The Middle Class, whether it is conscious or not, CHOOSES to live that lifestyle.
This blog, and your life, proves better than anything that any one of them could opt out of the system at anytime.
A slave cannot make that choice.

Granted, if they have existing debt, and a judge turns down a deceleration of bankruptcy, it becomes a version of indentured servitude, but it is still an arrangement that a person goes into voluntarily.

Where I work (as a entry-level admin. assistant jack of all trades) I’m surrounded by middle and upper middle-class people who fascinate me in their absolute stupidity. They complain and moan about financial anxiety and live in constant terror of losing their jobs, YET the parking lot of our office building is filled with LEASED Bmws and Mercedes Benzes. I had the unpleasant task of doing some of their taxes, and you would NOT believe some of the ridiculous purchases that these people make. One person had spent over $5,000 at The Sharper Image (a.k.a. junk) alone! And this same individual who by all accounts is drowning in debt, has elected to trade in his “old” (last year’s model BMW) for a new one! Insanity. Yet this semi-retarded behavior is apparently the norm for most of the middle class. I think it all comes down to the need to impress the other rats in the cage. But you know, you can win the rat race (biggest cars, shiniest toys) but you’re still a rat.

The number ONE liability that disrupts FI is this horrid little nesting instinct that starts to develop the minute you begin to earn slightly more than you expend on rent/food. It’s the nesting instinct of a confined pet. People should keep themselves hungry (go asceticism!) to remind themselves of why they started saving for FI in the first place. Freedom to be, to say, to feel, to live, without constantly and secretly quaking in fear over the chance that your “master” might elect not to to feed you your food pellets one day. I don’t care how big or shiny your house or car is… that is just an undignified way to live.

“For the average person the best thing they can do is mimic the Millionaire Next Door , that is drive an older car, live in a smaller house, take less expensive vacations and pack alot of money away. In a few years your assets will be more than sufficient to fund a comfortable middle class lifestyle.”

That’s only PART of the $1m’N'Door story, the OTHER part is that you need a business (and/or be in the ‘business’ of actively investing).

You simply can’t save your way to a healthy retirement … by the time most people get to $1m in savings, their passive income from that ‘cash brick’ will only be worth $15k per year in today’s spending power.

well said. Most live paycheck to paycheck trying to pay daily expenses and splurges.

I at 50/50 I work and I also have side business, I invest a nice portion of my salary as well. So Im almost there!

Just try to make yourself happy, if people don’t like you for being yourself. They can go piss up a rope… Problem Solved.

Unfortunately, I had a goal that required me to live an even more Upper-upper-middle-class lifestyle [some would say Upper Class] …

… the difference is that I didn’t START living that lifestyle UNTIL we could afford it. That didn’t come until my 40′s … before then, we lived well below our circle of friends (now, well above).

It’s sort of like selling your freedom to a Mastercard so you can enjoy comforts right now.

The trappings of consumer-class life are more like sexual favors than comforts.

Though I concur with the sentiment, maybe we should be careful about characterizing home ownedership as slavery. (There is no legal home ownership, only various degrees of home rental.) Slavery is the boss telling you you have to do it, else you must endure detention, torture or death. On a W-2, the boss tells you you have to do it, else you must simply forfeit the means to secure unfree comforts. I believe the more appropriate phrase is voluntarily making oneself beholden to those means.

I’ll quote, or at least paraphrase, a man I admire, the American military strategist John Boyd: “I will not be beholden!” referring to why he would not work for the military-industrial complex upon his retirement from active duty in the United States Air Force in 1975. Some say that he mistreated his family by refusing to live above the means of an O-6 (Colonel) retirement salary, but I think he did them the greatest service a spouse or parent could ever do: he led by example, How To Be Free.

Are you worried about your investments (you need *some* money to live) when the stock market goes down?

For myself, another reason I see for dropping out of the middle class is as a form of protest over what my tax money is being used to fund. If I’m not making 100k, then the government isn’t getting 30k to spend on foolishness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

Secondly – to Eden who “wants to have enough to afford freedom” – financial freedom isn’t always something that needs to be bought. possessions and being in charge of millions can be restrictive and confining in and of themselves. I always thought the movie/book Fight Club is about how “things you own, end up owning you” or how “It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.”

“I think the distaste actually stems from the rejection of middle-class values, since in modern society they connote conformity, passiveness, stagnation, bad taste, the banality of time wasted just existing in security. It’s the devolution, in a way.”

I think the culture in America is to overstate the possibility of upward mobility. The streets are not paved with gold and has anyone tried “pulling themselves up from their bootstraps”? The physical impossibility of such an act should be a clue to how difficult it is to move within the system (that in my opinion is sabotaged by government subsidies).

What I really see in my life is the rich getting richer and the poor/middle class working hard, but also reasoning as to why they wouldn’t want to be part of the upper class. Yes, some millionaires work overtime and barely see their families – but the point is no one invited the middle class to join the VIP club of wealthy elites. It’s just not in the American psyche to admit that no matter how hard you work your entire life, you could still never get out of the middle class.

And I have to disagree with the statement: “Most millionaires and such have poured excessive overtime into their businesses and work.” Of course this is anecdotal, but the first 10 millionaires I know don’t work overtime because they don’t have jobs. They inherited their money and wisely invested it. From my personal experience, I have yet to see a rags to riches story unfold, yet have seen plenty of the rich get richer. But if you do have a rags to riches story, I am all ears. Feel free to post your story on my blog.