if you count all the paper money locked up in the stock market. But it's not clear to me that Sergei Brin consumes more actual resources than a Rockefeller did. But their respective bankers and lawyers almost certainly do. If you look at the established, affluent suburbs where these people live, everything is much bigger and nicer than it was in the 1990s.
I doubt it. At least in the States, lawyers can always generate more make-work for themselves and are not seriously threatened by AI.
Courts will probably punish self-representation by AI just as heavily if not more so than self-representation without AI.
Lawyers have a de facto monopoly on legal practice, and too many politicians are lawyers or ex-lawyers for that to change any time soon. There’s not much opportunity for class consciousness to manifest there.
They play a game for a living. Their labor provides only indirect economic benefit in providing entertainment. They are also simply waiting to officially join the second group once they retire at a young age.
But then you have things like "works for a living, but contributes to a 401k". Now they work for a living, and their net wealth grows from other people working. (I mean, not enough - yet - for them to be able to quit working themselves...)
So where are they? They have a foot in both worlds. And there are tens of millions of them. They work, but they're taking what they can from what they earn, and using that to bootstrap them toward the "don't have to work" category, but they aren't there yet. Those people are fundamentally different from "working class", even though they work.
I do think there's more class granularity than that, and it's important to understand how such distinctions can make it more or less difficult to organize and cooperate. E.g. the idea of a petit bourgeoisie is useful for understanding why small business owners, despite indeed needing to work for a living, are generally against unionization.
But the core of your point certainly stands. "Higher wage" vs "lower wage" does not make a big difference in terms of our fundamental interests, and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.
> and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.
You're confusing "experiences" with "interests." Worrying about paying your mortgage isn't an "interest" you have in common with someone else. It's an "experience." But people with similar experiences can and often do have conflicting interests.
"a college degree made you stand out. But now that so many have them, it’s table stakes. Now, we spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to end up in the same place."
That kind of depends what you're measuring, doesn't it? A better educated population is presumably generally a good thing. My life is probably more interesting because I spent 4 years at university learning.
Is that worth the price? I don't know, but it's not the same place.
The author is pointing out that spending gobs of money on expensive educations is no better than the public education that is either free (high school) or cheaper (public colleges.)
I've lived this, too. My parents sent me to a private high school, and later when I found rankings in my state, my private high school was no better (or worse) than the free one in town. I was no better or worse off, I probably would have kept most of the same friends, and probably would have gotten into the same colleges.
Then, my Dad pushed me to a "fancy" private college. The professors were just so-so, and I should have transferred. (I didn't know better.) Later I found rankings and my "fancy" college ranked poorly, but the public college nearby was ranked significantly higher.
After graduating from college, I bumped into some people from high school, and we all agreed that our guidance counselor gave us horrible college advice. Had I gone to the public high school, would they have pushed me towards the better public college? I have no idea.
> This is why the best way to escape the upper middle class trap is to stop participating in it altogether. Opt out of those ultra-competitive sectors that won’t materially change your lifestyle. Send your kids to good public schools instead of costly private ones. Skip first class and fly economy. Buy a little less house than you can afford.
> The ironic part is that the data supports this. … And, as I demonstrated last year, premium travel experiences aren’t what they used to be.
On one hand I see the author’s point but anyone who’s flown the last decade will also see economy has become increasingly a shitty, cramped experience, where you’re treated with a certain level of baseline disdain and distrust from airline staff.
For housing, agree on living below your means, but it’s the same issue. Housing on the low end and middle price ranges is in many places most competitive, with multiple bids over ask for a fixer upper with major issues. For general goods and services, companies are extracting every ounce of value they can from budget offerings, usually by sacrificing quality to drive down cost.
I think the author sees this as an upper middle class issue because that’s their experience and lens but the truth is everyone is getting squeezed, and I’d argue the value prop on purchasing essentially anything gets worse, not better, as you try to save money.
> companies are extracting every ounce of value they can from budget offerings, usually by sacrificing quality to drive down cost
I grew up poor. Not like destitute or anything, we had food and all the necessary basics, but there were 3 of us sharing a 50m^2 apartment on a single income with a dad who wouldn’t pay child support. So it was kinda tight.
Now I’m sorta upper middle class in SFBA. There’s 2 of us sharing 1500sqft, each saving almost 2x/year than my parents salary was back when times were tough. The fear of no-money never quite leaves you.
Here’s what I learned: Buy the most expensive thing you can afford. Use that thing until it dies. Do regular maintenance.
Yes! The fact that as a civilization we decided to run real estate as a ponzi scheme does not uniquely impact the upper middle class. Quite the opposite. Ditto inflation, which is notoriously good at punching down.
How is this novel? Just sounds like the “lifestyle creep” trap of just always wanting slightly nicer
FWIW I think SFUSD changes the public/private math a little: you can live in a 3m house and the neighborhood school for you is 2/10 on great schools or less. I’m not saying this rating scale is perfect but am saying that 2/10 is probably pretty bad. Also FWIW 1/3 of the school age kids in SF go private.
