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Suddenly I Don’t Feel Middle Class Anymore

My Christmas Celebration will be to Afford Steak from Costco this Year — The only time in the last year my beef hasn’t be ground.

Les Brown
4 min readDec 19, 2023
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/miniature-airplane-and-hand-of-person-over-drawn-map-3769146/

It just seems a couple of years ago that I could afford everything I wanted. Not much has changed in my life and our household. At the same time everything has changed. I was banking money like crazy during the pandemic. Now I can’t seem to afford concert tickets or travel, things that I really enjoyed doing before the pandemic.

Lets talk about travel first. It’s not that we travel a lot, but every couple of years my family would go south for a week or so at an all inclusive vacation. This year we were going to be having an orphan Christmas so we thought about going on a cruse, my son has never been. But the sticker shock is to say the least astonishing. Perhaps it is the time of year, but my wife and I have done a New Year’s cruse in the past and it was only a few hundred dollars each.

This time, not including airfare from the far north, we live in Canada, it was going to cost in the range of $8–10k for a family of 3 for a 5-day cruse. We then started looking at all inclusive resorts in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Again sticker shock in the rage of $2K/person, $6–7K all in for a family of three. The…

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Les Brown
Les Brown

Written by Les Brown

Generation-X Blogger, Futurologist, Entrepreneur, Financial Independence (FIRE) & I learn from my mistakes, so I’m often wrong

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