Uncomfortably
Comfortable?
A second home for the semi-rich and completely exhausted, Upper Middle helps
those fortunate enough to have choices make more interesting ones.

What to Expect....
Don't think of it as a newsletter. Think of it as your guide to a totally unsustainable lifestyle.
2x Weekly
Digests
Reporting and
Snooping
Quarterly
Shakedowns
Who is Upper Middle?
The wealthiest 20% of Americans – minus the caviar noshing 1% – have a lot in common: high educational attainment, long work hours, constant comms, debt, subscription fatigue, travel plans, and too many fucking tote bags.
$100,000
Earners in the 80th percentile graze six figures. That’s the edge of upper middle – though it doesn't feel like it when you're white knuckling life in a major city.
49,353,443
From an economic perspective, 58,062,875 Americans are upper middle. Roughly 85% are college educated. Plumbers make bank, but grads are the neurotic core.
$4,000,000,000
The upper middle has seen a massive increase in pretax income since 1979. Is the top 1 percent doing better? Absolutely, but the bottom 80% are doing way worse.
49%
Roughly half of the upper middle self-identifies (on surveys and forms and such) as middle class. It’s a weird bit.

How's That Going?
Mixed bag. As anyone paying over $100,000 in taxes will point out, money arrives before the relief of wealth. That said, school districting, 529 savings accounts, and the mortgage-interest tax deduction ensure downward mobility is, statistically speaking, an American myth. Still, anxiety abounds.
90th Percentile
Higher earners take more mental health medications than low earners. Insurance skews the data, but Zoloft is most popular among people raking in $200,000.
13%
The Great Recession wiped out 13% of Millennials' expected earnings between 2005 and 2017. They are catching back up, but still feeeeeeeeeeeeel behind.
$84,400,000,000
The “Great Wealth Transfer” will see Boomers pass it down, but that's only if they die and they won't (it would require them to stop talking about themselves).
$1.16
The cost of a Honeycrisp apple at Wegmans in Brooklyn. I shit you not. Money isn’t what it used to be.
You Might Be Upper Middle If...

Making the Best of
a Good Situation

Mission
Upper Middle provides semi-rich Americans the information they need to measure themselves against their neighbors and the push they need to cut that shit out and go do something fun instead.
We Believe
What Do We Cover?
Get semi-rich or cry trying.
Your
Money
What should you expect when you expect returns? How should you feel about it?
Other People's
Money
How do smart people spend and save? How about morons? What's normal?
Love & Sex (Occasionally)
What strains a relationship?
What helps? Why is Bob so happy? A pinkie, really?
Status
Symbols
What should you order when you want a beer? We still driving Acuras?
Leisure
ROI
Is the new new thing as good as the old new thing? What's the next new thing?
Laundry
Culture
Does streaming Top Chef while doing chores even count?
Read a Sample Issue
6.4.2023
The "TK" Issue
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6.4.2023
The "TK" Issue
Quia natus rerum enim. Harum et molestias natus consequatur qui harum laudantium ipsum voluptatibus. Esse voluptas maiores mollitia consectetur quia
6.4.2023
The "TK" Issue
Quia natus rerum enim. Harum et molestias natus consequatur qui harum laudantium ipsum voluptatibus. Esse voluptas maiores mollitia consectetur quia

"In J-School, I was taught journalists were needed to 'comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,' but in an era of algorithmic dysmorphia, the comfortable furiously and compulsively afflict themselves. Upper Middle exists to intervene. Yes, this is a publication about keeping up, but this is also a publication about calming down. And it's a fuckload cheaper than CBT."
What they think...
Frequently asked questions
More or less. The goal here isn't just to appeal to Millennials, but that's likely to be the bulk of the audience for both demographic and cultural reasons. Also, Millennials are fun readers. They have the sense of humor that comes with disappointment as well as the moral courage to consider new takes and take hard drugs.
Nope. We segment and deprecate readers based on engagement. Readers that don't read are not readers. We take them off our mailing lists. The second-to-last thing we want to do is spend our time and money spamming people. Not a strong business model. (The last thing we want to do is take another fucking corporate gig.)
As of now, we don't. But going forward we plan to scale our readership and sell newsletter sponsorships on a "Cost Per Mille" (thousand readers) basis. Once we bulk up, we may introduce a more intensely reported subscription product or an events series, but that's realistically 18 months away.
While it's definitely true that the Times and The Atlantic and the Post and plenty of other publications default to writing for an upper middle audience, no large newspapers or magazines are solely focused on the day-to-day experience of the upper middle and the pressures, real and imagined, that define that experience. We take a more direct, service-focused approach. We want to help our friends and neighbors get happy. We see civic value in that, to be honest (if a bit overly defensive).
Not at all. Frankly, we're not rich enough or successful enough to give anyone advice. (We're doing this for fucks sake!) That said, we're talking to some well-meaning hedgies – to the extent hedgies can be well-meaning – about contributing. These are real Jupiter, Florida, "Working on my short game"-type sociopaths. If we can flatter one of them into writing, we'll add an advice column. But, no, media people should not be giving anyone money advice. We're much more focused on helping readers understand their feelings about what money they have than we are on helping them get more.
Absolutely. Having kids is great, but it can also be exhausting, expensive, and, at times, unrewarding. Our contribution on that front isn't Spock-ian. We are less focused on telling people how to raise great kids (our kids are deeply mediocre) and more focused on exposing strategies that might directly or indirectly bring down the stress level at home.
An entirely fair question and one that deserves an honest answer. Here's an attempt: America has a calcifying class system and Upper Middle is designed to cater to a particular stratum. That stratum is defined by access to capital and access to opportunity, neither of which is distributed equally. That means our work will probably feel a bit insensitive or un-empathetic at times even though that's not the intent. Inequality is not our focus, but that doesn't mean we can't or won't acknowledge it.
Pretty simple. Just email Andrew. He's the Founder and Editor-in-Chief so the rapidly depreciating buck stops there. He's not always immediately responsive, but he's generally pretty good about getting back to people.
Depends on who you ask.