The main difference is "lifestyle creep" is an individual problem / choice. You make more, but you spend more of it. Your lifestyle is improved, but there's a diminishing rate of return.
The collective "lifestyle creep" where the consumers are competing can cost everyone more while resulting in worse outcomes overall. Almost like reverse capitalism. Instead of producers / sellers competing (on quality and price), there is just so much demand from consumers that they are forced to sacrifice quality while paying a higher price.
That's why SF houses are significantly cheaper than their equivalents in suburbs like Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamoraga, Marin, etc.
Or lemme put it this way - $1.5 million buys you a single family home with a backyard in outer sunset, but only buys you a townhouse with no backyard in the Tri-Valley, but the family in outer sunset will have to send their kid to a private while the Tri-Valley household kid will attend some of the best public schools in the nation.
This article is rediscovering the same phenomenon that happened when the steam-powered machinery was invented, leading to the Luddite movement.
Machinery at the dawn of the industrial revolution was supposed to be a time-saving miracle that freed capitalists from having to deal with workers, and also freed workers from backbreaking labor, letting them spend their hours in the pursuit of leisure.
Of course, the opposite happened. Machinery meant workers could produce more output in the same amount of time, so they didn't work less, they worked at least the same and eventually even more to keep up with competition and the demands of consumers. It took decades of unrest and bloody conflict to give us the 8-hour workday.
This article is rediscovering that same history, but for a different class. AI is to white-collar knowledge workers what steam-powered machinery was to the rough-handed working class of the 1800s. It promises capitalists freedom from having to deal with highly-paid knowledge workers, and it promises highly-paid knowledge workers freedom from their labor so they can spend their time in the pursuit of leisure.
Like anything it depends. How expensive is the private school, what are your hours, what is your spouse willing to accept. While expensive, I will say that a lot of private schools appear to understand the path past high school and into college. I think you'll get better advice about what to do after and I think it will make your kids a more viable candidate for the selective colleges they might be interested in. This again raises the question of whether the degree they move onto will be worth it, and it's a problem that you'll have to make a spreadsheet for. You're paying to keep your kids' options open.
The ending note was the most interesting. In regards to the offhand about AI, I was literally was talking to my wife about a topic very close to it last night. Strange.
The upper middle class have a leg-up and motivation for leveraging AI, as we are still involved with optimizing financials, time, and maintenance of lifestyle through careful planning. Like we asked Google before, now we ask Google which redirects us to their LLM to answer the questions more fully, along with actionable plans we can afford to implement. We take this journey multiple times, on a daily basis. We definitely noticed the increase in AI usage YoY for the last couple years.
I'm guessing the upper class and above, generally don't need to worry about practical details in the same way, delegating that responsibility (to someone who will use AI eventually). Maybe it feels like it's a tool best leveraged for our economic position because we're already trapped. Maybe everyone will feel this way.
A side effect of higher prices in the California real estate market is that houses are often remodeled before putting them on the market, because the price bump is more than the cost of the remodeling.
So, price per square foot may not be the whole story. They are often nicer homes with the same square footage. Some improvements are superficial but there are real upgrades too.
Who loses? Home buyers who would rather save money by buying a house that hasn’t been fixed up. If you wanted to buy the same house that the people there lived in fifty years ago, you can’t, because that house is gone. But other buyers presumably thought it was worth it.
I remember getting burned by this a bit over 20 years ago trying to get on the housing ladder. At the time, the going rate for property where I was looking was around £80k, but I'd seen one wreck go for £60k and I was waiting around trying to get another for that kind of price. Unfortunately for me, I never did find that bargain, and that year saw massive property price rises, and in the end I had to pay £120k for a house that was the same as those that had been selling for £80k a year earlier. My guess is that most of the bargains were bought by people who knew how to flip properties, as a lot of the properties were a very high standard around then. Just to rub it in, after a 50% rise in a year, the prices were then pretty stagnant for the next 12-13 years. At a guess, its value has approximately doubled in the decade since the stagnant period.
A very long time ago, I found myself commuting to work alongside a centi-millionaire who happened to only own one car, a Volvo 740 Estate. His wife drove him to the commuter train station, and he shlepped to work like everyone else.
I was reading a book about paying yourself first, "The Richest Man in Babylon." He spotted that and we had a short conversation about money, in which he recommended another book about personal finance, "The Millionaire Next Door," an enormous amount of which is about not buying into the Upper-Middle Class Trap.
I walked directly to a bookstore, bought it, and while I am not wealthy, what I do have I credit largely to that book. Yes, it's a book that could be a podcast episode or series of blog posts. But no matter how you consume the wisdom or where you get it from, consider this my heartfelt endorsement.
And yes, The Volvo V90 Estate in my garage was purchased used. And even then... We vacillated over spending that much to replace our XC70 Estate, also purchased used.
> AI use also varies across income levels, rising from 9% usage among earners below $30,000 to 34% among those making $100,000 or more.
> Individuals with the highest incomes tend to use AI the most. This is a rational response if you believe that AI is a serious threat to your high-paying career.
