#this also doesnt mention the goofy differences like a stainless steel fridge vs a white one but that also helps differentiate lmao

[mostlikelyshutup]

What do you consider to be middle class born and bred people and what are some tell tale signs these people belong to that demographic? Could you also share the video about growing up poor in the US?

Okay so I was watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QNFDtmNPW0

I think they have other ones with similar topics but this one came up on my algorithm and i just deleted tiktok and will watch anything (and honestly i didn't even finish this video, but I found what I did watch pretty interesting)

My answer to the actual question is below the read more because it got very long lmao

Honestly middle class born and bred, to me, are people who have had generational wealth, even on a smaller scale. They are definitely closer to me and other poor Americans than they are the rich but there are some key differences.

For me, growing up was realizing that I didn't have money, it was coming to terms with the fact that I was going to lose the house i grew up in, and in a lot of ways, as I grew up I missed out on things that are part of the stereotypical American upbringing. For me, growing up was filled with lots and lots of grief and loss, not just for people, but what my childhood and life could have been without certain circumstances.

I will add a giant caveat that I was actually pretty well off until around third grade ish (so around 8-10 for non-Americans). I had a house that we weren't in fear of losing, my parents worked different shifts so one was always around, I felt cared for, and, though there was definitely things I didn't have, I never really felt like I was missing out on things. I had birthday parties with my friends, I went on trips with my family, etc etc. I was not rich at all, or even middle class, but I was pretty protected from any financial issues that we did have.

Even taking these things into account (and that it would all eventually go away bc of some bad mistakes/events in my childhood(including but not limited to the 2008 financial crisis and both of my parents being laid off)), my parents did not necessarily have those things and neither did their parents. My grandmother was born during the great depression and before that her mother was an Irish immigrant in the beginning of the 20th century. Every single one of my great-grandparents was an immigrant, which while is a long time ago, is not long enough to have built generational wealth in America (at least for them and the decisions they made and circumstances they were in)

My family has never, even when they were financially okay, been secure in that financial well-being or even really known what to do with it. My parents didn't have savings, my mom had a retirement plan but that's because she worked in retirement benefits, but overall there was not much financial literacy to be passed down. I didn't know what a HYSA was until my second year of college, I didn't know how to invest until maybe six months ago, and I am in 55 thousand dollars of debt going into my first job out of college. I still am not sure the material difference in retirement accounts and why I would need more than one. Neither of my parents finished college, and my father didn't even go to college. My mom, though she went, had no clue how financial aid worked. Along with the lack of passed down financial literacy, there are also no connections to be passed down.

One of the most mind-boggling and culture shock-y things I had when beginning to intern in the accounting profession was how many people's parents or grandparents knew each other. We talked about networking in class and school and I had some contacts from school itself, but these people had parents that golfed with other people's grandparents and had a network basically built in. They ran in the same circles and they had their entire lives.

Even on the level of what colleges we went to, I was one of three interns from my school (an on the cheaper side state university that I used student aid to get through) interning in the summer of 2023, and there were places (more expensive public colleges, private colleges that their parents probably went to or knew about and could partially/fully support them through) that would have lunches of thirty or forty people to network with.

They mention this in the video linked above, but I think the middle class has a much higher threshold for second chances than someone who is closer to my financial level/class. My parents made mistakes and their parents made mistakes and my family has lived in poverty this whole time. I have almost been homeless, my mom has worked 100 hour weeks just to make rent, the price of groceries has had more impact on my mood than most personal grievances at times.

A lot of middle class people (I wont say all but I would bet most) have not experienced that on the level that me and the people like me have. This isn't a bad thing and I wouldn't want them to have experienced this but it is a huge difference between me and them.

If they did experience something like that, I bet they recovered a lot better because of their passed down financial literacy and connections than my family did when the same happened to us. They had savings, they had retirement accounts to pull from, they had grandparents or parents to depend on in case they didn't. They lived with a bit of a safety net built in because of these things. A safety not that neither I nor other poor people had and we now have to build for ourselves, if we even can.

For me, middle class Americans exist in this realm of financial privilege where their parents set up savings accounts for their college and their grandparents gave them inheritances and they had a house their entire life (not all have to be true, but a generalization). They are a lot more comfortable with dinners and events and free drinks at work than I am. To me, this is all new, this is entirely different than anything I have been around for at least a decade and half (when my mom lost her cushy job and went on unemployment for close to two years) and most likely my entire life.

They don't know what it's like to be on food stamps or rent assistance or to not have enough money even with those helping out. They don't know what it's like for your mom to sleep on a couch for eight years while you sleep in the only room in your apartment. They don't know what it's like to become used to seeing eviction notices and even being somewhat okay with them because now you can prove to assistance agencies that you actually need their assistance. They don't know how much having to buy staples like oil or shampoo or soap or salt can bankrupt you. They, largely, don't know what its like to lose your childhood home and most of the possessions in it. They don't know where the cans they donate to the food drive go and if they do, they have not actually had to "buy" groceries from there. They had fresh baked goods that they didn't have to inspect for mold on the way into their house. They had fruit and vegetables that didn't rot in a week, and weren't frozen. They don't have the experience of trading cigarettes for food with neighbors some weeks just to have a protein to eat with dinner. They have never had to return food to the dollar store to get money for other shit.

I am happy that they don't have those experiences because they are hard and, frankly, humiliating to live through. However, because I have had those experiences and because of what I have had passed down from my parents and their parents (along with the lack of what was passed down), we have vastly different outlooks on life and how things work. I feel entirely different about things than they do, and we look at things with different viewpoints. Things they may take for granted and are normal for them are completely mind-boggling to me (team dinners in an accounting office are so strange, i had filet mignon for the first time on a partner's dime and I was one of five other people that ordered it. There was bone marrow and octopus and creme brulee and all of these things that I have never had and I definitely was not used to ordering for someone else to pay for, though this is definitely an extravagant example.)

Like I kinda hinted at throughout this fun little rant, this isn't true of some middle class Americans. I am willing to bet that it is true of a lot and maybe even a majority of middle class Americans. If they have experienced a majority of these things, I would challenge them to take a good hard look at their finances and history and maybe rethink their idea of their class.

Overall, it's pretty hard for me to really pinpoint what makes me, a poor person, different than a middle class person beyond that safety net and security that comes with inherited wealth going back even one generation. We don't act all that different, on a day to day basis or in general, but there are some moments where it becomes very apparent to me that we didn't go through the same things growing up.

It's kinda like when you first go to college and there are all these people there that you don't know and lived in different towns or states or even countries and you start going over differences and you're like oh that's cool I didn't know that happened where you lived and there are some similarities, but less as their home town gets further and further away from yours. A middle class person is like someone that lives in the same state but a few towns over. You've been to the same restaurants and malls and things like that, but your sports teams played in different divisions and you knew maybe one person from their high school that they may or may not have known and there are just these differences that you have to reconcile with by being like duh of course its different they're not from my hometown.

As a person from Massachusetts, the uber rich are like people from Singapore. I have no clue what it's like there and I probably won't visit anytime in my life and though there may be some similarities, it is vastly different in our two hometowns. (They also probably robbed my great grandparents to move to Singapore, but that's not really what we're talking about)