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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.

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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

News You Can Use to Make More Informed Choices.
Conversation Starters for Hypothetical Cocktail Parties
Smart Opinions You Can Pass Off as Your Own

Reporting and
Snooping

Look at Real (Anonymized) Bank and Credit Card Statements!
Visit Desirable Neighborhoods and Find Out Why Everyone is Angry!
Eavesdrop on the Intimate Conversations of Your Neighbors!*

Quarterly
Shakedowns

Discretionary Spending Trend Breakdowns
Domestic and Professional Time Usage Surveys
Opinion Polling on the Stuff You Obsess About
*Probably not your actual neighbors, but people very much like them.

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...

"Vanguard funds mostly."
"Half a melatonin and a gummy. It definitely helps."
"Thanks. Yeah, he's a doodle."
"It's cool. I get points."
"To be honest, I prefer a Malbec."
"I'll mute Slack, but she's just gonna text."
"NBD. Just doing the California Sober thing."
"We found a great VRBO in Condesa."
"Do you mind using a coaster?"
"Linkedin."

Making the Best of
a Good Situation

Like a great martini in your inbox. Information portioned precisely. Opinions perfectly chilled. Almost no vermouth.

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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

Privilege should be pleasurable.
Honesty makes for good dinner parties.
Competition can and should be fun.
Relationships matter most.
It's a fugazi. It's a woozie. It’s a whazy.

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?

Test Drive The Subaru AScent of Newsletters

Read a Sample Issue

6.4.2023

The "TK" Issue

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Read It

6.4.2023

The "TK" Issue

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Read It

6.4.2023

The "TK" Issue

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Read It

"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."

Andrew Burmon, Editor

What they think...

“Finally, the opposite of hustleporn – content I can talk about with my wife, who hates it.”

Barrett Berno
Sugar Land, TX

“Updike does Axios, but he's gotten super into podcasts, economics, and psychedelic therapy and he keeps licking the good china.”

Aaron Martin
New Canaan, CT

“Like a successful dinner party in your inbox, minus the bullshit text message logistics.”

Sung-Hyun Smith
Park Slope, BK

I am very helped by this E-wallet application , my days are very easy to use this application and its very helpful in my life , even I can pay a short time 😍

Shahin Alam
CEO, SamirTS

I am very helped by this E-wallet application , my days are very easy to use this application and its very helpful in my life , even I can pay a short time 😍

Shahin Alam
CEO, SamirTS

I am very helped by this E-wallet application , my days are very easy to use this application and its very helpful in my life , even I can pay a short time 😍

Shahin Alam
CEO, SamirTS

Frequently asked questions

This feels like it's pretty specifically for Millennials. Is that accurate?

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.

If I subscribe am I going to keep getting this thing forever even if I don't read it?

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.)

If this thing is free, how do you make money?

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.

On some level, isn't all media aimed at the upper middle? Why is this different?

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).

How focused are you on providing financial advice?

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.

A ton of personal and financial stressors are associated with having kids. Do you talk about that?

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.

This all sound pretty... snobby. Also... very white? Is this a totally exclusionary thing?

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.

I'd like to share some feedback or contribute. How do I get in touch?

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.

Are y'all just totally insufferable in person?

Depends on who you ask.