A professional job that pays $400k is being a dermatologist in New Jersey. Even after the nanny and $600K house you are still putting away $200K a year. Your husband's $100K hobby job as a stay at home dad/computer programmer can be used as a slush fund to take care of the parents and keep him entertained with a new iPad every other year. Most high earning situations are not really like an adaption of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
Just to break this down a bit for you at 400k/year, your take home after taxes and extras will be somewhere in the ballpark of 18k/mo.
Your nanny will be around 2500/mo - down to 15.5k
Your 600k house will be around 4300/mo - down to 11k
Malpractice insurance / practice fees is anyones guess but lets be reasonable and say 2k/mo - down to 9k
So were down to saving 9k per month but then there is all the other stuff, food, electricity, entertainment, kid expenses, clothes, etc etc. Id say this usually amounts to about 3-4.5k per month ($100-150 per day) for someone who expects to live decently well.
Anyhow nobody is going broke in this scenario but our rich dermatologist is "only" saving 4-6k per month amounting to about 50-70k per year. Not horrible but not the extravagant wealth that you might expect. Note that I was also pretty nice to our hypothetical doctor - in this scenario they dont even have any student loans or a fancy car.
With the normal family deductions take home would be $20K in New Jersey. Chinese nanny is $1600/m. Mortgage on $600K house is $3000/m. No insurance fees for a derm. They are in high demand and insurance is covered by the practice. There is also property tax, which is very high in NJ. Probably like $20K a year somewhere nice like Princeton. I was too generous with the savings rate but it's still over $10K a month, not $4k. Plus, there's still your husband's salary.
Anyway, that wasn't really my point. My point was that the $400K band is also a lot of upper middle class jobs like medicine, where people shop at Costco and drive Toyotas.
