rxz wrote:
but I guess it's all relative.
It certainly is.
I still remember when I was rich.
It was after college and some time of trying to find a real job, doing crappy work in the meantime. I finally landed a "real" job, complete with an actual salary... $12K/year. We got paid monthly, so that was gross pay of a whopping $1K each month (don't remember what the net pay was).
I felt rich! It was a wonderful feeling.
Of course as the years went by, the pay kept going up but so did the expenses. I eventually could afford an apartment without a roommate, and finally my own house (actually my first house was shared with a GF). The pay kept going up, but the vacations, entertainment, expenses, taxes and everything else tended to keep going up too. Eventually, after many years and lots of hard work, I could finally graduate from living paycheck-to-paycheck and start to actually plan for the future.
I could afford a car that didn't have a 50/50 chance of leaving me stranded on the way to work... I could go out to a nice dinner once in a while and actually buy a bunch of groceries all at once. I could take a decent vacation now and then. Comparing my life at any point to 5 or 10 years earlier I could really measure the difference... there was always a gradual momentum forward.
But, nothing compared with that very first feeling of becoming "rich" virtually overnight when I got that first "real" job!
