I'm worried "paycheck to paycheck" is up to the interpretation of the person filing it the survey and how the questions are phrased. Depending on how the questions are worded, they'd possibly include me. My wife and I max our IRAs, 401ks, and HSAs each year. Anything that can be put on the credit card, is (then paid off before any interest can accrue). Like sure if you look at our monthly expenses vs income hitting the bank, we are "paycheck to paycheck". But we could both lose a significant portion of our income and be just fine (provided we scale back retirement savings).
Unless they address that in these articles or surveys, it just sounds like they're trying to get the poor and middle class to just agree to this shared misery while the rich keep fucking the world over.
Speaking anecdotally, I've always heard "living paycheck-to-paycheck" to mean having insufficient savings to cover a missed paycheck
I.e. if you don't get an expected paycheck then you cannot pay your monthly debts/utilities/rent and still have enough money to feed.yourself and your dependents
Which is why I'm worried it's not adequately defined. I'm definitely not paycheck to paycheck. But they could word the questions in such a way that I'd be included.
Oh, absolutely. If you click through to the Quicken press release they have a small section defining their methodology but don't list the specific questions
I wish more people appreciated the lengths that Pew et al. go through to both minimize and recognize sources of bias, confusion, etc
"We asked a group of gambling addicts if they run out of money regularily" /s
I think that's the point though. It's subjective.
Many people think the phrase applies to them because paycheck to paycheck is their budget cycle. They're not living hand to mouth.
(provided we scale back retirement savings).
But it would affect you, just longer-term than shorter-term. You don't know what things will be like when you're old, which is why most people who can do put the max amount in their IRAs, 401Ks, and HSAs. That doesn't mean they're bad people or misspending their money or not living paycheck-to-paycheck.
If you suffer in your old age because you had to cut back on retirement, that's a huge impact on your life. It's way easier to live paycheck-to-paycheck when you still can work than it is when you literally cannot and are relying on Society Security or retirement investments. I think that matters.
I'm poor as fuck, but I don't feel like I need to judge people who barely make more money than me in the context of fucking billionaires.
Also, do you have kids, because that's a huge impact on the bottom-line of people who make a decent salary.
Also, do you have kids, because that's a huge impact on the bottom-line of people who make a decent salary.
Only furry ones with four paws. And the cost of raising kids is a not insignificant factor in that decision.
Exactly my point.
Well your certainly buried your point at the end of your tirade. Sounds like you just want to argue with people on the internet that making 150k isn’t a livable salary for a person in this day and age. There’s a lot of nuance and factors to consider. Like children and life situations. People making 50k also have to deal with those same issues - and it sounds like you’re one of them. I feel bad for anyone living paycheck to paycheck because of their circumstances but at the end of the day this is life under modern capitalism.
I feel bad for anyone living paycheck to paycheck because of their circumstances but at the end of the day this is life under modern capitalism.
So have some class solidarity for fucks sake then. If you think people making $150k are the people who are the problem in this society, I think you're the one wildly out of touch.
The average CEO salary in the US is $832,576 right now, and they don't actually fucking work.
I don’t think $150k wage people are the problem at all and never said that. Overpaid CEOs and corporations are wildly disgusting and the root of a lot our problems so I guess I’m not sure what we’re arguing about.
I'm not sure that they asked that directly. It looks like they asked if people are using their credit cards to cover bills more, and whether they expect to be able to fully pay the credit card bill off by the end of the year.
This is like all those surveys saying that 70% of Americans have less than $5000 in a "savings account."
No shit, yields on savings accounts have been pointless for about two decades. Everyone with spare money puts liquid savings into index funds in margin accounts and runs on credit cards.
If you're making 150k and are living paycheck to paycheck you either live in a crazy expensive area or are a total fucking idiot when it comes to managing your money.
Rent in NYC where I live is insane. My partner and I recently toured a place where they broke up the basement of a building into 4 apartments, none of which had a real bedroom, and were asking for $3k each
This is a trend everywhere, I just recently moved to different apartment and I’d say 8/10 apartments I saw on Zillow and the other sites were these “open concept” or whatever 1 bedrooms and hallway kitchens. It’s depressing
Move to Ohio and you can buy a house for significantly less than your current rent.
And work?
These answers are always aimed at WFH "professionals" but blue collar schmucks like me always get the short end of that stick ever since the WFH trend kicked up. I have to live within range of a job that I have to physically be at (I've done the 1 1/2 hr drive one way) and any lcol area that I look in doesn't have anything even remotely close that pays enough to not make it a relative repeat of my current situation just with lower numbers. It's not that easy for everyone to just do.
There are lots of blue collar jobs in Ohio, yes.
Idk how to answer beyond that without specifics but my point is that changing jobs within your skillset and moving for opportunities is basically what the country was built on, and is not a new concept.
If you're not willing to relocate or change roles for more money there's not a lot anyone can do for you.
I began my career as a high school teacher. Had I remained one, I would make less than half what I make now. Had to change jobs and states to grow my wealth.
Look at the positive side. When sea levels start rising, you'd be first to notice that!
Supply and demand.
You can always move somewhere else and have hope of one day owning property. Or you can rent forever and have nothing to pass on to your kids.
The choice is yours. I wouldn't wait around for others to solve your problems.
Ya, people should be forced to move away from their family and friends and home by insane cost of living and instead of sympathy we should just expect them to single handedly solve an entire fucked up economic system.
🤡
Entitlement. Thanks for understanding.
Douchebaggery. Thanks for your support for high income inequality and low social mobility
What are you talking about? I support spreading out so there are more developed areas that people want to live.
Passing a bunch of money around in major cities is what exacerbates the disparity in wealth. Why should city people who already have more wealth get even more before those who have less?
I really don't think that's how any of this works, dude
You need to invest in areas if you want them to be "developed" so people want to live in them. If you force poor people to leave places where there are more opportunities (e.g. economic, educational, occupational, etc.) for them, you're basically dooming them and their following generations to poverty. This is why I said you support low social mobility and high income inequality.
Now just think of who the poorest people are in cities - it's a lot of minorities, single parents, people in debt, etc. That should immediately tell you "city people" don't have more wealth than most people elsewhere. As far as I can tell, the working class anywhere serve mainly to enrich the wealthy class.
I've always looked at it this way: should the people that scrub toilets in NY or SF or LA be paid enough to live in the same city? Everything I've seen tells me the average American answers this question with a resounding "No!" People in those areas have to make hour-long commutes to put food on the table for their family. I don't see why we should accept essential workers being paid less than they deserve.
That's exactly how it works. Why do you think it's more expensive to live in major cities than outside of them? Supply and demand. There's more demand and less supply. Why is there more demand? Because more people would prefer to live there.
Why should we invest in major cities that have already reached diminishing returns on their investments instead of spreading out to make more places attractive to more people? Entitlement. Life outside of major cities isn't good enough for some, and they think people living in major cities should get more before everyone else who has less.
