[QUOTE=Mursenary;2554099]That mother example was not to be personal. It is just an example of numbers I know directly. There are likely hundreds of thousands of second generation immigrants who have first generation parents with much the same expense sheet.
No one is saying 1 million is wealthy. It is just a milestone point. Again, this conversation started with immigrants coming over to the US. And for someone whose family had nothing, $1 million is a big milestone that certainly signals that you are not living in poverty. That's all.
Yes living that frugal sounds miserable to you and I, but that's because we grew up with certain expectations. But we are talking about people who grew up shitting outside where cleaning your ass means spraying it with a garden hose. Hell that's how I cleaned my ass up til the age of 6. Different expectations for people from different backgrounds.
To understand, you have to change the lens in which you view life. Regarding people immigrating here to make 7 figures and old first generation retirees, why are we even talking about dating upper middle class white women and home property values? Pulling upper middle class women is not the top concern for immigrants. Home depreciation is not either. Hell, we had a lawn that was 50/50 dirt and grass. There were no trimming of hedges, just a chain linked fence keeping the neighbor's pit bull from chomping on a kid's neck. First gen immigrants are not exactly dating McKaylas and Britneys with Gucci sunglasses and Patagonia vests. Hell, even if he spent the cash, social class intangibles makes that not likely anyway..[/QUOTE]We are digressing into strange tunnels here.
Your original statement was that it was easy to become wealthy in a generation or half gen. I can't bother to find the exact words but that was the gist of it.
That actually implies that the American dream is alive and well. My claim is that it is not. And even if the dream was alive it was always difficult to move into wealth brackets in a generation and doubly more so these days.
The examples I gave with regards to lawn and fertilizers are just personal examples -- the broader point is that as income and wealth levels move up, normal people spend more. The concept of consumer spend being tied to wealth is well researched and accepted by economists. For a long time, Fed did not take into account stock market levels in setting their policy decisions but of late, they are very cognizant of this. They used to look at unemployment rates, wages / hour, hours worked etc and not as much on wealth levels, but now there is broad recognition that societal wealth impacts spending.
So, my point was that any couple, whether first gen immigrants or those trace to Mayflower, as their wealth increases and their self assessment of their own financial security increases, they begin spending more. You can look down on them as Karens or what have you (again and again, you seem fine with dissing and dispensing your own brand of discrimination and ridicule while still invoking the virtues of woke), but that is just the societal norm. And your personal example of having a million bucks in the bank and still living in frugality is just an outlier. The links I included clearly show that wealth is strongly correlated to marital status in the US.
The increased propensity to spend as their incomes and wealth goes up is a natural phenomenon and that acts as a self imposed break in saving more. Yes, they can sock away 10%, yes, they can get to a million by the age of 65 but they won't even think they are wealthy, far from it.
A lot of educated working professionals (especially if both spouses work and make good money) find themselves in upper brackets of income levels by the age of 40. Here is one link:
[URL]https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/[/URL]
$530 K for a couple and $360 K for a single person takes them to the top 1% income wise. But if they get there, they will find that it is much much tougher to accumulate the $11 M to make it to the 1% net worth bracket. I think the churn in the top 1% or top 10% of the income bracket is much higher than the churn in the top 1% net worth bracket, which still has a lot of old money.
You can give all kinds of hypothetical examples but numbers are numbers. If people making 200 grand or 150 grand could easily vault into wealth levels, it would show up in numbers.
BTW, these anecdotal examples of immigrants are misleading, even if you find personal connections there. My observation is that there are vast disparities between them. The Korean, Chinese, Indian immigrant who comes to the US to study Computer Science at Georgia Tech or Austin, goes back to native land to bring an equally qualified spouse will surely do well in life even if that guy legitimately came here with $100 in pocket. That $100 is meaningless because he came equipped with a completed degree in CS which is worth millions in NPV already. The taxi driver in NYC (before Uber) or the stowaway smuggled and doing bonded labor in Chinese restaurants do not find any such upwards mobility regardless of how much they save. And in any case, in a country of 330 million, focusing on just a few million immigrant outliers is not sensible.
