How your income stacks up

[Monoriu]

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/108460/how-your-income-stacks-up?mod=career-salary_negotiation

Where do you rank as a taxpayer? You may not feel rich earning $35,000 a year, but you're in the top half of taxpayers. Make $70,000, and you earn more than 75 percent of fellow taxpayers.

Even as the Great Recession ends, we know the economic wounds it inflicted will take years to heal. The national unemployment rate has breached 10 percent, and unemployment is higher than 12 percent in California and above 15 percent in Michigan. A new study from the Department of Agriculture found that nearly 50 million Americans struggled at some point in 2008 to get enough to eat.

More than 40 million Americans are officially living in poverty. And you might be surprised at how little income it takes to not be considered poor by the federal government. For 2008, the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65 was an income of $11,201, or less than $1,000 a month. For a family of four, the threshold was $21,834. For a family of six, $28,769.

With that perspective, you may wonder just how your income stacks up against that of your fellow citizens. New statistics from the IRS provide an answer. The numbers here come from an analysis of 2007 tax returns, the most recent ones that have been studied.

The data show that an income of $32,879 or more puts you in the top half of taxpayers. Earning a bit more than twice that much -- $66,532 -- earns you a spot among the top 25 percent of all earners. You crack the elite top 10 percent if you earn more than $113,018.

And $410,096 buys top bragging rights: Earn that much or more and you're among the top 1 percent of all American earners.

Kiplinger has developed an online calculator to quickly show you -- based on your personal adjusted gross income -- into which income category you fall and, as a bonus, what percentage of the nation's tax burden is borne collectively by you and your fellow citizens who are in that income category. The following table shows the income categories and the percentage of income earned and tax burden paid by each category.

[Josephus]

Not highly surprising. I've been arguing that here for a while. It's certain lawyers on this forum who don't believe they are part of an upper class....but I won't get that started again. 

[Eddie Teach]

Lawyers may be rich, but they aren't really part of an "upper class."

I'm fairly certain my current income of $0 doesn't qualify as rich. 

[Valmy]

Wahoo!  I am rich!

[Monoriu]

Lawyers may be rich, but they aren't really part of an "upper class."

I'm fairly certain my current income of $0 doesn't qualify as rich. 

Not necessarily.  Another measure is your net worth (total assets - total liabilities).

[katmai]

Not necessarily.  Another measure is your net worth (total assets - total liabilities).

By those standards I deserve a bailout!

[Eddie Teach]

Is Katmai: too big to fail?

[Jacob]

Is Katmai: too big to fail?

Katmai, like Rudie, can't fail.

[Zanza]

That's an interesting table. I just compared it to the German table and apparently our income spread isn't nearly as wide as that of America. While it is still reasonably close in the bottom 50 percent, the upper 50 percent in Germany earn way less than in America.

http://grundgesetz.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/einkommenspiramide.jpg
(Left is percentage of population in that income group, right is percentage of total income tax paid by that group)

[Martinus]

In Poland, I'm apparently in the top 1%. But it's Poland. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

Nice little calculator for UK household after-tax incomes and where that puts you relative to other households :

http://www.ifs.org.uk/wheredoyoufitin/

[Martinus]

Not highly surprising. I've been arguing that here for a while. It's certain lawyers on this forum who don't believe they are part of an upper class....but I won't get that started again. 

Upper class to me is the "idly rich" - people who could stop working (or indeed don't work) but could maintain their luxurious lifestyle. People, like lawyers etc., who earn a lot of money but need to work in order to maintain their lifestyle are "upper middle class".

[Richard Hakluyt]

I reckon you need a title to be upper class, or at least be a member of the landed gentry. They are a very small group in the UK nowadays.

[Monoriu]

I've found the table for HK. 

http://www.ird.gov.hk/eng/ppr/are08_09.htm

(PDF file in the last row, Schedule 5)

Table is a little misleading because, in HK, if you pay any salary tax at all, you're already well within the top 50%. 

[Monoriu]

In Poland, I'm apparently in the top 1%. But it's Poland. 

Still, that's gotta be something