When she gets home at 1 p.m., he leaves for his job as a line cook, where he is paid hourly and works until 11 p.m. Koch works part time at a shop that sells CBD, or cannabidiol, products. Now he cares for the children in the morning, while Ms. Koch lost his job as a chef at the end of February. Given the high cost of child care, she felt her time was better spent at home.
Koch decided to give up her job as a restaurant server after the couple had the first of their two children. Koch, a chef earning $51,000, often worked 50 hours or more a week. Their stories help illustrate how a middle-class existence has fundamentally shifted over a generation.įor Lauren and Trevor Koch of Sheboygan, making their finances work on one salary was a struggle. It defined being middle class as having an annual household income from about two-thirds to double the national median, which translates to roughly $48,000 to $145,000 for a family of three (in 2018 dollars).įour families, from Sheboygan, Wis., to San Francisco, gave us a glimpse at their monthly budgets. Most people believe that they belong somewhere in the middle class, but its boundaries and markers are subject to interpretation.īased on income alone, about half of all adults in the United States fall in this category, according to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group. They’re also making different kinds of tradeoffs. Today’s middle-class families are working longer, managing new kinds of stress and shouldering greater financial risks than previous generations did. The costs of housing, health care and education are consuming ever larger shares of household budgets, and have risen faster than incomes. But what it takes to achieve all that has become more challenging. What it means to be middle class hasn’t changed much - there’s a steady job, the ability to comfortably raise a family if you choose to, a home to call your own, an annual vacation. Examine the typical American family’s monthly budget, line by line, and a larger story emerges about how the middle class has evolved.
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