I guess the good news is that TFA proves there are still some instances left of good, old-fashioned, human-produced sloppy logic.
The AI use thing is a bit iffy, as the "upper middle class" people are using it heavily simply because the tools currently on offer are made for the type of work they do (and remember: if you are a FAANG engineer, you are very solidly in the "upper middle class").
So much ink has been spilled on the "disconnect" between the public mood (very bad based on polling) while on paper Americans are wealthier than ever.
The author's focus is the upper middle class because he's a wealth manager but the theory I've been mulling over in my head is something that is hitting everyone.
Customer surplus has been optimized away. Or put more simply: deals have disappeared.
Honest question for you - when is the last time you were just out and about, not really looking, and said to yourself "wow that's a good deal" from a find?
It happened to me once last year and it hit me like a lightning bolt that I used to feel that regularly and now it was a novel experience. Not even a decade ago companies priced things more aggressively and there was a sense of pride in making things broadly available. The customer was king and all that.
Post-covid though, instead of leaving some surplus on the table, including a bunch of extras, and trying to please as many people as possible, the relationship has completely flipped. Companies now proudly price things and engage in business practices that are design to extract as much as possible and turn people away. Customer service everywhere has gone down the tubes. Take it or leave it is now the default behavior of most companies.
It's a phenomenon related to inflation and enshittification but more anti-social which is why I think it hurts more.
Instead of approaching most business interactions with a baseline feeling of positivity I now have to actively defend myself from being taken advantage of everywhere. Even paying more to get a "premium" experience isn't a defense. No wonder everyone is miserable.
I can't take anyone seriously who equates "six figure income" with "upper-middle class". That was true in the 80s. But the median household income in the US is about $80,000/yr. That extra $20,000 doesn't push you into upper-middle class.
If there's a trap for the upper-middle class, it's for the W2 earners. The federal tax code essentially disqualifies high-income W2 earners from virtually every deduction. Both parties wind up soaking these taxpayers because they
- make a lot of money,
- don't own a business, and
- don't have an organization like the Chamber of Commerce to lobby on their behalf
When Republicans get into power, these people are likely to vote Democratic and are therefore okay to stick with the bill after cutting taxes for dentists, lawyers, and corporations. When Democrats are in power, these people are (as ever) not "paying their fair share", so they need their taxes hiked to pay for free stuff for people who don't vote for Democrats. And then they'll also be disqualified from taking advantage of those new benefits/entitlements.
shrinkflation is real I'm afraid. and so is inflation. better school better area may give some edge to kids. Or would teaching them principles and the way of life be more useful? Or teach them real skills that schools don't teach, like how to manage their own finance and building wealth. They don't teach that stuff at school.
<< This is why the best way to escape the upper middle class trap is to stop participating in it altogether.
Huh? No. If anything, participate harder. I am not going to go into the public school example author gives, because anyone in US ( including left leaning people ), know full well that public school is only good if it is in a 'good' district. If you really want to drop education cost, home school and hire experts to tutor your kid. Dunno, if opting out of life niceties is a good either for that matter.. or from AI..
I get it is an opinion, but it is also such a bad advice overall.
I worked my ass off for a decade in one of the highest earning careers available just to be able to barely afford more or less the same house as my grandparents, who worked odd jobs and were able to build it themselves while raising a family. Mediocrity is the new success, and misery is what's left for the rest.
Yeah this article has a very "blame the user" attitude because it labels a supply side issue as a demand side collective action problem.
"Just buy less house" sounds very avocado toasty. Anyways, the actual way many people are "escaping the trap" is by not having children and not buying homes. Or at least delaying doing those things.
If anything, the collective action problem is political. But it's very systemic. Simply voting for a good representative isn't enough unless those representatives push for systemic change (and the right kind at that).
I'm sorry, but I am having a hard time buying this as-written.
"One ofthe highest earning careers available" would suggest a job that paid you at least $200k over median; median is livable so you could have been saving at least $200k/year. You'd have had $2M after 10 years as a downpayment, which would easily cover anything a pair of "odd-job" self-builders had 2 generations ago.
idem. Except they also ended up owning a good amount of farmland to garden and a bit of forest and a smaller vacation home later on.
As western european factory workers.
They marvel at the fact I have an office job and insist that I must dress very properly. I think one should question that and why their job (which they were proud of) no longer exists here and the ones that do exist don't employ locals. The result is that many of my generation are competing for those "prestigious" "high earning" carreers.
I'm not really sure what to make of this. The article is conflating tradeoffs people make. People typically overbid on housing for access to good public schools. Folks sending their kids to private school live in a cheaper home with a better commute. They're optimizing for commute time, perceived safety, education, and access to child care.
The real way for everyone to escape this perceived hedonic treadmill is to build more housing, invest in public transit infrastructure, and have affordable childcare.
> People typically overbid on housing for access to good public schools.
Such an American thing. Not sure what to make of it.
It’s the same in the UK, house prices in the catchment area of a good school are significantly higher.
It’s a soft form of segregation that hangs around because the upper classes benefit from it.