Try making $150k in a "reasonably priced area." It can be done, but is not the norm. The problem is that to make a good salary, you have to be in a place that pays those wages. Obviously, this attracts more people, so real estate is more expensive.
The trick is to make $150k in some kind of sweet spot where housing does not compensate. But it's always a moving target and is extremely difficult. Then in you lose your job? Start all over again.
I started working remotely and then left America. Now I live in a very low cost of living city and haven't owed more than 1-2% taxes in years.. It blows my mind that more people don't do this.
If they did, it wouldn't be a low cost of living area for long
There are many low COL areas, so yes you can do this quite a lot.
Gentrify the planet.
Most people won't do something if they think it's "too hard," even if it will solve their problems.
Where did you go? And how do you not pay fed taxes working for an American company? Or is it a foreign company?
Georgia (the country) and Turkey mostly.
Qualifying for the FEIE (stay out of America for 330 days per year) means you don't pay taxes on the first $120k you earn. Maxing out the 401k ($22,500) will reduce taxable income as well so it's really like the first $142,500 is tax free.
I work for an American company as a W2 employee.
Thanks, looking to emigrate with a remote job, so good to know. Do you know if the FEIE is for any country or only select ones? And how hard did you find the entire transition in general?
The FEIE is only concerned about your relationship with America. It doesn't matter what country/countries you decide to live in.
As far as the transition, I didn't know it was happening until much later. When I left America it was to travel full time. I wasn't specifically going to one place so saying goodbye to friends and family was like, "I'll be around. Catch you guys later." 2-3 years later I was thinking to myself, "Oh shit.. You're like.. really gone."
For work, I hold myself pretty strictly to working on US east coast hours so there is as little friction as possible with the employers. I moved my phone to a virtual provider and updated all banking and W4 paperwork to use a mailbox service in Florida (no state level income tax in FL).
You do get very bored with tourist stuff though. I think I would rather die than set foot in another museum or see some old building or religious site or whatever.. Now 100% of the travel I still do is to see people I care about.
Good luck.
You just explained how work from home jobs will transform how people buy housing and where they buy it.
Let's pump up the flyover real estate market?
Yeah, my job went remote in 2020 and this year I moved out of the city and just bought my first house in my home state where the cost of living is almost 1/2 of my former city. I could've would've never bought a place where I was before. I'm sure someone would have loaned me the money but that felt like a death sentence for my small amount of disposable income.
I make $150k and learned to manage a very strict budget living in the city. Now I have some disposable income and my own house with a yard.
My salary is $160k in the most expensive region in the country. My total yearly expenses don't exceed $50k, $20k of which is rent. The rest maxes out my 401k and goes towards a house down payment fund. I have a $30k emergency fund in case I lose my job which gives me 9 months of runway.
I'm not a nomad by any means. I have very nice things and I spend a grand a month on wants (eating out, my hobbies, whatever else I impulse order from Amazon), but I'm extremely aware of all my purchases and budget out every transaction at the end of every week. Hell, I just spent $2k on Christmas to get my family very nice gifts, but I've been spending less and sacrificing wants the past few months to offset that to prevent lifestyle creep.
This is a financial literacy problem, not a $150k is not a lot of money problem.
ETA: I split rent 50/50 with my partner in the California Bay area for a decent-sized 2b2.5b townhouse. My friends who do have 5 housemates, as so many of you seem to think I do, pay $1050 a month in rent, or $12.6k a year.
You live in the most expensive region of the country but you only pay $20k in rent? Is your idea of "most expensive" Akron or something?
No, I bet he has five housemates or something.
I live in the California bay area (not going to get more specific than that), and split rent of a townhouse 50/50 with my partner. I live in a stupid bougie area too, so I'm not doing myself any favors there pricewise.
You cannot get a SFH here for under $2 mil, and our townhouse we rent is worth well over $1 mil. I could easily afford the whole place by myself, but that would be financially irresponsible. I was very fortunate to be taught at a young age that being able to afford something does not make it a good or okay use of money.
If I weren't living with my partner, I'd get a one bed or studio apartment for ~$2200 a month, or an extra $6400 a year. Unless someone took on a mortgage way larger than they could actually afford (again, a financial literacy issue), or has an extremely expensive medical condition, I have 0 idea how anyone could be paycheck to paycheck on $150k a year and unable to massively cut back. The world is expensive, but it ain't THAT expensive.
To get a townhome in the bay at ~2k a month is a complete outlier with respect to rent. I live in a similar COL area and the cheapest you could rent that kind of space is for ~3.5k monthly in the present market.
I didn't say I got a townhome for ~2k a month. The place I split with my partner is $3300 a month, and if I didn't live with them I'd get a smaller, much cheaper apartment.
Edit: Alright everyone can go on believing you need a million dollars a year to scrape by in the bay area lmao. I'm done responding since everyone already has their minds made up about what it's like here, and somehow saying I could get a studio or one bed for $2200 is the same as a whole ass townhouse.
I just hope more people can learn to be good with money, and we can stop this terrible capitalistic cycle of consumer over-spending and debt.
Go look at a mortgage or even rent in any major city.
Hi, this is pretty much me, and I concur. If you can't live on $150k then you are definitely making some questionable decisions. That's around $8k/m take home. Even if you are spending $4k on rent/mortgage, you should have plenty left over to live on.
Do you have kids?
I'm pretty sure I covered the questionable decisions.
Yeah, if you're a single man who doesn't have anyone to take care of and has no physical or mental health problems $150k is great. If you're part of a house with two incomes you're probably OK. If you're on a single incoming supporting parents with disabilities, kids, partners with disabilities, or any combination of similar things, you can maybe get by on $150k as long as you never fuck up and everything goes perfectly in your life and you don't care about or try to help anyone else.
Edit: and I say man, because men are less likely to take on caregiver roles that cost large amounts of money.
My wife is disabled FYI. I get what you are saying, but there is still a good amount of wiggle room in our budget. I also still don't really like the idea of lumping kids, which are a choice with a very clear financial impact, in the same category as dealing with illness and disability. That doesn't seem to be a good faith argument.
A society where having kids is an unsustainable financial decision is a society that can't continue to exist, and a society where caregiving for someone with a disability or having one yourself makes life impossible is also a society that can't continue to exist.
There are also a ton of other factors that can easily push someone over the edge. "We have lots of wiggle room" is great for you but lots of people don't... And even if someone did make a mistake, why should some small mistake put someone in inescapable debt?
I just think the idea that $150k is fine and everyone who can't make it is an idiot isn't taking in to account the obvious data that shows the opposite.
It does always strike me as ridiculous when we live in a world where continuing the existence of the human race is considered bad financial planning. No wonder birth rates are declining massively when the incentives are all on personal productivity and streamlining your life rather than having/raising a family. I don't plan to have children for a number of reasons, but the fact that society is filled with active disincentives certainly doesn't help persuade me otherwise.
Kids are not always a choice, especially now that abortion is illegal in so many places.
