Eliana Broome
Microeconomics
Citron
05/01/2016
What it’s like to Live in the Middle Class
Reading the article The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans by Neal Gabler struck a
chord for me because while I am aware this is happening in our nation, I hadn’t thought about
where I would get money in an emergency. Sadly, my mother is also struggling with an income
right now so I don’t even know if I could ask her. Seeing as how I’ve just taken up living on my
own and being an adult, she’s my only source. I’m sure I could ask my friend or boyfriend, they
have a good amount of savings, but I hate talking to them about my financial situation because of
that. They definitely aren’t rich but they’re both not having to pay for school, which allows them
to basically put everything I’m spending into a savings account. Since they are “successfully
saving”, my bank account amount tends to be a topic of arguments with my boyfriend. I prefer
not to tell him how much is in my account. I may express some excitement over a bigger
paycheck but I never actually tell him how much of it I spend, or how much of it I save. They
seem to take my spending as a sign of poor saving skills, but they don’t acknowledge that every
quarter, classes take out 2/3 of my saving. By the time I save everything up again, the quarter is
over. The scariest part of the article was reading about how the author is a writer and has a pretty
