I didn’t notice.
The first five years of my career were spent in big law firms. The starting salary was $160K/year back then (now it’s $180K/year), and by the time I was in my fifth year I think it went up to about $250K/year. Plus bonuses.
My wife also worked for the first roughly ten years we were married. Her salary fluctuated from about $50K/year (as a public school teacher) to about $90K/year (as a freelance editor in educational publishing.) For the past couple years, she has scaled work back drastically to raise our son. Maybe she earns $15K-20K/year now.
We don’t live a lavish lifestyle… we don’t own a car, we don’t buy jewelry, we don’t fly first class, etc. To be sure, we do live in the greater Boston area, which has one of the highest costs of living in the US.
The excess money was almost always invested in real estate, and specifically in rental properties.
One day I was putting documents together to purchase our fourth rental property. We were getting a mortgage, and the bank wants to know about your financial picture: your debt, your income, your assets, etc. At that point, I realized our net worth was well over $1M (but less than $2M). This kind of took my by surprise, so I double and triple checked.
I totally missed that milestone go by.
To be sure, a huge chunk of that is “paper.” That is, equity in houses/apartments that have appreciated over the years. But even with pretty conservative estimates (say, discounting the Zillows and Redfins of the world by 20%), it’s up over $1M.
But in terms of lifestyle, I don’t think there’s really anything remarkable. Again, modest house, no car, no fancy toys, etc. We might go to eat at restaurants a little more often than usual, or slightly fancier restaurants than usual. But these days, in a high cost of living area, I think a net worth between $1M and $2M is still pretty middle class. Maybe upper-middle class, but not at all glamorous.