In addition, the idea that if you don't have enough money then you just don't get to have a family seems abhorrent.
Yeah, if you’re a single man who doesn’t have anyone to take care of and has no physical or mental health problems $150k is great. If you’re part of a house with two incomes you’re probably OK
Why would it matter how many people it takes to make the 150k?
If you're making $150k and someone else is making another amount of money...
Then your family isn't making 150k and you're not part of this discussion.
Also if you're making more than 150k and can't pay your bills, I have 0 sympathy for you.
It must feel good to feel superior to all these people who are struggling. I bet that makes you feel really smart and capable.
You wanna stop lashing out and make an actual point?
I own a home just outside of a city and my mortgage is 1060/mo. 3BR, 3 bath, finished basement, on a half acre.
Good for you. I bet you have to drive everywhere and you don't even realize that the cost of the infrastructure to make your life convient is bankrupting your closest city.
What a dumb shit comment lol.
I literally volunteer on campaigns to change local zoning to be more dense and contain more public transport.
"You countered my point so quick let me think up some way to attack you as a person" lol.
Telling people to "go move outside the city like I do" does exactly the opposite of what you say you're trying to support, so why even bring it up?
When you advocate for density, you are de facto arguing to have more people where you are.
Look, I'm glad you're advocating for good things. People need to be doing that. I'm done with the US and I really have no hope for it so it really doesn't matter anymore to me either way. I'm lucky enough that I never have to come back.
It fucking sucks getting gentrified out of places you lived when you're making over $100k, and its absolutely absurd. I live in the Netherlands now. Because there's a functional tax system my neighbors are bike mechanics and students, instead of literally everyone either being a boomer who bought their house in the 80's or a tech bro on a single income. People should be able to live in cities, and cities should be high density. If people say they're struggling on $150k/y then believe that what they're saying is real, because it is. If people are struggling on $150k/y then theres a huge problem. But you know what's nice? It's not my problem anymore.
I really hope your volunteering works out because it's needed.
How were you able to move there? On paper I'm absolutely worthless... I'm stuck in a place I can't afford to stay in, but too poor/undesirable to be welcomed into another country.
I'm really privileged and I sacrificed a lot. It's not an option for most people and if I didn't work for a big evil company I probably couldn't do it. They paid for most of it and organized a lot of it, but it was still a ton of work that we couldn't have done without a bunch of help from our family. Also being fueled by pure terror helped.
As much as I say I don't care, I have so many friends who couldn't do the same thing and are stuck like you. If I thought I could help by staying, I probably would have. I thought about leaving when Trump got elected, but decided to stay and try to make things better. Then I got shot by a Trump supporter. So this time my family and I figured out an exit plan and left. Well... My partner and kids got out, but everyone else is still in the US.
Everyone should have the opportunity to live in a place that makes sense. I wish I could make the US a place with living in. I wish that borders didn't exist.
But if you want to escape to Europe, you want to figure out how to get citizenship in a place in the Schengen zone. The easiest to get in to legally are Spain and Portugal, which are a lot cheaper. It's also easier and cheaper to move if you're not taking anything and not supporting any kids or a partner.
I wish I could give you useful advice.
I appreciate your abrupt change in tone and your effort to engage with me as a person. I feel like we share many of the same goals and ideals, and are not as far apart as pithy comments may make us seem.
I hope the Netherlands is as kickass as I've heard it is from friends
Good thing there are plenty of places to live outside of major cities.
The only people who this isn't a solution for are those who feel they're entitled to live in places they can't afford 🤷
A lot of people like not commuting several hours a day, or having access to actual culture, or not being constantly robbed by meth heads, or not being murdered because of their Identity, or about a million other things that are difficult to impossible outside of cities...
But fuck all the queer and trans people who escaped to the safety of cities. If they can't afford t, they shouldn't be there, right? /s
If they can’t afford t, they shouldn’t be there, right?
What makes them exempt from supply and demand?
"The invisible hand" is literally a metaphor for god. Sorry, I'm not in the capitalist suicide cult.
So... what do we do when there is scarcity?
Share
Totally. I wish we lived in a culture that valued taking excess from those who have it and giving it to those who need it.
We have to create that culture. You're not alone. That's the world that most people want to live in. The more we talk to each other and the more we're able to connect, the more we can work together to make that happen.
There's obviously enough for everyone, but we choose to pretend there isn't. We choose to pretend that the people who artificially restrict access to things people need to survive are ligitmiate and have the right to restrict access to food and housing. We pretend the people who enact that violence on behalf of these borders are heros. We pretend the imaginary rules they enforce on us have power. We pretend paper and imaginary numbers should dictate who lives, who dies, and who has the right to dictate the actions of others.
We're playing a game together with made up rules. We pretend that there isn't enough so that people who have too much can take even more from people who don't. This is a stupid game that we should stop playing. Just by being aware of this, we can start to change the rules.
Hmmm you're not going to be making 150k a year in a shit fly over state.
I moved from the Bay Area to the East side of Washington near Seattle, folks here don't make as much as I do for sure, at least not on average. We both have good salaries so we can afford a lot of things. We essentially got to keep most of our bay area salaries.
But even then if we need a big repair we still have to sit down and plan out the money.
I can't even imagine what it's like for folks around here.
I live in Nebraska, and all comp included make around 155k per year salary + bonus. You can make that kind of money even here in the "shit"
What's your title?
I'm a software architect, though even when I was just a senior java developer I was making 130k, software pays well even in the fly overs.
I'm a level 2 Engineer and I make close to what you're making TC. Hopefully maybe more come next year. And I don't work for the big 5. I work for a hospital group. Seniors make well close to double that in TC. Principals make slightly more.
Also there are more jobs for higher levels than in non tech hubs. Career wise you'll probably be making more complex systems too.
You have it good for sure, but you're the outlier my guy.
I know that, I was just refuting the claim that "your not going to make that kind of money in a flyover state", it is possible, and you don't have to work the big 5 here either, and the cost of living is way less.
In California, a new mortgage payment is 8-15k/month. Rent on an apartment is 3-4k/month. $150k salary isn’t enough for the mortgage and will struggle to cover that cost of rent.
In California, a new mortgage payment is 8-15k/month. Rent on an apartment is 3-4k/month
Buddy of mine lives in LA and was just posting angry complaints about his rent going up to 1800/mo, so no.
I've got three friends in the LA area and one in the Bay and none of them pay anything close to 3k/mo rent or 8k(!!!!!) on their mortgages.
Those numbers are insane.
LA is cheap compared to the Bay Area. Also, I’m quoting numbers for new mortgages and new rentals. If you got your mortgage even 3 years ago, the numbers will be different.
Terrible assumption
Household income not personal income? And gross not net, correct? After healthcare, taxes and retirement deductions my net is 50% of gross so let's say that calculates to 6,250 a month. It is a lot of money! But for a household of 4, 2 paid off cars 3 drivers and one college student with no tuition costs, and one high schooler in a school that gives everyone lunch(so it could be much worse) here the average community monthly costs are:
2.5k mortgage with the tax & insurance in there, make that 3k if you are renting.
