What Percent Are You? Working Through the Ninety-Nine Percent

Does your household have an income? Is that income less than $500,000 a year? Then welcome to the 99%.

The 99% Club is this year’s red-state/blue-state, or 1995′s Backstreet Boys/N’Sync. (Where have you gone, Kevin Richardson? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Oh! And remember that time we tried to send Lance Bass into space but it didn’t work? We’ve gotta get better at that.) Does it mean anything? Maybe! I don’t know! But there sure are a lot of people occupying things and living in tents and then some rich people found the internet and digital cameras and took photos of themselves asking to be taxed more and here’s a handy tool from The Wall Street Journal:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/19/what-percent-are-you/

Use it to enter your household’s income and then click the Rank Me button. It’ll tell you where you fall, percentage-wise. For instance, thanks to two of us working in my household (the cats continue to freeload, gladly) I’m part of the 78% Club, better than 77 percent of the folks below me; not quite so well off as the 22 percent above me.

What do I do with this information?

What do any of us do with this information?

What will you do with this information?

One of the curious things I see with regards to this super-scientific ranking system is how many folks who aren’t in that top 1 percent — or even 5 or 10 percent — kind of think they are. I wonder if some of that comes from the occluded way we tend to talk about money here in America (I can’t speak for how you talk about money — or drachmas or franks or cowry beads or whatever passes for currency in your current locale). Salary, like one’s private behaviors or favorite Kardashian, tends to be something we hold close to the chest. There’s the actual money that we use to pay for our actual lives; and there’s the idealized money that we sort of want people to assume we have. Not being successful seems like a slap in the face of the bald eagle that flies clutching an apple pie through the majestic skies of the American dream — and yet, from the looks of things, there’s a 99% chance that a lot of us aren’t successful.

And then there’s the fault-finding. That’s always a good use of time.

So, I’ll throw the question out again as a way to close this:

What do you do with the information of where you fall in the Financial Ranks?

What should any of us do with this information?

As to what I’ll do with the information? I’ll probably just continue to work towards my goal of being found to have had a very rich relative at some point who is leaving me a sizeable inheritance with some wacky conditions — like, in order to keep the money I have to foster-parent a couple of plucky beagles who solve crime. In other words: Living the dream.

So you’ve taken the WSJ “test,” right? What percent are you? Tell us: