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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shades who wrote (47137)	1/16/2006 6:22:28 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

What other half are you talking about? I'm married to a drywall hanger. I was born to two parents who never made it past the eighth grade, my mother was a factory worker and my father worked on TVs for a living. My first job was working as a domestic and I moved up to waitress, then photo lab tech. We're all blue collars here in this household. Wegmans, while being a sight to behold, isn't any more expensive than your Safeway or Giant or Winn Dixie. It is just a fabulous store with every imaginable type of food from the low brow ham hock to high brow range fed beef. Our Wegmans happens to be right next door to a Walmart. It's a very different retail experience but price is not what ets them apart, it is the depth of choice which makes Wegman's completely unique in the retail universe. Your Harvard gal cherry pics her data. It's an old rant that is continually brought up to show how the poor aren't doing as well as the rich. Never do they make any adjustment for how people move from one income group to another through life, never do they show how much everyone's standard of living has risen unrelentingly over time. I'm betting she never adjusted for the unpaid labor that all woman had to put in at home before they entered into the work force en mass? Aside from that, between myself and my husband, we have a lot of women in our family. He has seven sisters, I have four. Of all those women I'm the only one who has worked consistently throughout adulthood. Our sisters all took time off to raise kids and lived on one income for a time. They went back to work when the kids were older because they were bored or they got divorced. With us, our incomes are essentially equal so we live on one and invest the other. This is what has given us a much higher standard of living than those people who max out their spending, who always turn up in these articles about how hard it is to be middle class in America. I don't care what you make, I can find someone who manages to live on half that amount. You let me spend three hours analyzing their budgets, I'd find where they are wasting money. A rich guy told me when I was fairly young that if I lived on half my income and invested the other half wisely that my investments would soon grow faster than my ability to grow my income and he was correct. Most people's incomes grow fastest between 29-45 and then stagnate or fall off after that. Here's a link to a pretty good survey on what people actually live on: bls.gov BTW if you look at the data in income quintiles, my husband and I are on the low end of the fifth for income but our household spending is between the second and third.