[Closed] Apparently I'm "Established Middle Class"

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I'm in complete denial of my result and feel dirty after taking the test.

One has to ask?

DD, welcome, fellow Elite member 😉

What test Stoner? I don't remember taking any test.

Technical middle class

This is a small, distinctive and prosperous new class group.

I'm new, distinctive, prosperous and erm.. small.

Next thing you know, you'll be dropping your "aitches" next time you go down to the Arnolfini...

Technical Middle Class.

Proper niche...

Wow, Elite apparently, It seems to be my cultural interests that have pushed that up from Established Middle Class which feels more realistic.

[i]This is a small, distinctive and prosperous new class group. [/i]

I read that as preposterous.

sorry 🙂

This must've been done before. It's from 2013. But still, it's a monday morning...

Emergent service workers

This class group is financially insecure, scoring low for savings and house value, but high for social and cultural factors. According to the Great British Class Survey results, lots of people in this group:

Are young
Enjoy a cultured social life
Rent their home - almost 90%

Culturally sophisticated but no cash

What a surprise

Don't go into engineering

My friends dragged me down, who knew?

I own a shop am I a chief executive or a shop assistant?

I'm one of the Elite 😯
Seems like social mobility is just a case of listening to all sorts of music and popping into the odd museum or gallery.

TMC here too. I suspect that will be the majority on here?

Emergent service worker, whatever that means.

I think its skint working class scum with delusions of cultural adequacy

The wealth bit is just a pseudo indicator for age, if you bought a house 20 years ago, you're wealthy no matter what job you do.

[url= https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5820/23287078000_7a6816df91.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5820/23287078000_7a6816df91.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/BtNmYQ ]Untitled[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/ ]Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr

Only ever got as far as Dangerous before....

elite or established middle class depending on including the GF’s property and income or not.
still working class though, grew up on a council estate, did spudding in the summer, get my hands dirty etc. just happen to like some of the things that ‘posh’ people do. much like my grandparents who worked on the railway and behind the bar but loved opera. if your formative years were in a particular class you stay that way.
i know plenty of middle class people who are poor and working class people who are millionaires.
these online test things are very hit and miss

Result: the class group you most closely match is:

New affluent workers

Hmmm PS worker I doubt that very much

New affluent workers.

Think I was saved when I admitted to listening to hip hop.

Established middle class, the horror.

I'm off to ritually purge myself of last nights white stilton with cranberries, rosemary crackers and sauv blanc (we were watching I'm a celebrity - that gets me a few credits back surely?).

Better get a pie for lunch to make up for it.

I think its skint working class scum with delusions of cultural adequacy

Yep, but because I know you (an artist) I get propelled into Middleclassville. You may be scum, but you're my kind of scum. 😉

If the wife hadn't gone part time to look after Tarquin and Cressida I may have even made it to the next category. Would that involve voting Tory and having a sex-wee into dead animals?

Culturally sophisticated but no cash

What a surprise

Don't go into engineering

Yep, emergent service worker here

Established Middle Class here (unsurprisingly), though I thought I might get Technical instead.

Surprised there are so many Elite on here though. I know we have a skewed demographic, but Elite is supposed to be only 6% of the population and an average age of 57.

You did all notice that it was income [b]after[/b] tax, yes?

(Not sure how this test can claim to be remotely accurate without considering location and household expenditure too).

Technical middle class, which I didn't like, so reviewed and now Elite - between the two I suppose.

@ mudshark - surely aspirant middle class would be a better fit? 😆

Precariat.
Might explain why I only own one bike and it cost £60.

Don't go into engineering

Established middle class, engineering rocks 🙂

elite or established middle class depending on including the GF’s property and income or not.
still working class though, grew up on a council estate, did spudding in the summer, get my hands dirty etc. just happen to like some of the things that ‘posh’ people do. much like my grandparents who worked on the railway and behind the bar but loved opera. if your formative years were in a particular class you stay that way.
i know plenty of middle class people who are poor and working class people who are millionaires.
these online test things are very hit and miss

I think if anyone did the test based on what shitty jobs they did whilst a student we'd all be on the bread-line. I don't think you get to call yourself 'working class' and own multiple properties between you. And the whole concept of social mobility is that you don't stay the same class as your parents (you move up/down).

