To: GraceZ who wrote (47172 ) 1/17/2006 4:28:38 AM From: shades Read Replies (2) | Respond to 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. oit.org Wegmans, while being a sight to behold, isn't any more expensive than your Safeway or Giant or Winn Dixie. allaboutguadalajara.com shopping experience that is considered by many to be unmatched in the world. The downtown area is also home to the very interesting "Mercado Libertad", located at the eastern end of the Centro Histórico section of downtown. This market is said to be the largest "under roof" market in México. If you don't look around; how will you know that you didn't miss that one very special item, without which you could never be happy. (materialism at its finest - hehe)allaboutguadalajara.com I know people who have flown halfway around the world just to shop in Tlaquepaque. The main shopping area has been closed off to traffic so that you can stroll and shop at a leisurely pace. Specialty shops are everywhere you look. It is just a fabulous store with every imaginable type of food from the low brow ham hock to high brow range fed beef. 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? hotboards.com 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. Here's a link to a pretty good survey on what people actually live on:bls.gov ;The drop in spending on food away from home in 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.
