I live in a small town where there are plenty of people who compare "who's got what". My DH and I have had people treat us like second class citizens because we live in the decent-but-not-outrageous side of town instead of the oversized-mcmansion-near-the-lake side of town. Yet, I can virtually guarantee (from conversations we've had with folks) that we are doing better financially than many of the people who've looked down their noses at us.
Many of the folks who look like they have money spend every dime they make, have large mortgages, have credit card debt, and lease their automobiles. They have little or nothing put away for a rainy day, for retirement, or for their kids' college. We, on the other hand, put away a good percentage for retirement and college savings. And we have no debt other than the mortgage (took several years of frugal living to get to that point).
It's interesting to me, because now that we've had things paid off for a while, any extra money we get (raises, bonus, tax refunds, etc...) is money we can spend on "extras". We're getting to where we have money to spend on even nicer vacations, on sleepaway camp for the kids, nicer cars, etc... We still don't go hog wild and we don't see any reason to upgrade to a bigger house, but it's funny to see some of these people trying to figure out how we can do this stuff that many of them can't. They just have to have you pigeonholed... and we aren't fitting in to their categorization system.
