I don’t think of myself as rich. 

Of course, rich is a relative term.

I only own half of one house, and it has a mortgage; but being a homeowner means I’m richer than a lot of Americans. I drive a seven-year-old car (running nicely, thank you) which makes me more affluent and gives me a larger carbon footprint than most people in the world.

I think of myself as middle-class, as I believe do most Americans whose annual family income ranges (depending on where they live) from thirty-something thousand dollars through, I’d guess, the mid-six-figure range. Even those at the high end of those numbers probably don’t think they’re rich, because it’s so hard to say when you have enough.

I’m thinking about this subject because the front page of the New York Times and most other newspapers have been loaded yesterday and today with stories about investment banks, brokerages and insurance companies, all in financial trouble, and about the tumbling numbers on the stock exchange.

And what’s weird is that it worries me, not only because I worry about the country sliding further into a recession, but because I have actual investments.

I never used to look at business stories.

It doesn’t seem so many years ago that all I had was a checking account from which the money went out as quickly as it went in, and a plain vanilla savings account (often with a balance of about $35, if that) and I thought that if I could ever get up to having $1,000 put away for a rainy day I would feel secure.

Now, having survived as a single mother the years of Catholic school and college tuition (with the help of my son’s scholarships and earnings) I have modest tax-advantaged retirement accounts invested in various mutual funds…and I don’t like hearing that the stock market is tanking.  I even have funds that I moved out of my savings account and into the market because the savings account was earning less than one percent interest: over about six years, that amount has gone down about ten percent. I guess nobody should ask me for financial advice—except that it is a good idea to save what you can if you ever hope to retire, even if the value of stocks and bonds invariably fluctuates and even though that fluctuation is a little daunting sometimes. (I also have what I think is a healthy fear of debt, but that’s another column.) And I don’t feel terrifically secure.

What rocks me a little bit is that back when I thought $1,000 was a whole lot of money—and I still think it’s a whole lot of money—I would have thought someone in my current position was rich.  Not quite a bloated plutocrat, but more than comfortable. And instead of feeling rich, I watch my nickels and look for bargains.

How does rich feel, I wonder. I once wrote a series on how Christians relate to material goods. As part of my research I interviewed a couple who had married when they had no assets and low-paying jobs (they lived in a rented room and she cooked on a hot plate), and when I met them were earning an annual income over $1 million. They said that being rich meant they didn’t have to think about money: when a bill came, they paid it; when they needed something, they bought it. They didn’t live ostentatiously. They sent their kids to private school but didn’t shower them with luxuries. They weren’t socialites. They were frank about the negatives as well as the positives of handling their wealth responsibly. They also said they’d always tithed, giving ten percent of what they made to the church and other charities.

Their example influenced me—and that was when I was pretty poor—to work charitable giving into my own budget, to write a check to my parish each week instead of giving from what was left over in my wallet. I still do that (I increased the amount a little each time I got a raise, although I haven’t reached the full ten percent) and regularly give to a couple of other causes.

But in a world where over a billion people live on less than $1 a day, where having a bank account, let alone retirement savings, puts me among the minority of the wealthy, I wonder how I dare to worry about Wall Street ups and downs.

How am I going to squeeze through that needle’s eye?