40-year-old homeowner says economy doesn’t add up: ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck’

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 1005 points –
40-year-old homeowner says economy doesn’t add up: ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck’
fortune.com

“There's this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.

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But previously he was paying $4000-per-however-long-his-beaters-last. That was a planned expenditure too.

Whether this is an improvement or not is impossible to say without knowing how long his beaters lasted, that would be on him to figure out. Since he made the decision to switch to the non-beater I assumed he'd worked it out, but evidently that's a bad assumption so who knows.

What i am saying is thay it currently costs X to actually live in my low cost of living area, but most jobs around here only pay around .8X instead. No amount of budgeting and cutting out frivolous expenditures is able to buget you out of inflation

Then you're living in an untenable location.

If you think small toen rust belt is untenable, then the country is fucked and not worth saving

Small towns in the rust belt are not the entirety of the United States. Different people value different parts of it in different ways, just because the part of it that you like isn't doing well doesn't mean it has no value to anyone else.

I work two jobs, one of which is a union manufacturing job. If that isn't enough to live in a low COLA area then we're cooked. That's the point i am making.

That hinges on the assumption that the car he's replacing is a beater, which isn't necessarily true. All he said is that he could've bought another beater, which says that he had bought one before, but the car he's replacing could've been a non-beater that he had bought because he had already learned how pricey constantly replacing beaters is. And by the sounds of it, having to replace the car was an unplanned expense, which says to me that he wasn't driving a beater.

Why not just ask him instead of trying to finely parse ambiguous wording like this is some kind of murder mystery? I asked him for clarification myself earlier but he never responded to that.