@j-wall, I went through a similar reality check a number of years ago as I drove through areas that had 1M plus valued homes. I thought "how can there be this many people who make this much money?" My wife reminded me that when we took out our last mortgage, we qualified for a 850K loan. The reality is that many, perhaps most, people are leveraged to the max. I saw this back in the 90's, when many of my colleagues had to sell their cars and a few had to sell their homes after a market correction. They were paying bills by day trading equities and commodities on the side. I've seen a lot of esoteric gear go up for sale on Audiogon after similar economic downturns. BTW, instead of taking out that 900K mortgage loan I took out a 200K loan and payed it off in 7 years. Later, I retired at age 60 with 3 kids still in college and all of them got through school with no loan debt. I was a chemist and made decent money, but not crazy money. In life, it is not just what you do for a living and how much you make, it is also what you do with what you have. The same can be said in building an audio system. My current system, including room treatments etc., retails for under 40K. I've put another 10K into flooring and HVAC for the room. My components work well together. I've made good choices on tubes. I put about 1.2K into rebuilding my speaker crossovers, which utterly transformed them. I've worked hard on optimizing MLP and speaker position, and I am nearing completion of a long effort in treating the room. I've heard systems that retailed for 4 to 5 times what mine cost that didn't sound as good. I see Audiogon virtual systems that are just stunning- systems that make mine look rather pitiful. So, I turn off the lights, close my eyes, listen, and smile. It occurs to me that some of the most knowledgable people here don't necessarily have 100K speakers. I'm guessing their systems are superb.
What do/did you do for a living?
With the increasingly high priced items people own and are selling, I'm curious about the line of work people do or have done. I thought my $5k integrated was a massive investment, but seeing users searching for $100k speakers or $75k SET amplifiers has me curious about the varying lines of work people do to afford these items.