I think there’s a difference between High Earner and High Income that is causing a discrepancy here. Somebody making six figures is a High Earner, but isn’t really a High Income anymore. In 2020, I made about $40k, which was more than about 55-60% of Americans made that year. That puts anybody making $100k or more in the top 25%, at least, of incomes in the country. And yet the prices of things mean that more and more of them are living paycheck to paycheck, regardless of their financial planning.

In a lot of ways, what’s in the market dictates what people can buy more than what they can afford does. I had to buy an SUV the last time I bought a car because I need the 4 wheel drive for the winters here. I had a front wheel drive car once, and couldn’t get it out of my neighborhood when there was more than a half inch of snow on the road. That same SUV today is at least 25% larger than the model I bought, because “that’s what the market wants”, according to Toyota.

When I was first looking for apartments in 2010, studio apartments in my town started at the $1,500 to $1,700 per month range. The lowest rent I could find was a single room in somebody’s house with “occasional kitchen access” for $1,000 a month. And now there are cities where landlords are telling people making $100k that they need to find roommates to afford rent. A 2 bedroom house on a tiny plot of land that’s falling apart just down the street from my parent’s house got bought last week for $1.2 million. 10 years ago that house was probably worth $500k at best. The new owners intend to tear it down and replace it with an Air BnB, taking it off the housing market and further driving up housing prices in town. Builders are making luxury apartments and condos, and single family suburbs, instead of medium density multi-family housing because “that’s what the market wants” and definitely not because that’s what has the highest profit margins. I think there’s been 1 new mixed-use development built in my hometown since I was living there as a kid, but the number of condo developments has increased from 1 to 17 in that same time frame. Every year more kids leave because it’s simply unaffordable to live there. It was even when I was trying to live there, and it’s only gotten worse.

There’s people living above their means, and then there’s people making a six figure salary who just had to replace a car in a market where car prices spiked 30% in the last 3 months of 2023 alone. Personally, I probably wouldn’t even own a car if our country wasn’t built for cars instead of people. They’re priced as a luxury but considered a necessity by the powers that be. Even if you do a lot of the routine maintenance yourself, like me, it’s still prohibitively expensive for the majority of people. Even those we could consider High Earners.