So the very little research that I've done about "class" in north american society stated that there were basically 5 classes. Out-of-sight rich, upper class, middle class, lower class (at/near poverty line) and out-of-sight poor (homeless etc.)

There is some fuzziness between the classes, you can be upper-middle or middle-lower, etc. but a lot of that is self-perception rather than actual data. The essay talked a lot about perception of wealth, concepts like "enough" and that pressures to consume/compete got (perceptively) higher the higher up the food chain you were. Lower classes tended to spend within their means and reported less anxiety than middle classes, who were more likely to over-extend.

I don't recall health care ever being mentioned (which has a huge impact on Americans of course), and the essay itself was written probably in the 80's at the latest. It did talk about how difficult it is to move "up" from the class you were born/raised in, but interestingly that people didn't tend to move downwards, either (barring exceptional circumstances).

What "class" did you grow up in? Has it coloured how you spend or save now? What class do you currently see yourself as a part of, and if you try to be more objective, how is your self-ranking coloured by your own anxieties/desires?

For example, I grew up in what would have been an upper-middle class home except alcoholisim dried up a lot of money so we lived more lower-middle class. Now our family income puts us probably at upper-middle class, but our debt load keeps us pretty cash-flow tight. Never had to worry about hydro or health-care, but I still have an almost Depression-like mindset on things like food, clothing or utilities. I make do even when I could easily afford to replace or get something nice. So my mental perception says "middle class... at BEST!" but I know damn well the numbers say upper-middle.

I feel/fear poor even though we're not even close (although we like most young couples, spent several years "grad student poor" as opposed to truly poor).

We spent some time as grad-student poor, and a short time as really poor. If my grandma hadn't owned the home we were living in, we would have been in trouble. We had assistance from food stamps to utility assistance (Oklahoma is not a good place to be unemployed.)

Now, we have very little debt - a credit card that we pay off each month, a car loan, and student loans. The latter is hefty, but not likely to send us spiraling into bankruptcy or anything. We're a cash family, except for things like cars, but we never have more than one car financed at a time and we've never gone upside down. I have a dread of debt, no doubt the residual effect of being raised by "Depression babies." In order to pay off his car in short time, my grandfather LIVED in it, eating only crackers and milk for several months and showering at the university gymnasium where he was both an athlete and janitor in the 1930s. I'm not that crazy, however.

When we were a military family, our pay put us in the working class bracket, but with all the benefits, military families are often able to lead a lower-middle class lifestyle, assuming they don't bury themselves in debt. Now, we are technically middle class, but my husband's new job will have us going to a number of cocktail and black-tie functions with the very wealthy. I'll feel like a poor little church mouse! Not really, but I'm sure the difference will be glaring, especially since I tend to think that our financial situation is a little more precarious that it really is. I also don't have the security anymore that a military paycheck brings - it's always on time, and you don't really get fired. My husband was put out on a medical discharge, but it took over six months to happen and then we lived off the severance pay for another six months. Pretty damn stable, except for the whole combat thing.

i grew up middle-to-upper-middle class. both my parents are teachers. my parents are careful with money- we camped for vacations, never had to move or buy a new house (a major blessing in california's ballooning real estate market) and their parents were military and college-educated, respectively, so we had that generational support. now the life duet and i are stable, though 90% of that stability comes from the deaths of his parents. otherwise we'd be check to check- what a tradeoff. it's going to get really hairy in a couple years, with my loans and his loans coming due, a kid who no longer just eats breastmilk, and no more savings. we definitely feel like we're part of the first generation to be worse off than our parents.

I grew up lower middle class with a break in the middle of grad school poor. The at the end we moved up to middle middle class in a small midwest town where cost of living gave us more class for our buck.

When Sailor and I had Mo we were piss poor. I happened to be a student but dropped out shortly to work and put food on the table. It was awful. After a year I went back to school and Sailor moved from job to job making often just about minimum wage.

For a family of four our income right now is tiny but before Sailor joined up our yearly income rarely broke the 10 grand mark.

We have so many benefits such as housing and medical covered that we could afford to buy a 2006 car last year. Right now we're definitely living very low on the scale but we don't feel poor since we know what dirt poor looks like.

Wookie,
Have you been reading Paul Fussell's book, Class? He uses those designations, and his book is one of my favorites from back in my University of Chicago sociology days...