800/ month car insurance
600/month electric, water, internet
200/month family cell phone service
50/month streaming and donations to community radio
600/month average repair & maintenance on home and cars
Leaving 1700 for food for 4, gas, vet bills, credit card payments (because if someone is making bank now, they got there by making less for years). It's certainly reasonable but here it's about the least you can make household - wise and be solid, so if you are making 50k, you need three people working not two. And I can see how a family could get behind. That 2.5k plus $600 housing cost can be much more if you bought a house in the last year or so, and car loan or tuition could also blow this up, as could a medical emergency.
800/ month car insurance
The fuck? Why is your car insurance so expensive?
600/month electric, water, internet
The fuck? Why are you water and electric bills so high? I live alone, but my water bill is always <$40 and my electric bill is $70-$150 depending on if I'm running the A/C or heater.
Internet for me is only $25/month because I use my phone for Internet and have unlimited data with Visible.
200/month family cell phone service
Switch to Visible, like I said. $25/month per line and you all have unlimited data so you can cut your cable Internet.
50/month streaming and donations to community radio
Complete waste of money. You don't get to do these and then complain you don't have enough.
600/month average repair & maintenance on home and cars
Lol, what? Are you constantly hitting your walls with hammers? Do you do offroading in a sedan? No way you're spending $600 per month on home/car repairs (on average) unless you're driving a Benz or BMW.
That said, thank you for listing out your expenses. It's a way more fruitful discussion when we talk actual numbers instead of vague "I don't have enoughs."
Nope. 2 cars and 3 drivers here with one of them 18 years old. Highest cost car insurance market in the nation. But without that third driver our household income wouldn't hit the $150k.
Electric, Water, Internet. That's mostly electricity. Electric bill is higher since I'm working from home, and everything in the house is electric (no gas bill) we don't eat out much, cook a lot. Very high in the summer. Big windows, high ceilings, old house. Water includes garbage and is usually $100 or so. Internet about $75 FIOS so I can work from home mostly (2 cars not 3 that way).
The $200 is a legacy t mobile plan covering 8 people so if needed I could get the grown kids to cover half of it, that one is high but not per line, we just pay it because if we cut them off it would still cost us $200 for 4 lines.
House is older and cars are too. Tenting for termites has to happen every 10 years and costs 10k, we've had to fix plumbing, electric, replace an old porch, need blinds to help with the electrical cost, and the cars won't last forever - I honestly think the $600 may be underestimating the cost of maintenance, not overestimating.
And of course every month something happens. Vet bills, or some medical cost, or car repair eats the 600 AND the plumbing springs a leak, or I have to work weekends and we buy restaurant food - no month is just bills.
It's easy to go cheap for awhile, I have done that plenty. We have dry beans, rice, a garden. But things fall apart. I am putting here the cost of maintenance because if we don't accrue this $600ish, it will end up costing even more. It's a real cost.
Oh, and I know this isn't poor, lol. In my 20s lived with 3 families in one house and dumpster dived to make ends meet. Then raised 4 kids with a guy who, halfway through, decided he couldn't work. 6 people living on what I could make, we are paying that deficit now too. Even so, this is is an awesome life, I am not complaining at all. Just saying that the bills do take most of the netpay if the real cost of housing and transportation is included.
I'm driving a 26 year old car and don't even spend $600 on maintenance in a year. $600/month ($7200/year) sounds crazy high. That's like replacing an engine or transmission every year.
Correct, it's mostly house. For a year, cars are about $400 in oil changes plus $300 in regular maintenance (brakes, etc.) and usually one repair or tires purchase of high cost, $600-1200. Its staying way below the cost of a new one.
The house is the real money eater.
Ah, I didn't realize you were lumping home and vehicle maintenance together. My water heater recently died after 19 years of solid use and that was more than a $2k project. I'm dreading the day the furnace goes out. Homes aren't cheap.
I'm buying whatever I want and putting 10% in my 401(k) and that's exactly the same as being poor
These people lol
Student loans
Or you only consider your expenses after savings and think that you are "living paycheck to paycheck" because you use up all your non-invested money by the end of the month.
I know a few programmers that are broke because they spend every penny that comes in and bought a $90k car the moment they got their jobs.
I don't understand why people give up financial security willingly like that
It's both. People try to always live above their means. Inflation causes that to catch up
I mean you can make any income be paycheck to paycheck by spending too much.
150k for me would be a dream right now. I have a dog, a gf, and I rent. But if you're making 150k and you have two kids and a spouse for example, suddenly that 150k doesn't go very far at all.
Yep, my mother used to manage pays for engineers making up to 300k and for some of them it was a disaster if a mistake lead to 200$ being missing from their cheque and they would be in her office first thing in the morning in full panic mode...
I mean, if my cheque was off by a couple of hundred dollars, I'd want to follow up on the discrepancy (not in panic mode though). My wife's a high earner and some pay was delayed a month due to staff turnover.
Leadership was like "it shows financial stability to be able to wait for pay," but people have budgets and plans for that money. Otherwise it's an interest free loan to the organization - the money should be paid out timely.
But I do agree, overall, that folks should be able to manage their budget, especially as a high earner.
It shows financial instability if an organization can't pay its workers on time. Or management incompetence.
That's wild to me.
Especially considering that at the time they could have just bought a house minutes from their office on a year's salary instead of being over their head in debt because they preferred living in the next city in a house worth a couple millions...
That's why lifestyle creep is a tough one. You make more money and then start thinking you want a bigger home, nicer car, eat out a lot more etc. It's hard to scale back from that when the times get tougher as selling a multi-million home isn't that easy.
Don't let this sensational headline fool you. These are not the 1% not even close.
If you're making 150k per year and "living paycheck to paycheck" you suck with money, full stop.
That's more than double median household income
If you are living in an area with a high cost of living, $150k won't feel like $150k.
San Francisco, CA
The cost of living in San Francisco is the highest in the country. Jobs in the City by the Bay pay well, with average annual incomes of over $100,000. In 2019, the city had an unemployment rate as low as 1.8%. But a good chunk of each check goes toward the nation’s highest housing costs. As of January 2020, the average rent for an apartment in San Francisco was $3,700, and the median home purchase price was $1.35 million. Prices are sky-high because of limited housing stock and lack of new construction.
If you are making $100k and renting at the average rental price of $3,700, in one year the cost your housing is $44,400 which is almost 45% of your income. The goal is to spend 30% of your income on housing. If people with would be normally considered to have a good income are struggling then the poor are completely fucked.
There is a small group of people who are making money off this system and ain't us.
San Francisco, CA The cost of living in San Francisco is the highest in the country. Jobs in the City by the Bay pay well, with average annual incomes of over $100,000
Now imagine one just doesn't choose to live in the literal most expensive place on the planet.
FWIW the only people benefiting from this shitty exclusionary zoning are the boomers who rigged the zoning so they stay rich forever. It's entirely a localized problem.