For example, the practice of funding public schools with property taxes was found unconstitutional in Ohio back in ‘97, but the Republican-held legislature ignored the ruling and refused to create an alternative. The practice continues even today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeRolph_v._State
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Ohio_state_governme...
The upper middle class don’t need to use public transport and have no issues paying for childcare.
It’s like you’ve commented on the wrong article or something. This article was talking about marginal costs and benefits.
> have no issues paying for childcare
I guess this depends what you mean by issue. One can pay for it but eventually (especially for multiple children) it crowds out other things.
The price forces a consideration of marginal costs and benefits instead of being able to think about it in terms like "my child would be happier here" or "I value education in classics/fine arts/religion/whatever else a private school teaches for non-financial reasons."
I’ve heard it said that a country is wealthy not when the poor have cars but when the rich use public transportation.
Couldn't the country be poor with exorbitantly expensive parking?
In short: no, not to the extent that it'd make rich people use public transportation.
Their personal driver can pick them up if needs be.
> The upper middle class don’t need to use public transport
Their kids still ride the school busses. Upper-middle class aren't in a position to hire a limo and driver to take the kids to school.
> and have no issues paying for childcare
Typically because both parents are working high pressure jobs, which makes childcare a mandatory expense, not a luxury.
Plenty of those in the upper middle class can just drive their kids to school. Some of them are taking a bus, sure, but not most.
You and some of these other responders are clearly conflating the middle class and the UPPER middle class. The upper middle class made >$160k in 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_middle_class_in_the_Unit...
I grew up in an upper middle class household, and the vast majority of my cohort in high school were also upper middle class, judging by the professions of their parents and the nature of their homes when I visited for group projects and the like.
Most of the kids took the bus, unless they were old enough to drive themselves.
> The upper middle class made >$160k in 2025
I was figuring upper middle class was around 2x that (250-400k) in desirable areas like the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC. Which after mortgage/rent, car payments, school fees... still isn't private-limo or even stay-at-home-parent money
> I was figuring upper middle class was around 2x that (250-400k) in desirable areas like the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC. Which after mortgage/rent, car payments, school fees... still isn't private-limo or even stay-at-home-parent money
Nobody said anybody is taking a limo, I have no clue where this straw man obsession of yours even came from.
Depending on which part of the country you’re in, 160k absolutely is stay at home money for the (most likely) wife, who would also be picking up the kid(s). Sure, that isn’t upper middle class money in San Francisco or NYC, but it was surely obvious nobody was saying it was in this context lol.
Legit this thing with you and limos is so weird. You realise limos basically don’t even exist anymore except as a gag for high school proms, right?
> Sure, that isn’t upper middle class money in San Francisco or NYC, but it was surely obvious nobody was saying it was in this context lol
The article is written by the COO of a NYC-based wealth management firm, so it very explicitly is the context.
> Nobody said anybody is taking a limo
"limo" in this context is a shorthand for whatever form of 3rd-party individual transport you choose. Taxis, uber black, or the nanny dropping the kids off at school all work out much the same (albeit the old-money NYC folks are absolutely still rolling with their private drivers)
It's absurd to say the upper middle class doesn't use public transportation. Of course they do. My commute is $8 each way on public transportation and would be significantly worse or more expensive if I drove (traffic) or used Uber. I could afford to live closer to work, but I wouldn't have nearly a nice home or sense of safety for my family. Childcare also is still a major consideration when deciding how many children to have. No one wants to earn upper middle class wages and still end up living paycheck to paycheck.
I also take public transportation into work because parking is expensive and work pays for a commuter card. But for literally everything else I have to drive, even to get to public transportation. It does feel like a upper middle class privilege. If I were poorer I'd be renting close to work to save
I consider myself upper middle class and I ride the bus. I'd rather ride my bike but sometimes I ride the bus.
I'm not sure you understand who the upper middle class are.
That's a very common problem, it's not a well defined and clearly visible definition.
Household incomes exceed $100,000 (equivalent to $164,849 in 2025).[5] Professions for this class may include: judges, senior military officers, financial planners, engineers, professors, architects, airline pilots, and businessmen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_middle_class_in_the_Unit...
How do they pickup their kids towards the end of the workday?
Commute times are a real factor in deciding where to live, and which schools to pick. In the Bay Area, the only real solution is living closer to work, which requires over bidding & selecting private schools if they picked the wrong area.
Why are you using the metropolis with the highest cost of living in the US as some kind of benchmark? SF is an extreme outlier. Why do you keep mentioning it?
Almost everybody who is upper middle class in the US doesn’t live in San Fransisco, so find a better comparator.
Sure, now map that income to transit usage in any major American city that actually has public transit.
Also $160k household can be very different in terms of childcare costs depending on how many people in that household are working, and is an actual problem for double income families with young kids in HCOL areas.
I am not sure where I am on the stack, but I make more than most families in my area and I heavily rely on public transport. It's also why I can afford to a lot of things others cannot -- I am not sinking money into a car payment, car insurance, gas, etc. every month.