For the first part of my child hood I grew up pretty upper class--Fairfield County Ct, private lake, etc. Mom and Dad got tired of suburbia and moved us to upstate NY when I was 10; Dad started a new career and Mom got a job for the first time since I was born; life changed and we were definitely middle class (would have been lower-middle but the cost of living was low, and mom and dad lived beyond their means...)
Now, Big Man & I are solidly middle class; we live comfortably, don't save enough, but pay off our credit card at the end of each month. I think seeing my parents go from rich to not-so-rich had two effects: when I was younger, I really didn't understand credit, because I had store cards as a teen and they were always paid for me. When I got to college and in my early 20s, I used credit to pay for stuff I wanted but couldn't afford to pay cash for. Then, I wised up, probably because I was mature enough to realize that my spending habits were like my parents were--spending all you had on fun, without much planning, etc. So, I paid everything off, except the student loans and the mortgage, and pay more attention to credit, etc. I still don't save like I should, but Big Man and I each put a little into our 401k, and UPROMISE for baby on the way, so we are doing okay. But it never really feels okay, because I do always feel like we should have more saved, and nicer stuff, etc. Like Wookie, I always feel like we don't have much. Then Big Man reminds me how comfortable we are. I think you just get used to spending what you have, no matter how much it is; I took a 40% pay cut to work closer to home to start a family and we are getting by, which shocks me, because I really stressed about it. We have less money for fun stuff and dinners out, but we just make it work, we just spend what we have.

Hm. I've lived in everything except rich. When I was 14, we were 1-step-from-homeless poor. No washer/dryer and not even enough money to buy pads for me. So at 14, when I was most prone to humiliation at not being like everyone else, I was wearing washcloths as pads and washing my clothes in the bathtub and eating ramen for every meal. When I went to live with my aunt, I went to upper-middle and I remember standing in front of the pantry and fridge and goggling over the amount of food in there. She was shocked that I got excited over red meat, because it had been probably a year since I'd had any.

Now, I'd say we're either lower-middle or upper-lower, depending on how you look at it. We live in a nice apartment (because I swore never to live in the ghetto again) and we're really paying more than we should for it, but again, that's what we chose for safety. We have enough for rent, and we're getting by, but we don't have health insurance for my husband and I (we carry it for the kids), and right now we're not carrying life or renter's because it's just not there. Out of the three, I really want to carry term life, but it's going to have to wait until after the first of the year.

We still haven't fully recovered from my husband not working for a year (he got crushed by a machine at work, then his work claimed he wasn't really hurt, so we had to get a lawyer.) It ruined our life and we ended up losing our home (yeah, we're one of the sad mortgage statistics). We lost just about everything, and almost our marriage. We're just now getting to the point to where we're not at 0 or negative when payday comes around, but we're not where we used to be, which was not rich, but comfortable and not worrying about bills. I'd like to get there again.

I grew up pretty solidly lower class/on the verge of poverty for the most part. We did have our house, because my mom's mom helped them out with that when they first got married, but I do sometimes wonder how my parents managed to keep us fed and clothes. Mom was technically a stay at home mom, but she tutored math to all the high school kids in the evenings and brought home a couple hundred dollars a week and dad was a coal miner (from a long line of the same) who didn't make too much money and was caught in layoffs at least half the time. But as kids, we never really noticed how bad off we were. Partly because mom was very creative with finances and they never let on just how bad it was until we were teenagers and partly because most everyone else in the area was in the same boat, so we didn't stand out among our friends either.

And then I got a full scholarship to college and TA/RA grants for grad school (so I didn't have to get any loans, thank whatever deity is in charge of that) and now I'd say we're middle class. We don't live extravagantly, but we also don't worry about money or how we're going to pay the bills. We've had a few stretches where things were tight (and summers always are--one of the perils of being a teacher), but we could always see the end of those particular tunnels and it never lasted more than a few to several months. And we've always made sure that we can pay for all our necessities (mortgage, utilities, food) on Mr. S's salary, as he has a pretty secure job situation and I work from semester to semester. We don't carry much debt, except for the mortgage and a credit card that gets paid off every month. We have good health insurance, and we live in a smallish house close to work instead of a bigger one farther out of town. We also don't save as much as we should, but we do have enough for a 3-4 month cushion if something should happen, plus Mr. S's retirement account from work.

And except for a stint of being college/grad student poor when he first came here (his parents paid for his tuition, but he worked to pay for rent and food in college), Mr. S has pretty much always been middle/upper middle class his entire life.

I just finished reading Nickeled and Dimed (I know, late to the party as always) - what a brilliant, eye-opening read. And then popped in here, first to TM's essay and this thread...

I grew up solidly middle class. I don't know how I would categorize myself now. My income is large enough that I didn't qualify for the economic stimulus check last spring, but my debt is so high that we can't pay the mortgage on time (and we've just run out of insurance on Raidne's medical bills). Right now I have $118 in my savings account. Last year, I emptied my 401(k) (losing almost 50% of it in penalties) and just borrowed what I had managed to build up again. I'm certainly not living large now, but my past has caught up with me in a huge way.