Ah, the classic, "Why don't they just move?"
Checkmate
Now imagine one just doesn’t choose to live in the literal most expensive place on the planet.
Because the jobs I want to work will relocate to the midwest to help me cover rent. /s
And before you tell me to take a less-fancy job, some of the problems a person might want to solve are far more interesting and rewarding than the kinds of "tech" jobs available in a place like Austin, TX. No comparison at all. People don't work hard to do things that don't interest them.
It's so weird that you just pretend nothing exists away from a coast lol
This is out of touch. There is a huge number of factors that dictate what amount of money is enough to live a fulfilled live. A bachelor can live a fulfilled life on 30k a year and still save money, but a family of 5 can definitely be living paycheck to paycheck on 150k, especially if they live in an expensive area.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck on $150k you're stupid full stop.
I rarely downvote, but you earned it.
I already did this one elsewhere. $150k is a decent middle class life barely in lower cost of living areas. Probably shouldn't be paycheck to paycheck, but it wouldn't hard to be either.
Children are a choice, plan accordingly for the children's benefit.
So poor people shouldn't have kids, got it.
Eugenics with extra steps, sounds peachy
I'm never having kids, by choice. How is that eugenics?
When you start advocating for a particular group to not reproduce, what else would you call it? You can choose that for yourself but if you suggest it for anyone else you're gonna need to choose your words very carefully to avoid coming across like a super racist from the 19th century.
To be clear, I'm anti-capitalist and not blaming poor people for anything, nor suggesting they should not have any children. But I stand by my position and wording.
Don't have more children (or even pets) than one can support. It's objectively cruel.
Would I prefer a world where there wasn't such dramatic (or ideally any) inequality? Definitely. But even in a world where every single parent could support 6 kids I'd be against people having 17.
You seem to think that the only way for people with children to to be poor is if they are poor and have children. You know you can have children, loose your job, and become poor, right? I'm telling you, you are out of touch and that is clearly evident in you're inability to come up with non circumstancial examples.
I'm just saying good parents consider what is best for their children before having them. Having 6 when you can only reasonable support 3 is a 'poor' choice. Bad parents, on the other hand, have children to benefit themselves rather than the child.
And anyway, statistically, lower income people have more children per person so no one is preventing poor people from having kids. I'm just questioning if that is what is best for those children, because I care about children's suffering.
As if it's never the case that people have children in the expectation that their current financial situation won't suddenly take a turn for the worse; as if what made perfect sense 10 years ago doesn't make sense now when you have a 10-year-old kid to support.
This idea of yours, that people should somehow be able to magically predict their financial future is pure bullshit.
Are you quoting facts from Idiocracy right now????
Are you sure that, since there are proportionally more poor people in the world, you aren't just forming an availability bias?
And besides that, poor people are more likely to get pregnant from rape without the ability to terminate the pregnancy. If that is not enough they also have less access to reproductive healthcare, reproductive education, abortions, birth control, and prophylactics.
You've mentioned you're a anti-capital, yet you see impoverished children as the fault of the parents who have them as opposed to the system that creates poverty in the first place. Capitalism demands cheap labor which means there are a ton of incentives built into it for procreation. Families don't just choose to be poor.
In my experience, bad parents are those that think people act with a single motive - they tend to label kids as manipulative. People can have kids for a selfish reason and still put their interests first.
Do you not live in America? Children are not a choice is a country that doesn't enshrine access to abortion.
Lol wat? Ever heard about condoms?
Ah yes, condoms. Famous for stopping rape and never breaking.
Look, I'm not arguing that restricting access to abortions is stupid. Of course it is.
But having children in our day and age is of course a choice. There are countless contraceptives available and what you mention are merely edge cases that are not responsible for people not being able to make a living because they pop out children non-stop.
I think location definitely plays into this. 150k in some places is nothing.
I also live in the Bay Area. My rent is locally cheap but nationally very high. My wife has a chronic illness and an unrelated acute issue that recently required surgery. She can barely work. Until this most recent surgery I was keeping ahead, but expenses are up and income is down and that's not true anymore.
I have good health insurance but there's a lot more to medical costs than just doctors, and to partially manage her daily quality of life it's not weird to cook her three different dinners and she can only stomach one. This explodes our meal budget.
We're childfree but one of our dogs recently also got diagnosed with chronic illness. They are our kids, full stop.
Shit happens. Don't be a dick about it.
You sound like the exception not the rule.
I think you'd be surprised how many people live in cities and have medical expenses. This dude doesn't even have kids.
Word
Nope. If people having been living the exact same without changing many of their habits then it is absolutely fair that they would also be struggling paycheck to paycheck. They're effected just as the rest are. We need to focus on the jackass causing us to turn on eachother. We shouldn't be comparing ourselves because there are people who consider 30k/y as living lavish and think they also shouldn't be complaining.
If people having been living the exact same without changing many of their habits then it is absolutely fair that they would also be struggling paycheck to paycheck
If you can't play for the future you will be poor. I owe you no sympathy
You're one of the richest people on the planet, by default, and I think you should pay more in taxes and it should be on you to figure out your finances, because you're fucking rich and you just don't realize it.
The most wealthy places on earth should not be held up as the norm and most people should not live in those places. We should tax all of those people excessively and they should not have guaranteed wealth.
They use the median instead of mean here for a reason... Can you guess it?
Because mean income is a useless metric in most contexts due to it being extremely warped due to outliers (billionaires) since this country has the worst income inequality in the first world by far..? Do I get a trophy now
Wholely agree. I live in the most expensive region in the US on $160k base salary. My total annual expenses (including vacations, wants, gifts) don't exceed $50k, and of that $20k is rent.
Well yeah, but you probably make good choices which is arguably cheating.
I don't think that would be a winnable argument.
I think the point is, they are living paycheck to paycheck unless they choose to decrease the quality of living.
On one hand we can say these people are way better off than they deserve and laugh at their stupidity.
On the other hand, that's not a great sign for the economy. The "every day" kind of rich person isn't even that rich anymore. And lowering the ceiling pushes you into the floor.
If society were healthier and functioning, relative costs would be going down for everybody. But enshitification is the new big thing to earn another buck.
I think the point is, they are living paycheck to paycheck unless they choose to decrease the quality of living.
People who actually live paycheck to paycheck don't have this option and this is ludicrously offensive to people who actually live this way.
On one hand we can say these people are way better off than they deserve and laugh at their stupidity.
It's not about laughing at their stupidity but about the situation itself being laughable.
The “every day” kind of rich person isn’t even that rich anymore. And lowering the ceiling pushes you into the floor.
I thought lowering these gaps was the intention of Progressivism. Is it not?
I think it's just one more side effect of "American exceptionalism" and the culture of individuality and "me me me me" here, that people don't even see "change your lifestyle" as an option.
They were told about the American dream or whatever, but they were sold a bill of goods, and now they can't even comprehend cutting back on expenses in any meaningful way.
