Class is never just about money

What is a class? It's a ranking.

If you're temporarily short on money, your ranking hasn't dropped—and that's fine. You might not even feel it in your daily life, because you notice those elites are still willing to engage with you.

So what does "falling" look like? It's when your ranking drops.

One day, you find the elites no longer pay any attention to your family. Unless you're talking to the foot-massage girl, you can't find anyone to talk to. That's when you're very likely to start acting recklessly.

The tragedy in Dream of the Red Chamber wasn't that they spent themselves into ruin—it was that they collapsed before they even started spending. Because they'd already fallen apart, they felt compelled to waste money wildly, trying to maintain the illusion of prosperity, which only accelerated the decline even further.