I feel the double whammy of shame that I had to scrounge for a dollar to put under my kid's pillow the other night when his tooth fell out, and ultra-shame that I really have brought all this on myself.

I grew up in middle middle class, I guess. My parents both worked for Circle K when I was born. They both quit when I was entering school. My dad worked for Tony's Pizza (a Schwan's subsidiary) for 19.5 years after that until they decided to eliminate his position when he was 6 months shy from being vested. My mom job-hopped for a while, finally going back to school and getting her teaching degree when I was in the 6h grade. Money was a HUGE stressor for me growing up. We had creditors calling out house all the time. A child should never have to worry about his or her parents' financial situation. I would make myself sick over it.

So, now, Earl Grey and I are upper middle class. We've worked hard to get where we are and we are fortunate to have parents who supported us as much as they could, emotionally and financially so that we could get to this point. Unfortunately, it doesn't go very far in this area, but we're still much better off than my parents were and probably than Earl Grey's parents too. My grandma and her boyfriend used to buy me most of my clothes. But, as in debt as my parents were (and still are to this day), they always sacrificed so that I could go to a Montessori for preschool and kindergarten, so that I could have piano lessons, and so that they could buy me a new professional flute when I graduated high school and entered college as a music performance major.

Over all we've been pretty good at keeping our debt low and the debt we do have is "good" debt, like a mortgage and student loans. These last few months our credit card his
climbed a lot. I blame this on being on maternity leave with not a big cushion and having the unfortunate luck of car problems. That and Baby Grey's medical bills from being in the NICU keep popping up, but I plan to have it under control by the end of the year.

I am considering taking a new job back in Charlottesville, actually it would be the job I had before moving to MD, but it would be a 40% pay cut. With the state of the housing market right now (at this point, we'd lose all that we've put into the house, at least), I don't know if we can afford to do this financially, but lifestyle-wise, it may be best for us. A rare statistician position in Albuquerque (my hometown and where all of my family lives) has opened up at UNM and I've applied for it. Also would involve a huge paycut, but it's cheaper out there and we'd be near family...

Living in this area sucks so much of out money away, though. I wish that I could pay off some of my parents debt. They've done so much for me. Really, they make a decent amount of money. They are just terrible money managers. I shouldn't have to dig them out of the hole, but I still wish I could do it and hope that I can someday.

Sorry for all of the typos and incoherence. I'm really tired. Good night.

My family moved from lower middle class to upper middle class across my lifetime. My parents tried to shield us from our financial woes when I was little, but that just manifested in constant unspoken angst and panic about money from my dad and a lot of emphasis put on how grateful we should be any time anything was purchased or done for us because it put us in financial peril. Which just made my sisters and I believe that we were one loaf of bread from the gutter our whole lives and feel horrible with every present or piece of clothing that was purchased for us. Those lessons have stayed with us all, for good and bad. For good, we all abhor debt (we joke that if you take out a school loan Satan will come and collect your soul on graduation day, and my sister cried when they upped her credit limit on her card without permission because that was POTENTIAL debt hanging over her head), and we are very careful with money. The bad, we also always feel like we are one loaf of bread from the gutter (which, you know, is kind of true in America, but leads to a lot of anxiety) and obsess about money.

I am blessed now to be upper middle class and working hard on saving money for Smudge's college, our retirement, and in case of horrible scenarios. We had to sell our house when Smudge was born to pay the medical bills, and if something like that were to happen again, well, we're not McCain and we're out of houses.

I guess I grew up middle class. My parents were teachers but in Ontario where teaching is actually a well paid career. Also, my grandfather insisted that my mother go to university which was pretty rare in the early 60's so she came into the marriage able to earn a good salary unlike my mother in law who was told that because she was a girl she wasn't going to university. That meant that when she wanted to go to university she was a mother of 4 - meaning they had 5 people to put through school rather than 4. It set them back a long way and has made my husband very careful with money.

Because we're Canadian we came out of university with very little debt which put us ahead and we're pretty frugal all in all. We've been living comfortably on one salary for 10 years now and the only thing we have to pay off is our mortgage. Some of it is good planning but a lot of it is luck. We were lucky to be born to the people we were, lucky to have been able to get university educations, lucky to (knock on wood) not have major medical issues affecting our financial lives, lucky to be able to live in an inexpensive area, lucky to both be cheapasses. We don't buy what we can't afford - my husband wanted a big screen tv and we saved until he could pay for it.

We don't have enough saved for retirement at all - I have no pension. Hopefully I'll be able to be successful in the next phase of my life when my youngest starts kindergarten (in a week!)