Lowering the gap between 10th and 90th percentile is meaningless if the very top doesn't change too
I mean, this depends on a lot of factors. Stop applying your own prejudice to this?
$150/y = ~$100-110k take home
The average monthly expenses (Living very much in your means, in an area with avg cost of living, not performing maintenance...etc) for a family of 4 is ~$101k/y
So you have between ~ -$80/m to +$700/m in disposable income. If you start doing the necessary maintenance & long term cost amatorization of living in the U.S. (ie. Having to buy a car eventually, if you own a home replacing the roof....etc). Suddenly you're close to negative. Meaning that when these events happen you have to cover their cost with credit card debt or some other form of debt, which means your cost of living is over time partially covered by debt.
This also seems that you are living not surviving... Much of the US is not really living, they are simply surviving. We should not measure the bar that low for what we consider acceptable quality of living standards.
Or, if you are in a marginally higher cost of living area that $700/m evaporates.
Even for a single person, a HCOL area will eat way that income to the point where eating out is a monthly luxury.
It sounds like a lot of money but depending on where you live it can be an incredibly small amount of money.
Famine, disease, collapse, or war. Those are historically the only ways inequality of anywhere near this level has been rectified.
We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health's.
You can see it in how it went from "essential workers are heroes!" back to "you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!" pretty much overnight in early 2023.
As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.
On the plus side, millennials aren't having fucking babies so we're killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it's a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
When they won't have enough workers to keep pushing exponential "growth" each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.
Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that's even possible.
As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.
Capitalism (depending on how you define it) is coming up on 600 years soon. That's usually the point at which systems start to break and new ones emerge. Unfortunately, if you're a fan of Marx you'll be aware of his theory that cycles of power relations and exploitation tend to reproduce themselves within these new systems - unless that cycle is broken.
I’d love to see this as a paycheck breakdown.
Unless you have a history of debt, a huge house, or like 8 kids I don’t see how it’s not possible to do at least moderately well on 150k/y
Edit: before folks reply with a comment about people being worse off, I know. I agree. This is just a scenario description.
It is very easy to be strapped with a modest sized house or apartment in the "right" zip code.
As in a 1.2mil mortgage on a 3 bedroom house that's never been renovated since the 70s. That mortgage could be 5k / month.
150000 a year is 8.7k a month, after taxes. If you have student loans, any medical debt, kids, that remaining 3.7k is pretty critical. You aren't swimming in liquid chocolate every night and wiping with singles.
If you own a home things can happen out of nowhere. I personally just had to replace my sewer line last month. 17k for the work and 1.5k for new concrete. Not covered by my home insurance because I didn't opt for the rider on my account. My fault there... My finances are a bit different than the above description but if you were the 150 + paycheck to paycheck situation, you'd be in hot water.
This isn't a "woe to the 150 crowd" comment. I'm well aware folks are way, way worse off, but when a 150 household talks about being paycheck to paycheck, it's totally possible.
At least in CA where the property tax is 1%, last time I fed the info into one of those calculators a few months ago, a 1.2m house (exactly the type you describe) with a standard 20% down-payment would run closer to $8k/mo with good credit. That includes property tax and homeowners insurance, which is required to get a loan.
So yeah, that doesn't leave a whole lot to live off of.
There's also the upkeep cost for repairs and to renovate.
We've let our gutters stay broken for several years now because we just can't afford to get them fixed. We had to have an emergency repair to our heat pump yesterday and that's going to be hundreds of dollars out of pocket. We're on a single income. My wife gets paid well (not $150,000 a year well) and our mortgage is low, but we're barely making it.
$150k is twice what my parents made combined back in the 90s, and they lived a solid upper middle class life in an upscale suburb of a small city. Always had a nice TV and my dad and I both had PCs that we upgraded every year AND they saved up two years worth of college for me. Amazing how quickly things have changed. They bought their house for $180k and it's now worth nearly $500k.
My career now is generally a higher valued one than theirs, but adjusting for inflation, my pay has always been lower than theirs at the same point in their careers. And that's the story. Incomes may have doubled since the early-mid 90s, but everything else has tripled or quadrupled.
Inflation has doubled since 1999 so I'm not sure what your point is
Isn't a mortgage as high as your whole salary for 10 years unwise from the get go?
In general yes, but many many people are doing this to attempt a "normal" home the likes of which they grew up in, and that they themselves want to raise a kid in.
OR consider a household where 2 incomes of around 150 were earned when the house was purchased, but now one earner is not earning appreciably any more...maybe a stay at home parent or illness or whatever.
Again just saying some possibilities, not the normative experience.
I guess the rough reality is that some people want to live where their family lives but can’t easily afford it. I don’t know how far you need to live from SF for prices to return to reality, but I suspect it’s a 1h+ drive
Welcome to the jungle fellas. How’s that trickle down working for you now?
A lot of, if not most, folks in that income bracket vote democrat and hate republicans. These are tech folks who voted for Bernie. It isn't until you add another couple of zeros that you find the people funding the Republican party. 150k isn't elite, it's literally just barely middle class in any major city.
No, at that income level these people tend to vote Republican.
I linked to the data showing that in here yesterday if you want to go back it up, unlike your bogus claim.
So are you stereotyping democrats as poor and republicans as rich? And only republicans tout trickledown? Oh, and if you voted for any trickledown policies, you have to be a rich elite? Please. Saying six digits is middle class is elite speech. Maybe in tech hubs like California and Washington, but in the REST of America, 6 digits is still upper class. Or at the least upper echelon of middle.
Personally I know many people in that “bracket” and lower that DO give to the GOP and vote for them too. They even vote for trickledown policies because they believe they are rich and they will benefit. I’d love to see some statistics on your claim that a lot if not most people in the middle class vote blue.
And other thing, there is a metric fuckton of blue and white collar work out there that makes six digits. Not everyone that makes that much is in the tech sector.
Consider what that income will get you. Ignore the actual numbers. There's also a very big variable on lifestyle- dual income no kids is very different from a single breadwinner with 8 kids.
I am in a fairly big city in the Midwest (you've heard of it, but you would never think of it unprompted). $150k/year (household) would buy a medium-large single family home (2000 square feet, 3 or 4 bedrooms) in a good (but not exclusive) area, a pair of decent cars (well equipped new Honda Accord or similar, trading in after 5 years), retirement around age 65. Any kids would attend a good public school, or possibly a very inexpensive religious school. You would have yearly vacations, but it would be mostly domestic. Road trips to the grand canyon, Disney world, etc.
Does that describe upper class?
I live in a capital of a southern state, no more than 30 minutes outside city limits $150000 a year will get you several acres, 2500+ square foot house, multiple cars, trucks, ATVs, boats and all the goodies to go with them. Three weeks of vacation a year, with a hunting cabin in the mountains.
Does that describe middle class?
Location does matter. Both ways.
Oh absolutely. My point was that it being a middle class lifestyle is the norm, not the exception.
