I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?
A financial planner earning good money explains why she still feels crushing money anxiety—and why the gap between what your income "should" buy and what it actually buys isn't a personal failing but a feature of how the economy has been redesigned.
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The financial behaviors are downstream of the psychological experience: When the future feels foreclosed, your brain starts optimizing for the present. And when you’ve internalized the idea that effort doesn’t connect to outcomes, you stop making the kinds of financial decisions that require believing in your own future.
The political scientist Peter Turchin has a framework for understanding this group historically. He calls it “elite overproduction”: Societies produce more people who expect elite positions than positions exist. It’s the engine of the American Dream running hotter than the economy can support. For example, master’s degrees have doubled since 2000. The credentials of elite status — the graduate degree, the knowledge-work title, the coastal zip code — have proliferated, while the economic substance has concentrated into a smaller and smaller group at the very top. You end up with an enormous class of people who did “everything right” and are one bad quarter away from the financial crisis.
Yes, many upper-middle-class households fall within the top 20% or even top 10% of earners. Statistically, they’re doing well. But the chasm between the upper middle class and the actual ownership class — the people whose wealth generates its own income without labor — is quite large, and widening. The top 20% accounts for 59% of all consumer spending. But within that top 20%, the real divide is between people who earn and people who own.
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TLDR
• The post-pandemic K-shaped recovery created two forms of precarity: material (basics falling out of reach) and positional (HENRYs who can't afford the life they thought six figures would buy)
• The "middle class" was a policy-constructed bundle (GI Bill, unions, pensions, cheap public universities) that's been systematically dismantled—same paycheck now purchases a fundamentally different life
• Both precarity groups share the same structural problem: they're on the labor side of the economy, not the ownership side—wealth comes from assets that generate returns, not paychecks
• Economic resentment flows sideways (toward immigrants, other generations, people who "didn't optimize") instead of upward toward the 0.1% and policies enabling wealth concentration
• The consumer economy manufactures dissatisfaction to keep you consuming—separating structural precarity from manufactured lack is the beginning of agency
In Detail
The author, a financial planner who objectively makes good money, experiences persistent money anxiety despite being "on track." This dissonance—having money but not affording the life you thought you'd have by now—affects millions and stems from a fundamental restructuring of the economy. The K-shaped recovery split into two trajectories: asset owners recovered and thrived, while wage workers fell further behind. This created a "missing middle" where companies design for premium and budget tiers, not the middle that used to exist.
Two distinct groups experience this squeeze differently. Material precarity describes people earning $50K-$100K for whom basics—housing, healthcare, childcare—are genuinely falling out of reach. One-third of middle-class families can't cover necessities, and the consumer economy has been redesigned to extract profit from their hardship through degraded base tiers. Positional precarity affects high earners (HENRYs) who did "everything right" but find six figures purchases a fundamentally different life than it did for their parents. A Harris Poll found 64% of six-figure earners describe their income as "survival mode," and 41% of households earning $300K-$500K live paycheck to paycheck. Both groups share a crucial similarity: neither is accumulating capital, and in an economy organized around returns to ownership, that's the only thing that determines which side of the K you land on.
The "middle class" was never a natural market outcome—it was deliberately constructed through post-WWII policy (GI Bill, FHA loans, unions, pensions, heavily subsidized public universities, 90% top marginal tax rates). That bundle was systematically dismantled through deregulation, financialization, and tax policy favoring capital over wages. Today, 70% of Americans identify as middle class even though only half objectively qualify—the term has become a psychological container absorbing the gap between self-concept and lived experience. The key insight: economic resentment flows sideways (toward immigrants, other generations, people who "didn't optimize hard enough") instead of upward toward the 0.1% whose wealth generates its own returns. The path forward requires naming which precarity is yours, understanding the capital line (converting labor income into ownership of appreciating assets), and separating structural precarity from the manufactured dissatisfaction the consumer economy uses to keep you spending.