Arthur may get paid an average or even a reasonable amount of money, however he has a very very large family to feed and clothe and probably school fees and so on to deal with. Molly is a useless bint and wont go to work as well and at one point he had five children in school and a himself and a wife to provide for. That would all add up extremely quickly I imagine.

 

I think that at the end of the day, whatever you ened up giving, we have so little knowledge of how much anything costs that you can change the prices to suit. I mean we have Harry going shopping in Book 1 and 3, and maybe a few more mentions of prices but thats really it. We don't even know how much he has at the moment.

 

I think one of the problems is that JKR herself doesn't even know how much Harry TRULY has. Thus the description of a 'mountain of gold'.

Kids, especially the ones that read Book 1, really have no absolute concept of money. So painting out an actual number would just sail right over their heads. JKR had to have known this on some level, so instead of saying Harry had X amount fo Galleons in his vault, all she has say a mountain of gold and VIOLA, to every elementary school student that read the first book (Her obvious target audience at the time), Harry is rich and they need to know no more.

Problem that this creates though is that you get those readers that actually WANT to know Harry's monetary status, but with JKR's 'child reader' induced description, she's really left us nothing to go by.

I'm not sure whether it was deliberate on her part, or whether she just didn't think older, more mature readers would actually brainstorm about this kind of plot hole.

 

She didn't think anyone would brainstorm on any of her plot holes, or she would have been a lot more careful. Begs the question, what would she do if she ever saw this forum.

Your right though, she simply used imagery to present the idea of riches in a way that younger children could picture and understand.

 

What did that post accomplish? Yes it's a Harry Potter forum, we break down the books and discuss them and things that we think could have been done better among other things.

I think Harry is moderatly well off. Like say a retired Doctor.