Long time lurker/reader, first time poster.
I must say that after spending the last 3 months poring over MMM's site, the average income of posters and their coworkers appears to be astronomical. My wife (she is a mostly SAHM) and I together pull in ~$43,000/year in a low COL area of the Midwest. I work at a large financial firm, and she is a nurse doing 1 shift every couple of weeks. As many of you and MMM himself have mentioned, FIRE is mostly contingent on savings rate, so the principles are the same for us all. All of the high 5 figure and low 6 figure household salaries are nonetheless impressive.
Back on topic: I have a cube mate who recently showed up to work with a new Louis Vuitton purse, promptly showing it off to everyone. Never having seen one before, I had to Google it to find out that it costs ~$2,000. She told me that she had been saving up for it for awhile, and that it was to reward herself. When I mentioned it was good she had at least not put such an extravagant purchase on a credit card, she qualified her previous statement by saying that she had "mostly saved up for it, but still had to put the rest on a credit card."
The confusing part is that we live in a city where no one would be able to identify the purse as the status symbol she was hoping to acquire. In other words, our city is not known for its cognizance of high fashion :-)