Are you rich? Or do you just think you are?
Who's Really Wealthy

Washington Post

Who's rich? Who's middle class? How can you tell the difference? By the "upper class," do we mean the yacht-club set, the ascot-wearing folks with the Thurston Howell III lockjaw diction and the monogrammed jodhpurs? Or does the upper class include all those harried, two-income suburban families who somehow burn through 200 grand a year and fret about orthodontic bills?

The Article is about politics, but the article has a link to an Online calculator that allows anyone to make an instant city-to-city cost-of-living comparison.FactCheck.org

Information from the article that I found informative:

* Median household income in America in 2006 was $48,201, which, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 1999
* A recent survey showed that 43 percent of people in the core counties of metropolitan Washington live in households with incomes of at least $100,000 a year. The three richest large counties in the country are in the Washington suburbs: Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard.
* People making $200,000 to $350,000, he says, could be considered rich, but they still have to slog to work every day. To be really rich, in Wolff's scholarly judgment, you need not only an income upwards of $350,000 a year -- which happens to be right about the point where today's top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent kicks in -- you also need at least $10 million in accumulated wealth.

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Paige A. Rausch
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I think you have to make money passively and have enough to live on for the rest of your life without working to be truly rich.