To me the distinction was always:
Working class - you have spare time and you do some more work in it to raise a bit more money.
Middle class - you've enough money to spend a considerable portion on your free time (mountain bikes) and you might even do some voluntary work or work in a job you like rather than the best you could get,
Anything higher you've got more money than you spend, so you spend more than necessary on your free time (owning a brace of high end shotguns rather than having once been clay pigeon shooting on a middle class stag do).

You did all notice that it was income after tax, yes?

Same difference for the likes of me. 😀

Same difference for the likes of me.

Are you Amazon or Starbucks?

Maybe a comment for a new thread but class is absolutely fascinating mainly as some think it's based on family history and others on current circumstances.

I have 2 friends, a couple, 1 a lawyer, 1 an accountant, combined household income of £150k+, big house, lots of savings, very cultured in their tastes. But they're adamant they're working class as only 1 or her parents worked and he was a shop keeper, the fella's folks were the same, 1 worked, one was a car salesman. I'd say they're middle, bordering on upper class.

@ mudshark - surely aspirant middle class would be a better fit?

My family were aristocracy until my Father married beneath himself...I don't fir in anywhere 🙁

Are you Amazon or Starbucks?

Well, I post a loss every year 🙁 but I don't have the registered company in Luxembourg or Ireland. 🙂

Elite.

But you knew that already, didn't you?

[quote=jimdubleyou ]Technical Middle Class.
Proper niche...

It's an STW niche I think.

Though if I was brutally honest about my social life it wanted to categorise me as New Affluent Worker, which is strange as the first sentence is "This class group is sociable" - the algorithm appears to be broken.

Up the savings (the value of your investments may go down as well as up) and I hit Elite.

The "own your own home" question doesn't take into account mortgage and or equity which makes the whole financial part questionable anyway.

Precariat

This is the poorest and most deprived class group.

And I thought I was a bit posh.....I even read the Guardian ffs.

Still, I might be poor and deprived, but at least I'm happy.

Pile of shite test to conjure up some internet clickbait 😆

I did it too..

Leave you to guess the outcome..

Despite my best efforts to fiddle the results to become Elite. I'm still Technical middle class.

Elite but this is skewed due to my wife being a professional violinist so our group of friends and past times fit the survey profile. I'd say technical middle class would be more accurate.

To me the distinction was always:
Working class - you have spare time and you do some more work in it to raise a bit more money.
Middle class - you've enough money to spend a considerable portion on your free time (mountain bikes) and you might even do some voluntary work or work in a job you like rather than the best you could get,
Anything higher you've got more money than you spend, so you spend more than necessary on your free time (owning a brace of high end shotguns rather than having once been clay pigeon shooting on a middle class stag do).

dont really have a lot of spare time as being self employed ‘work’ boundaries are blurred and cycling has taken a back seat, never been one for holidays/audi’s as i travel a bit for work and dont own a car.
have an old english box lock non-ejector (same one since a teenager) and just do the odd rough shoot day on a local farm at christmas having been a beater for the gentry in my youth. have you seen how much it is for a round of skeet and box of 1oz 7’s !?? no way am i going clay shooting when the farmer wants the pigeons off his peas.

i still dont think you lose the influence of your formative years but how/what we consume doesn't always dictate your class.
my shoes are made by trickers my jumpers by uniqlo, my wine by Banfi, Murrieta and Chapoutier, but i dont have a cellar full and just have the odd bottle now and again, i drank in spoons last week and me and the GF shared a Burrito with free pint deal for lunch.
all the itinerant working people dwelling in non-fixed abodes near my folks all drive new range rovers.

Elite here - I'm sure it just because our house is worth over £500k (even though we only have approx. 50% equity in it) and we have a couple of friends with 'elite' jobs.
I'm a project manager (Engineering) and my wife a science teacher.

Technical middle class would suit us better.

i’ll just leave this here
[url= http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/perry-s-portrait-of-bourgeois-britain-7830941.html ]http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/perry-s-portrait-of-bourgeois-britain-7830941.html[/url]

"At the heart of the Rakewell’s kitchen, as in any Chipping Norton homestead, is an Aga Classic in cream, the impractical marker of rural affluence. Resting on the hot-plates are a Le Creuset casserole dish in turquoise and an Italian-style espresso maker, no doubt acquired on an Umbrian holiday. The tiles are from Fired Earth (79p per tile). Also visible are a pestle-and-mortar (Jamie Oliver, Perry’s “God of Social Mobility”, is always banging on about them); a basket of eggs, convenient trays for recycling, and a Make Tea Not War tea-towel — a popular slogan from the ineffective Anti-War March of 2003."