I don't really buy the distinction between "upper middle class" and "lower middle class" and "lower upper class" and "upper lower middle class" or whatever other variations people can dream up. These just seem like people trying to find a more granular place to stick themselves on the economic totem pole.
In my view, we have two classes: People who have to work for a living, and people who don't. Most of us are in the first class: Our wealth (net of spending) does not grow unless we are working. We're N missed paychecks away from being broke. That N may be a high number (what some people call middle class) and that N may be a low number, but everyone in this class has a similar set of problems. Yes, small-N is more difficult living than big-N, but we are more similar than different.
The second group, the people whose wealth net of spending grows without them working, live in a totally different world than the rest of us and have totally different life experiences and problems. They simple don't worry about paychecks the way the rest of us do.
So this whole "upper middle class" distinction is IMO not very important. Now, more than ever, we need class solidarity, not more labels.
I like this framing. The differences between these two groups is much bigger than the differences within these groups, at least at some fundamental level. There is as always, nuances, and a grey area somewhere at the transition.. but overall yeah. You are either in need of some sort of income related to something you actively do, or not. There are of course ways to distinguish subgroups, but that is often as much or more culturally / socially than purely economical / financial.
A friend once relayed his mental scale that people usually fall somewhere on...
1) Must plan to buy a meal out.
2) Must plan to take a vacation.
3) Must plan to buy a house.
4) Must plan to pass it on.
...and that these are useful subgroupings for large-scale discussion.
It's an interesting question, we often talk of 'socioeconomic class' but in reality social and economic class are quite distinct things I think. This is particularly pronounced in countries like the UK where the social class system is very entrenched; it correlates with wealth but can be fairly independent of it, it's much more about the subculture you belong to and the way you see yourself within the world. You're born into your social class and you can't really change it within one generation no matter how much wealth you acquire.
Economic class is the more useful framing and it's exactly as you say I think, you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you. There's other features of economic class but that's the dominant one. This is the class difference that matters the most in my opinion when it comes to explaining aggregate motivations.
> you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you
I would propose a slight correction: you either work to put bread on the table, or someone else works to put bread on your table.
The capital return from investments does not come from the assets themselves, it is extracted from the labor of workers and from the externalization of costs onto public or shared resources, for which the working class ultimately, and disproportionately, foots the bill.
> it is extracted from the labor of workers and from the externalization of costs onto public or shared resources
If that were true, then the laborers could generate the same returns without the capital. Which is obviously not true.
Working class, business class, investment class.
One of the things Marx got right was to analyze society in terms of economic interests, and realizing that there was an intermediate class whose interests are more linked to that of the upper class than to the interests of the masses.
In feudal times, kings and barons needed lesser gentry to carry out their plans. "Billionaires" likewise need armies of professionals to run their organizations. This group "works for a living," but that's a superficial distinction. In reality, those peoples' financial interests are strongly linked to the interests of the billionaires. There's a lot of people who "work for a living" that sent their kids to college by helping paper up deals that moved factories and jobs to China. The fact that those lawyers and accountants and bankers also "work for a living" was only a superficial similarity they shared with the factory workers whose jobs were outsourced. What dominated was the material interest--one group had skills that enabled them to benefit from globalization. And another group lacked those skills and suffered from globalization. You'll see the same from AI.
Your "class solidarity" has had the opposite effect of what you probably intend. The more the upper middle class started seeing themselves as "part of the 99%," the more they diluted the mission of organizations that advocate for working class interests.
Perhaps incentives among workers will align better as those lawyers, accountants, bankers and other billionaire-supporting professionals themselves also start getting discarded by the billionaires in favor of AI and automation. The material interest alignment will evaporate the second the billionaires don't need those professionals.
I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class has gotten much richer in material terms over the past 50 years. The top 0.01% has obviously gotten richer much faster if you count all the paper money locked up in the stock market. But it's not clear to me that Sergei Brin consumes more actual resources than a Rockefeller did. But their respective bankers and lawyers almost certainly do. If you look at the established, affluent suburbs where these people live, everything is much bigger and nicer than it was in the 1990s.
I doubt it. At least in the States, lawyers can always generate more make-work for themselves and are not seriously threatened by AI.
Courts will probably punish self-representation by AI just as heavily if not more so than self-representation without AI.
Lawyers have a de facto monopoly on legal practice, and too many politicians are lawyers or ex-lawyers for that to change any time soon. There’s not much opportunity for class consciousness to manifest there.
What about soccer players actors that make millions and their income comes from working?
You can surely find edge cases everywhere when trying to classify the entire population of the industrialized world into two groups.
What about the 10 year NVIDIA employee who held on to every stock grant and bought at every opportunity?
They play a game for a living. Their labor provides only indirect economic benefit in providing entertainment. They are also simply waiting to officially join the second group once they retire at a young age.
Most professional athletes in the US go broke 3-5 years after they retire.
But then you have things like "works for a living, but contributes to a 401k". Now they work for a living, and their net wealth grows from other people working. (I mean, not enough - yet - for them to be able to quit working themselves...)
