My wife's aunt and uncle haul their motor home down to Florida for six months a year, where they "volunteer" at a KOA camp. I hadn't previously put together their layoffs and their work schedule because they're "retired" (he's riding a bike across the US right now, in fact) and they have a "farm" (which is actually an ancient structure on a bunch of fallow land in rural Wisconsin) but they're itinerant workers in their 70s. Period.

I grew up on food stamps; we were off them before I could really remember but I remember a lot of living with relatives and my posse was not the rich kids for damn sure. So when I look at my investments and recognize that both my wife and I have multiple IRAs and 401ks and I'm vested in a pension and my health insurance is cheap there's a sense of thankfulness, but there's also a sense of "well duh, this is exactly what you were promised you're just keeping up with the Joneses."

But I haven't seen the Joneses in a long-ass time. I'm slowly starting to realize I left the Joneses in the dust. My cheap mortgage, healthy retirement plan, child in private school and fully-paid-for vehicles put me in truly rarified air.

I'm upper-class not because I rose out of the ranks of the great proletariat but because everyone else has fallen away.