Elite

@freeagent, I think thats the point. When people think of the elite or the rich its always someone else.

'm sure it just because our house is worth over £500k

That's why location matters. 500k around here buys you a [url= http://www.yellowproperty.com/buy-a-property/search/HedleyontheHill-25642436 ]Four bedroom, three reception room, barn conversion featuring extensive gardens, an integral double garage, an external triple garage, and a "fabulous Gin-Gan"[/url]

500k in London buys a cupboard with en-suite kitchen, toilet and living room. 😀

[i]To me the distinction was always:
Working class - you have spare time and you do some more work in it to raise a bit more money.
Middle class - you've enough money to spend a considerable portion on your free time (mountain bikes) and you might even do some voluntary work or work in a job you like rather than the best you could get,
Anything higher you've got more money than you spend, so you spend more than necessary on your free time (owning a brace of high end shotguns rather than having once been clay pigeon shooting on a middle class stag do). [/i]

IMO class has nothing to do with money, at least it isn't linked to what YOU earn.

Precariat
This is the poorest and most deprived class group.

And I thought I was a bit posh.....I even read the Guardian ffs.

Still, I might be poor and deprived, but at least I'm happy.

Well at least you've that nucleus to build a future around

500k around here buys you - a hell of a lot of cheap pine by the looks of it and decor from the 80's.

Elite here for what it's worth, but not over surprised by that result really.

a hell of a lot of cheap pine by the looks of it and decor from the 80's.

Well I didn't say it was tasteful 😀

Those beams are quite nice though.

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I had our Butler do the test for us.
I am glad to report that the result came back as [b]ELITE[/b] ,phew.
Must dash,we are off to test our new hovercraft at North Queensferry.

The tiles are from Fired Earth (79p per tile).

Cheapskate!

IMO class has nothing to do with money, at least it isn't linked to what YOU earn.

I think I actually said is specifically wasn't if you read it, if you're middle to upper class you're more likely to be doing some voluntary work and your kids are off on a gap-yaaa. At the other end of the scale though it's hard to see a justification for a "working class" label if you don't have to work.

Emergent service workers

This class group is financially insecure, scoring low for savings and house value, but high for social and cultural factors. According to the Great British Class Survey results, lots of people in this group:

Although when we buy a house next year we'll be established middle class (despite a love of Hip-Hop and dislike of more 'classical' cultural things).

The thing that surprises me is that even now at the end of 2015 after 8 years of financial upheaval, and based on nothing but a few questions you're considered to be financial secure because you've got a mortgage and insecure if you don't despite all factors pointing towards the opposite - at the moment our rent is 11% of our income, we can easily afford to pay all our bills on one income, in the unlikely event our nearly-new boiler breaks down (or anything else in the house) we've got a 24 hour SLA with the maintenance people to at least get someone to look at it and that's 24/7/365 we'll never see a bill for any of it. We've also got effectively a 'rest of our lives' lease and rent is tied to inflation. Whilst we don't have much in the way of savings (as per that link anyway) we do both have very good pensions. I'm not sure it's possible to be more financial secure without a huge pile of money in the bank.

By the end of next year we will likely have bought a house, our mortgage will probably be double what we're paying now and at the whim of the BOE, our savings will be gone, and if anything breaks in the house we'll have to pay for it ourselves - for the first 12 months at the very least - if something major goes we'll have to use a credit card to pay for it. With massive large scale house building projects already started near us and more nationally coming in the years to come, coupled with rising interest rates it's by no means guaranteed the value of it will rise - it may even fall. in 25 years, just about when I'm starting to think about retiring it will (all things being well) be paid for, and whilst it might be worth a huge pile of money, it's money I can actually use unless I somehow work out how to live somewhere for free, the true value to us is that we won't have to pay a mortgage / rent from our pension.

But hey, financially security!

This is exactly the sort of thing that illustrates how stupid the term "middle class" is, it doesn't mean anything tangible - it only exists to make people think they're a bit superior. but mostly it allows those who are actually rich, convince the rest of us we're wealthy really and should vote as such.

Traditional working class

Hmm, I've had a play with selecting different things in the wealth bit, and not only is it heavily dependent on how expensive a house you own (ie how long ago you bought, which part of the country you live in), it's not internally consistent. Given current circumstances I'm Technical Middle Class. If we sold the house and rented for a while I become Emergent Service Worker. Then if we bought a slightly cheaper house (which could even just be relocating somewhere cheaper and buying just as big a house) converting some of the equity into savings we become Elite!