So where are they? They have a foot in both worlds. And there are tens of millions of them. They work, but they're taking what they can from what they earn, and using that to bootstrap them toward the "don't have to work" category, but they aren't there yet. Those people are fundamentally different from "working class", even though they work.
I do think there's more class granularity than that, and it's important to understand how such distinctions can make it more or less difficult to organize and cooperate. E.g. the idea of a petit bourgeoisie is useful for understanding why small business owners, despite indeed needing to work for a living, are generally against unionization.
But the core of your point certainly stands. "Higher wage" vs "lower wage" does not make a big difference in terms of our fundamental interests, and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.
> and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.
You're confusing "experiences" with "interests." Worrying about paying your mortgage isn't an "interest" you have in common with someone else. It's an "experience." But people with similar experiences can and often do have conflicting interests.
"a college degree made you stand out. But now that so many have them, it’s table stakes. Now, we spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to end up in the same place."
That kind of depends what you're measuring, doesn't it? A better educated population is presumably generally a good thing. My life is probably more interesting because I spent 4 years at university learning.
Is that worth the price? I don't know, but it's not the same place.
Take a look at the linked article https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-private-school-isnt-worth-t...
The author is pointing out that spending gobs of money on expensive educations is no better than the public education that is either free (high school) or cheaper (public colleges.)
I've lived this, too. My parents sent me to a private high school, and later when I found rankings in my state, my private high school was no better (or worse) than the free one in town. I was no better or worse off, I probably would have kept most of the same friends, and probably would have gotten into the same colleges.
Then, my Dad pushed me to a "fancy" private college. The professors were just so-so, and I should have transferred. (I didn't know better.) Later I found rankings and my "fancy" college ranked poorly, but the public college nearby was ranked significantly higher.
After graduating from college, I bumped into some people from high school, and we all agreed that our guidance counselor gave us horrible college advice. Had I gone to the public high school, would they have pushed me towards the better public college? I have no idea.
> This is why the best way to escape the upper middle class trap is to stop participating in it altogether. Opt out of those ultra-competitive sectors that won’t materially change your lifestyle. Send your kids to good public schools instead of costly private ones. Skip first class and fly economy. Buy a little less house than you can afford.
> The ironic part is that the data supports this. … And, as I demonstrated last year, premium travel experiences aren’t what they used to be.
On one hand I see the author’s point but anyone who’s flown the last decade will also see economy has become increasingly a shitty, cramped experience, where you’re treated with a certain level of baseline disdain and distrust from airline staff.
For housing, agree on living below your means, but it’s the same issue. Housing on the low end and middle price ranges is in many places most competitive, with multiple bids over ask for a fixer upper with major issues. For general goods and services, companies are extracting every ounce of value they can from budget offerings, usually by sacrificing quality to drive down cost.
I think the author sees this as an upper middle class issue because that’s their experience and lens but the truth is everyone is getting squeezed, and I’d argue the value prop on purchasing essentially anything gets worse, not better, as you try to save money.
> companies are extracting every ounce of value they can from budget offerings, usually by sacrificing quality to drive down cost
I grew up poor. Not like destitute or anything, we had food and all the necessary basics, but there were 3 of us sharing a 50m^2 apartment on a single income with a dad who wouldn’t pay child support. So it was kinda tight.
Now I’m sorta upper middle class in SFBA. There’s 2 of us sharing 1500sqft, each saving almost 2x/year than my parents salary was back when times were tough. The fear of no-money never quite leaves you.
Here’s what I learned: Buy the most expensive thing you can afford. Use that thing until it dies. Do regular maintenance.
Thought I was super clever when I figured that out, but it’s just the Vimes Economic Theory of Boots – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Also never try to keep up with the joneses or buy things just for status. Unless you can leverage that status into financial opportunities.
> Buy the most expensive thing you can afford.
For everything or specific products?
It can’t be everything. Would never buy a Lambo over a Toyota, just because of maintenance cost.
> > Buy the most expensive thing you can afford.
> For everything or specific products?
I mean, it depends? You probably dont need gold laced toilet paper but a pair of shoes that lasts 10 years instead of 2 years is probably worth it.
Yes! The fact that as a civilization we decided to run real estate as a ponzi scheme does not uniquely impact the upper middle class. Quite the opposite. Ditto inflation, which is notoriously good at punching down.
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Most Americans live in an owner-occupied residence. If you want to reform housing, you have to contend with that fact.
How is this novel? Just sounds like the “lifestyle creep” trap of just always wanting slightly nicer
FWIW I think SFUSD changes the public/private math a little: you can live in a 3m house and the neighborhood school for you is 2/10 on great schools or less. I’m not saying this rating scale is perfect but am saying that 2/10 is probably pretty bad. Also FWIW 1/3 of the school age kids in SF go private.
The main difference is "lifestyle creep" is an individual problem / choice. You make more, but you spend more of it. Your lifestyle is improved, but there's a diminishing rate of return.
