I’ve talked about poverty from time to time since I grew up on public benefits. But you should be reading Linda Tirado if you want to understand poverty in the United States. It’s been a while since I’ve been truly poor because welfare, food stamps, Pell grants, etc. put me in a position to be financially independent.

Instead, I want to say a little bit about wealth and what it is and what it means. My spouse and I both work full time. We drive used cars. We have 401(k)s and a mortgage. Our house is in the suburbs. We have a two-car garage and our kids have their own rooms. We have broadband internet, basic cable, and Netflix. We have satellite radio. We haven’t been able to take an out-of-town vacation since we had kids, but we’ve been to Europe and around the United States.

We’re pretty much the picture of middle class American life, right? Consider this:

There is a family wedding coming up, so we’re having some guests next week. Since we have jobs and kids, we hired a woman who has worked with us before to clean before family arrive. Today she didn’t have childcare and brought her tween daughter with her. And the same thing happened that happens every time someone outside our social circle comes into our home.

The little girl ran around playing with the cats and our youngest child, and said things like “Wow. Your home is so beautiful! You have so many rooms! You have ANOTHER bathroom?!” This isn’t the first time this has happened. It isn’t the second or the third. It makes me uncomfortable every time – it forces me to come to admit something that I don’t like to:

We are not middle class. Not even upper middle class. We are objectively WEALTHY.

I don’t have a $40m yacht or a house in the Hamptons or a cottage on Lake Michigan, but all that stuff I mentioned above is so much more than many Americans have.

The median household income in the United States is $59,000. That’s for a whole family. Those of us with much higher earnings have a responsibility: to stop lying to ourselves about our wealth and to use that money and the influence it gives us to make things better for our communities. My community has food banks and free clinics and refugee centers that all need more funding and I have a responsibility to do more than I am.