TMC - prob about right, though from WC family

If you need to take a test to tell you you're middle class.

You're not middle class!

On the contrary, if you're browsing the web doing tests, then you're middle class whatever the results say.

On the contrary, if you're browsing the web doing tests, then you're middle class whatever the results say.

Not necessarily. I'm doing the test on an iPhone I've just mugged someone for (they had it open on it at the time), then I'm off to spend the proceeds on smack

How did you all value your savings, which includes pension? That made the difference between technical middle class and elite for me.

Ah, completely forgot to include the pension. If I include how much it would cost to buy the equivalent of my DB pension then I'm elite even without downsizing.

Elite here too, although more accurately my missus is elite, and I just tag along.

So, a test that confirms people really did get idea's above their station. The game was to get people to believe they are middle class, once they think that way, they start voting that way and, oh dear.

Where I live there are plenty of people who would fit into that tests version of what middle class is, but they have large mortgages, the cars on credit, the kids don't go to fee paying schools.

The people up on the hill are middle class, never concerned about the cost of housing, the cost of the schools their kids go to, or their childrens future because the family wealth gets passed on, how many holidays they go on every year, etc, etc.

Peoples jobs may have changed from blue collar to white collar, and they are not "working class" anymore, but they are not middle class, that class definition takes a whole lot longer to acquire.

Well, that macaroni cheese slice has just re-established my cultural identity. Might go for a sit down piss to sleep it off.

[quote=El-bent ]Where I live there are plenty of people who would fit into that tests version of what middle class is, but they have large mortgages, the cars on credit, the kids don't go to fee paying schools.
...
Peoples jobs may have changed from blue collar to white collar, and they are not "working class" anymore, but they are not middle class, that class definition takes a whole lot longer to acquire.

I'm not sure you understand the concept of middle class. Large mortgages and cars on credit are very middle class things , and sending the kids to private school certainly isn't a requirement (I've discovered I'm a member of the elite and certainly can't afford that, though I do have the upper middle class credentials of a lack of credit).

Those people up on the hill sound upper class, or at the least upper middle class (since upper class still implies spurious things about hereditary titles)

's all about Tomato Sauce innit?

Keep yer red sauce in the cupboard? You're working class.
Store your Tomato Ketchup in the Fridge as per the instructions on the bottle? You're middle class.
Absolutely no idea where Cook keeps the pickles and preserves? You're upper class.

Anyone else here in the working class scum category?

😉

Anyone else here in the working class scum category?

Matt, you're only working class [b]scum[/b] if you keep your red sauce in the living room next to your 60" telly

GrahamS - Member

'm sure it just because our house is worth over £500k

That's why location matters. 500k around here buys you a Four bedroom, three reception room, barn conversion featuring extensive gardens, an integral double garage, an external triple garage, and a "fabulous Gin-Gan"

500k in London buys a cupboard with en-suite kitchen, toilet and living room

You're not that far from the truth - leafy London suburbs here - £500k gets you an extended bungalow (now 4 bed) with a detached garage and off street parking...

matt_outandabout - Member
Anyone else here in the working class scum category?

I'm authentic working class scum with overdeveloped and unaffordable aesthetic sensibilities

😀

I'm authentic working class (father was a tradesman, which I think is teh definition). Elite apparently. Socialising with a mix of people at the cycle club and the odd theatre trip keeps one's standing.

I've got evidence you're all uneducated unwashed plebs - none of you got my cellular biology joke 🙁

Established Middle Class, presumably because I enjoy both Mobb Deep and Billie Holiday and I don't rent.

Well I just completely PSML as it says I'm elite, despite being a copper born in an old Yorkshire mill town, and with Cypress hill top of my play list....

Emergent service worker apparently. Going back and saying I owned a house instantly propelled me into the Established middle class though. Like P-jay I'm not convinced that's a useful marker,

But I look more like the guy in the Emergent service worker graphic.

Hmm, Elite, I think the calculator is broken.

Load of bollocks, if you work for a living and don't sit on your ass living off other people's labour then your working class. Claiming to be middle class is working class denial and a salary is a simple method for getting middle class people to work longer for free, see I went all left wing for a moment

I'm a Precariat. Which I though was some sort of desert cat, but whatever.

Surely unless you can survive off the return from your investments/estate you're working class.