Understood, my point being classes are created by the .01% and have no meaning, we are all “lower class” unless you can buy a government representative.
Adam Smith observed in his epic that when people get more money they generally spend it on more/better housing. Today we have a few more luxury goods, to add to a house, but a house is still something people spend more and more money on when they get it.
I'm not sure that is bad. My dad died at 65 - what was the point of all the retirement savings he had saved up (at least my mom can enjoy it). Even if you live for much longer, most old people I know have failing bodies and so they can't really enjoy those old years. More and more my advice to people is save for a rainy day and an okay retirement, but don't save for a rich retirement - instead enjoy that difference now.
Sorry about your dad - I hope you got to enjoy some good times together before he passed.
That's because they're just passing a bunch of money around at the top.
All of them live in major cities and don't own property.
The only way I could reasonably see that is if those people bought houses when rates went up. I live in a high cost of living area and $150k would not be living paycheck to paycheck for my family (wife, 2 kids, and a dog). I guess I also don't have expensive tastes.
Define high cost living area. Wife with 2 kids and a pet, I assume you're going to need at least a 3 bedroom condo for a modest living arrangement.
Where I live, southern California, the average cost for a 3br condo is $4k per month. Mortgages at this time would be way more (standard 20% down).
Someone else estimated 150k is around 8.7k a month after taxes. So that's already almost half your income just for a roof over your head.
Include the expense of kids, student loans, car loans, health insurance, etc. Yeah, paycheck to paycheck isn't unrealistic.
Not everyone was lucky enough to be in the financial place in their life to buy a house 5 years ago.
I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, that's a bit high for after tax.
I make 172/year and after tax and benefits and what not in South Carolina, I'm at 8.6 a month, which is less than the 150 estimate. So in an average tax state and making 20k less? Might be more like 7.5-8.
Edit: granted of course, 401k contribution can change things a bunch
Fair enough. I'm sure there's a calculator to make it easy per state. But yeah, take home is deceptive, because typically someone making that kind of income is going to have health insurance contributions, retirement contributions, social security (not technically income tax, but fair enough to deduct IMO) taken directly out of their paycheck.
Without doing the estimates myself, either of your claims sound plausible, and even taking 8.7k as a generous estimate, it doesn't look good.
and even taking 8.7k as a generous estimate, it doesn't look good.
Big facts. Worker wages need to be adjusted for the last ${years since Reagan took office and initially screwed everything up for the common American} and then we should be okay.
My family is very similar. We aren't quite paycheck to paycheck, but things feel a lot tighter than they did before - we make 190 ish combined, which ends up being about 9k a month. We have one paid off car.
Mortgage - $2500
Utilities - $800 (electric, water, plain Internet and mnvo cell phone plan)
Daughter's school - $1200/mo (obv this is a "non essential", but it's pretty cheap for a year round private school)
Prescriptions - $1200/mo with insurance (although this usually comes in a single lump in January. Insurance also refuses to cover a few essentials which we pay out of pocket for, about $100/mo)
Student loans - $800/mo
Which leaves us with around $2500/mo for entertainment, car/house repair (it's 40 years old and needs new things like a roof or hot water heater from time to time), groceries, any vacations, etc. My wife and I both have chronic conditions which are exhausting to deal with so we get house cleaning for $300/mo as well.
We are doing fine, but it seems like an exhausting cycle to try and build savings, and if we ever had to buy another car I don't know how we would swing an extra $500 payment every month, with what it seems vehicles cost these days.
All this to say, while we are ok, I have no idea how families making under 100k get by.
Most people are not paying $1200/month for childcare or $300/month for a maid. They also probably put a lot less toward retirement.
That said, good on you for recognizing that the average household is struggling.
Sure, for school age kids like my daughter that is true, but I will push back that toddler and infant childcare is, on average, extremely expensive.
If you don't have a grandparent or other relative to watch your kid, in a state like North Carolina you will be forking out around $800-900 a month per kid on average.
Which is why publicly funded options for preschool would be life-changing for so many people, especially single mothers and fathers.
I live in Seattle. Like I said, I can see this being true for people who got a mortgage at 5+%. But I don't think a third of people got houses at that rate so it would likely be closer $3k. Here the average 3br is around $3k/month.
But you missed one large part of the headline. It's people making $150k or more. So that includes a ton of people that make more than that. And also a ton of people not in SoCal or other HCOL areas.
To be fair, I live in a low cost of living area and having purchased a house this past January, if I dropped to 130k I might be paycheck to paycheck after a while. Which, granted is lower than the survey.
This being said, my mortgage payment is only $50 more than what my rent was about to increase to, because landlords are the devil.
I also didn't get a big house, it was well under the national average for cost and size, very much a "starter house". But still over 300k, because housing is a nightmare.
I'm somehow sure that plenty of people were still buying houses when rates went up. Once again, people blaming choices and circumstances. It feels eerily similar to how people judge the homeless and talk about their "bad choices."
Seeing this first hand between myself and some of my close coworkers who all earn similar incomes with similar sized families, I'd be willing to bet a majority of those 32% (who don't live in the bay area or Manhattan) are financially illiterate and live paycheck to paycheck because they blow all their money on stupid shit.
I still manage to save, pay my credit card off each month, and pay all the household bills while still having money for stupid hobbies and yearly vacations while they constantly take out loans, loans to pay for other loans, finance even small purchases, have multiple maxed out credit cards, and keep kicking the can down the road on paying off their 20 year old student loans. I'd have a little more sympathy if they didn't make snide comments like "must be nice" when I mention an upcoming trip, or argue that I'm stupid for upping my 401k contributions during our recent market dip while suggesting its better to sell it off when the market is down so you don't lose your money.
This is a completely unfair assessment. I make way less than that, and this is what results they get? Either they didn't try hard enough with more taking the test, or they are THAT financially tone deaf. Soo stupid
I don't understand your point? The article and the survey found a 3rd of people earning over $150k were living pay cheque to pay cheque, but also 36% in the bracket below and over 55% of people on $50k or less.
Living pay cheque to pay cheque is a sign of financial distress but not the only sign. People's living costs also match their lifestyles - it's possible for someone earning $150k to be living pay cheque to pay cheque as the cost of living, schools, transport, etc are higher. Of course people in that bracket have the "luxury" of being able to move down the quality of life ladder - move to a cheaper area, cut back on their lifestyle.
Whatever you may think about people earning that much, the message is that the cost of living crisis is affecting everyone and pulling down living standards for everyone. Not only is it hard to live your previous lifestyle but it's impossible to aspire for more.
The only exception is the millionaires and billionaires who continue to screw the rest of us over. We have more in common with someone who earns $150k a year than someone who earns $500k or who is sitting on millions or billions in asset wealth.
The sooner the middle classes realise they're aligned with the poor and not the rich, the better. Maybe then they will stop voting for shit right wing politicians who only benefit the truly rich.