The collective "lifestyle creep" where the consumers are competing can cost everyone more while resulting in worse outcomes overall. Almost like reverse capitalism. Instead of producers / sellers competing (on quality and price), there is just so much demand from consumers that they are forced to sacrifice quality while paying a higher price.
That's why SF houses are significantly cheaper than their equivalents in suburbs like Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamoraga, Marin, etc.
Or lemme put it this way - $1.5 million buys you a single family home with a backyard in outer sunset, but only buys you a townhouse with no backyard in the Tri-Valley, but the family in outer sunset will have to send their kid to a private while the Tri-Valley household kid will attend some of the best public schools in the nation.
Back in the stone age we called this "keeping up with the Joneses."
Also, you step in poop on the way to school.
This article is rediscovering the same phenomenon that happened when the steam-powered machinery was invented, leading to the Luddite movement.
Machinery at the dawn of the industrial revolution was supposed to be a time-saving miracle that freed capitalists from having to deal with workers, and also freed workers from backbreaking labor, letting them spend their hours in the pursuit of leisure.
Of course, the opposite happened. Machinery meant workers could produce more output in the same amount of time, so they didn't work less, they worked at least the same and eventually even more to keep up with competition and the demands of consumers. It took decades of unrest and bloody conflict to give us the 8-hour workday.
This article is rediscovering that same history, but for a different class. AI is to white-collar knowledge workers what steam-powered machinery was to the rough-handed working class of the 1800s. It promises capitalists freedom from having to deal with highly-paid knowledge workers, and it promises highly-paid knowledge workers freedom from their labor so they can spend their time in the pursuit of leisure.
Look to history to see how that worked out.
Like anything it depends. How expensive is the private school, what are your hours, what is your spouse willing to accept. While expensive, I will say that a lot of private schools appear to understand the path past high school and into college. I think you'll get better advice about what to do after and I think it will make your kids a more viable candidate for the selective colleges they might be interested in. This again raises the question of whether the degree they move onto will be worth it, and it's a problem that you'll have to make a spreadsheet for. You're paying to keep your kids' options open.
The ending note was the most interesting. In regards to the offhand about AI, I was literally was talking to my wife about a topic very close to it last night. Strange.
The upper middle class have a leg-up and motivation for leveraging AI, as we are still involved with optimizing financials, time, and maintenance of lifestyle through careful planning. Like we asked Google before, now we ask Google which redirects us to their LLM to answer the questions more fully, along with actionable plans we can afford to implement. We take this journey multiple times, on a daily basis. We definitely noticed the increase in AI usage YoY for the last couple years.
I'm guessing the upper class and above, generally don't need to worry about practical details in the same way, delegating that responsibility (to someone who will use AI eventually). Maybe it feels like it's a tool best leveraged for our economic position because we're already trapped. Maybe everyone will feel this way.
Wealth management guy discovers the hedonic treadmill.
Yeah, the article basically just defines lifestyle creep, which has been a common term for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_creep
Most of what is described there just reads like modern cost of living crunch rather than a challenge specific to middle class.
Lower/middle class isn't exactly having a good time with housing either
A side effect of higher prices in the California real estate market is that houses are often remodeled before putting them on the market, because the price bump is more than the cost of the remodeling.
So, price per square foot may not be the whole story. They are often nicer homes with the same square footage. Some improvements are superficial but there are real upgrades too.
Who loses? Home buyers who would rather save money by buying a house that hasn’t been fixed up. If you wanted to buy the same house that the people there lived in fifty years ago, you can’t, because that house is gone. But other buyers presumably thought it was worth it.
I remember getting burned by this a bit over 20 years ago trying to get on the housing ladder. At the time, the going rate for property where I was looking was around £80k, but I'd seen one wreck go for £60k and I was waiting around trying to get another for that kind of price. Unfortunately for me, I never did find that bargain, and that year saw massive property price rises, and in the end I had to pay £120k for a house that was the same as those that had been selling for £80k a year earlier. My guess is that most of the bargains were bought by people who knew how to flip properties, as a lot of the properties were a very high standard around then. Just to rub it in, after a 50% rise in a year, the prices were then pretty stagnant for the next 12-13 years. At a guess, its value has approximately doubled in the decade since the stagnant period.
A very long time ago, I found myself commuting to work alongside a centi-millionaire who happened to only own one car, a Volvo 740 Estate. His wife drove him to the commuter train station, and he shlepped to work like everyone else.
I was reading a book about paying yourself first, "The Richest Man in Babylon." He spotted that and we had a short conversation about money, in which he recommended another book about personal finance, "The Millionaire Next Door," an enormous amount of which is about not buying into the Upper-Middle Class Trap.
I walked directly to a bookstore, bought it, and while I am not wealthy, what I do have I credit largely to that book. Yes, it's a book that could be a podcast episode or series of blog posts. But no matter how you consume the wisdom or where you get it from, consider this my heartfelt endorsement.
And yes, The Volvo V90 Estate in my garage was purchased used. And even then... We vacillated over spending that much to replace our XC70 Estate, also purchased used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door
> AI use also varies across income levels, rising from 9% usage among earners below $30,000 to 34% among those making $100,000 or more.
