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lamasery 3 hours ago

We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income.

Our money, aside from basics on which we don't spend so differently from when we made a lot less money, mostly goes to:

1) Optional but advantage-conferring or life-improving things for our kids. This is probably the biggest single category, by a long shot. This takes the form of lots of stuff.

- Mental health care that we'd have had to forego or spend a whole lot less on when we had lower income. YMMV but this one has hit us hard and we'd feel awful if we couldn't afford to at least try all reasonable options—which has been goddamn expensive. Guessing it's similar for anyone with a kid with chronic physical issues, too. There are things you can spend money on above what insurance will pay for, or to get way faster than the months it might take to work through processes insurance is happy with. If you can, you'll feel like you must. If you can't, you just... can't.

- Taking the kids to the doctor or urgent care just about every time they probably ought to go but it's not strictly necessary ("this laceration ain't gonna kill them... but if they get stitches, it won't scar nearly so badly, so let's take them in" or "I bet that's a hairline-fractured finger bone, and we can do just as well splinting that at home with like $30 or less in supplies... but let's go let them x-ray it just in case it's something worse" or "they might get over this infection but it's trending worse and I'm starting to see red lines in the skin... so instead of rolling the dice, let's go pay the gatekeeping fee to get the antibiotics I'm 100% sure they'll be prescribed after a 5-minute chat with a nurse practitioner, and that'll clear this up in 36 hours flat even though it'll cost us a few Benjamins since we haven't hit our deductible for that kid yet").

- Spending on optional education stuff.

- Spending on lots of activities that might cost as much as $200/wk or require a couple hundred dollars up-front in equipment, giving the kids a broader set of experiences without having to go "no, you can't try all three of those, you just have to guess which one you'll like and then that is what you do for at least a few years" or just "no, that's too expensive" (though, to be clear, many things still are. Most of the more-interesting summer camps still give us pause, by which I mean we have yet to send any of our kids to any of those because they're so friggin' expensive, though it's not quite out of reach of even being a discussion. Though, if we had only one kid to pay for on the same income, that'd be another matter...).

2) Spending at local businesses of a kind and degree we definitely didn't engage in when we had lower incomes, earlier in our life. Gives a feeling of satisfying a kind of noblesse-oblige to help keep local businesses alive, and we get really nice chocolates or great pastries or whatever in exchange.

3) House improvements or repairs that we'd have never done or have tried to defer as long as possible when we were poorer. Sometimes, paying to have a thing done that we'd have DIY'd before. This can be a really big category some years.

4) We don't do a ton of traveling, and don't do any remotely luxury-tier stuff (I think a $150 hotel room is expensive no matter where it is or how nice the room, LOL) but we rarely decide we want to take some kind of trip and then have to abort because we can't find any route to doing it at a price we find tolerable. So we do travel more (mostly stuff like visiting family and friends, or little weekend get-aways in the summer) and spend more on it than we probably would if had a significantly lower household income, though it's a relatively small proportion of our spending.

5) A couple summers when we had a frustratingly-healthy lawn and a goddamn HOA we paid someone to mow our lawn. We definitely wouldn't have done this when we made less money. Tiny amount of spending in the scheme of things, and not something we kept doing, but an example of the kind of little service we occasionally splurge on. Some people spend on this sort of thing basically full-time (or house cleaners, say—we've done that, too, though only occasionally, and wow does that feel weird and uncomfortable to someone who came from a sub-upper-middle-class midwestern background... actually, so did the lawn mowing, and so does hiring e.g. plumbers, I always feel like I ought to be helping them) but we just keep it in mind as something we can periodically pay for to make our lives a little easier for a while, in some circumstances. Damn nice to be able to, but not a big-ticket spending thing for us. It is a category of thing that sees almost zero spending under that 90th percentile mark, though, I bet, is why I bring it up.

6) When basic consumer goods break we usually replace them basically instantly (maybe used if we can, not new, but still). Even if the cost is in the hundreds of dollars. No delays or long stretches of going without like when we were poorer. I'm sure this causes a higher overall rate of spending. Minor, compared to some of the above, but it's a thing.

No clue if we're representative. We spend like we're fairly poor on stuff like cars, and lots of people in our income-range definitely spend way more on that than we do. Ditto the travel thing, I think we probably spend less overall on that than many folks with similar household incomes.

No hugely-expensive hobbies, which is where some folks' money goes I think. None we couldn't have supported about as well when we were at more like the 60th percentile, none that we've opened up the money-spigot on just because we can. We cut down or eliminate collections of stuff we accumulated in earlier years far more than we accumulate that sort of thing, having almost-but-not-quite no active collecting habits between us. Not big collectors. We thrift clothes, still, a lot. I buy most of mine aside from socks, underwear, and knits on ebay, LOL.

A lot of our money also goes to paying for a house in a nice school district (file under: "technically-optional spending on the kids to improve their life prospects") without compromising tremendously on size or house quality, but I don't think that counts as "consumer spending".