> Individuals with the highest incomes tend to use AI the most. This is a rational response if you believe that AI is a serious threat to your high-paying career.
I guess the good news is that TFA proves there are still some instances left of good, old-fashioned, human-produced sloppy logic.
I don't think upper middle class is that now. It's just middle class, anything below stopped being one
The AI use thing is a bit iffy, as the "upper middle class" people are using it heavily simply because the tools currently on offer are made for the type of work they do (and remember: if you are a FAANG engineer, you are very solidly in the "upper middle class").
So much ink has been spilled on the "disconnect" between the public mood (very bad based on polling) while on paper Americans are wealthier than ever. The author's focus is the upper middle class because he's a wealth manager but the theory I've been mulling over in my head is something that is hitting everyone.
Customer surplus has been optimized away. Or put more simply: deals have disappeared.
Honest question for you - when is the last time you were just out and about, not really looking, and said to yourself "wow that's a good deal" from a find?
It happened to me once last year and it hit me like a lightning bolt that I used to feel that regularly and now it was a novel experience. Not even a decade ago companies priced things more aggressively and there was a sense of pride in making things broadly available. The customer was king and all that.
Post-covid though, instead of leaving some surplus on the table, including a bunch of extras, and trying to please as many people as possible, the relationship has completely flipped. Companies now proudly price things and engage in business practices that are design to extract as much as possible and turn people away. Customer service everywhere has gone down the tubes. Take it or leave it is now the default behavior of most companies.
It's a phenomenon related to inflation and enshittification but more anti-social which is why I think it hurts more. Instead of approaching most business interactions with a baseline feeling of positivity I now have to actively defend myself from being taken advantage of everywhere. Even paying more to get a "premium" experience isn't a defense. No wonder everyone is miserable.
I can't take anyone seriously who equates "six figure income" with "upper-middle class". That was true in the 80s. But the median household income in the US is about $80,000/yr. That extra $20,000 doesn't push you into upper-middle class.
If there's a trap for the upper-middle class, it's for the W2 earners. The federal tax code essentially disqualifies high-income W2 earners from virtually every deduction. Both parties wind up soaking these taxpayers because they
- make a lot of money,
- don't own a business, and
- don't have an organization like the Chamber of Commerce to lobby on their behalf
When Republicans get into power, these people are likely to vote Democratic and are therefore okay to stick with the bill after cutting taxes for dentists, lawyers, and corporations. When Democrats are in power, these people are (as ever) not "paying their fair share", so they need their taxes hiked to pay for free stuff for people who don't vote for Democrats. And then they'll also be disqualified from taking advantage of those new benefits/entitlements.
shrinkflation is real I'm afraid. and so is inflation. better school better area may give some edge to kids. Or would teaching them principles and the way of life be more useful? Or teach them real skills that schools don't teach, like how to manage their own finance and building wealth. They don't teach that stuff at school.
<< This is why the best way to escape the upper middle class trap is to stop participating in it altogether.
Huh? No. If anything, participate harder. I am not going to go into the public school example author gives, because anyone in US ( including left leaning people ), know full well that public school is only good if it is in a 'good' district. If you really want to drop education cost, home school and hire experts to tutor your kid. Dunno, if opting out of life niceties is a good either for that matter.. or from AI..
I get it is an opinion, but it is also such a bad advice overall.
I worked my ass off for a decade in one of the highest earning careers available just to be able to barely afford more or less the same house as my grandparents, who worked odd jobs and were able to build it themselves while raising a family. Mediocrity is the new success, and misery is what's left for the rest.
Yeah this article has a very "blame the user" attitude because it labels a supply side issue as a demand side collective action problem.
"Just buy less house" sounds very avocado toasty. Anyways, the actual way many people are "escaping the trap" is by not having children and not buying homes. Or at least delaying doing those things.
If anything, the collective action problem is political. But it's very systemic. Simply voting for a good representative isn't enough unless those representatives push for systemic change (and the right kind at that).
Your grandparents probably worked their asses off too.
I'm sorry, but I am having a hard time buying this as-written.
"One ofthe highest earning careers available" would suggest a job that paid you at least $200k over median; median is livable so you could have been saving at least $200k/year. You'd have had $2M after 10 years as a downpayment, which would easily cover anything a pair of "odd-job" self-builders had 2 generations ago.
What am I missing/getting wrong?
idem. Except they also ended up owning a good amount of farmland to garden and a bit of forest and a smaller vacation home later on. As western european factory workers.
They marvel at the fact I have an office job and insist that I must dress very properly. I think one should question that and why their job (which they were proud of) no longer exists here and the ones that do exist don't employ locals. The result is that many of my generation are competing for those "prestigious" "high earning" carreers.
Beats the absolute tar out of poverty, tho!
Or as Zsa Zsa Gabor once said (at least, I think it was her): "Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure makes the bad times a lot easier"
This article hangs on the assertion that AI increases productivity. This is fundamentally false and refuseted by effectively every study of AI use.
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