Try living in a high CoL area on 150k. Don’t bother with the “just move” or whatever trite oversimplified solution. People live where they live. Not everyone wants to earn 75k and live in Ardmore, Oklahoma so that their money goes further. If you can find a 75k job in Ardmore, anyway.
Higher taxes, higher mortgage or rent costs, cost of commuting all add up fast.
That said, burning through $150k does seem a stretch. I lived in a major metro area on a lot less (we were definitely poor), it is possible to keep expenses low, but it sure isn’t comfortable at all.
Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it didn't. 75, 000 a year is still less than what I make.
I make less than a third of that and make it work (barely). Some people need to seriously reassess their priorities or something.
Many probably live in higher cost of living areas.
And it's entirely possible/likely if they move to a lower cost of living area they will suddenly not make anywhere near as much and still live paycheck to paycheck.
You don't get any sort of financial assistance?
I grew up on the poverty line. Food Stamps and Affortable Housing programs got us by.
I worked my ass off to get above the threshold of qualifying for any sort of assistance, and now I live at about the same level because food and rent eat up the difference between what I make and what my parents made.
Nope, no direct financial assistance. Though my parents are close by, and do help with things like inviting me over to dinner like once a month and helping me buy used furniture, if that counts. I shop very frugally and don't have expensive hobbies. The only thing I'm really missing is savings.
We are cut from different cloths.
I hope you the best.
Maybe. At least I'm not making $150k and somehow still struggling lol
Ya.
You can't figure out how to make 150k, but you think you are better than people who have.
Tried to end it nice, but fuck you are a raging asshole.
Do you make $150k and are struggling to make ends meet? Please clue me in to the struggles, I'm all ears.
Household, not solo, income of about 150k.
About same quality of life as I had growing up.
No kids.
Bottom barrel health insurance is a LOT more expensive than it is for people who make less. Drive a Honda Civic, but I still pay more for car insurance than my buddies that make less and drive Mustangs/Chargers/etc. My mom got WIC. I don't. My mom qualified for Affordable Housing. I don't.
I mean... I endorse you punching up, but I don't think you aim those punches high enough, which makes you look like the kind of asshole who it makes sense that you can't find actual gainful employment to advance yourself.
If this conversation proceeds, I need to know if you have reproduced, if you have been divorced, and if you are on any form of public assistance.
I'm no divorce/no kids/ can't qualify for public assistance and my rent, food, and insurance costs have me living paycheck to paycheck.
At a current household income of, specifically, about 130k, far higher than I ever thought I'd pull off, there is NO shot at me getting a mortgage and I'm still living at the standard of life whose tax statements include kids, divorces, far lower paying jobs, and public assistance.
Aha so you ARE taking it personally, I had a feeling. I'll go through the math with you for the sake of discussion, name calling aside.
I have no kids, no marriage, no car payment, no student loans, no public assistance.
Take home pay after taxes and benefits is about $2500. Housing is $1500. Utilities are $250 including A/C during summer. Car insurance I'm rounding up to $150. Gas is $150. Food is ridiculous of course, looks like $250 for groceries and let's say $150 for combined coffee/sometimes lunch/maybe a pizza here and there. Add em all up and I'm at... $2450. Like I said, I barely make it work. :)
There are many other details I'm leaving out for the sake of anonymity, and I will admit I did get lucky in some regards, but I can imagine my figures are quite extendable with someone who has a roommate or two, who got handed down a family member's car, who has a decent side hussle, who reaps the benefits of minimizing their bills, etc.
If made 3x as much as I did, with the same monthly costs, I would be in a ridiculously better place financially. I would have a decent amount of savings and could eventually have enough for a mortgage down payment. I could even have a good set of investments that would further contribute to my income. There would be no excuse to still be struggling, hence my hostility. Not saying to not eat the rich, also not saying our system isn't fundamentally fucked and that our current and future generations might not ever be homeowners, but I feel my original point still stands.
What's even the point of your comment, I'm not trying to be rude it just seems unhelpful and the attitude is prevalent. Sure, if people adjust their habits they could make due, but the problem is the fucking robbery of all working people so it's just wasting time bickering with points like this.
The point is that there is something fishy going on if you make $150k and still can't make ends meet.
My hunch is that there is obvious excess spending on things that aren't needed, and downsizing is the best solution. Families don't need a $80k SUV when a sedan would do for example. Joneses be damned.
Your 150k number continues to highlight how oblivious you are to the current state of the economy.
1 mil... maybe that has gotten past the orphan crushing machine/boring dystopia threshold, but there is almost no physical quality of life difference between someone making 50k a year and someone making 150k a year.
How does the old adage go?
Mo money mo problems.
The $150k was literally in the OP lol?
You've called me an asshole multiple times yet you've been incredibly toxic in this comment thread.
Yeah, I was making a flat 50k a few years ago, and seeing some college classmates making three times as much complaining about how poor they were could only make me laugh.
I'm doing much better now, but it still drives me nuts when people don't know how to appreciate what they have.
Someone can appreciate what they have and still struggle to support a family, repair and maintaine a house, pay deductibles and co-pays for medical treatments, support an unemployed or ailing family member, pay student loans, pay car loans, send remittances to family in a home country, etc. They could simply live in a HCOL area. There are many not unusual scenarios that could have a household making $150k/year struggle.
It drives me nuts when people think their circumstances define someone else's, too.
Oh boo hoo. Try making about half that, like me and my wife do (combined). It isn’t fun.
Dude. Get a grip. These people are far closer to you in wealth than the people who fund SuperPACs or own news organizations. You have much more in common with someone who makes $150k/year than you do with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch, or whoever the fuck else has obscene amounts of money. Those people, the billionaire class, the 0.01%, are the people using their larges to influence politics and media.
These people making $150k/year are overextending themselves, I get it, but if I actually spent the money I wanted to spend on improving my life, especially in relation to things like my health, I would be looking at needing to spend that kind of money each year. My teeth are falling out of my god damned head and I've gotten the cost of such things shared with me and it's out of fucking control. I'm talking like $10k for one of the many problems I have in my mouth. The others aren't cheaper. All it means is that we are so poor that we're literally putting off life-saving medical care because it's fucking unaffordable. All people making $150k a year are doing is just barely scraping by while actually getting that care.
Oh no, they own a single super shitty, hollowed out house that is busted as hell and needs massive repairs constantly. Yeah, man, they're doing so much better than us just because they have a house. /s Like maybe take a minute and understand a lot of those people just bought their house, and it's not like they were buying it in their 20's.
People making this much are not your enemy, they are the people you have to convince that the system is broken and get them on your side.
People whose entire wealth and income comes from investments are the people who are your real fucking enemy.
Because guess what, these $150k/year stiffs still work for a fucking living.
Because I get it, it feels like they have so much more when they're making over $100k a year more than you, but like, they're still treading water, just like us, just like this article points out. Trust me, if you were making that money, you'd still be pretty broke unless you didn't have kids.
Source: my broke ass sister, a lawyer who lives in a fucking hovel that needs tons of repair and is being bled dry by medical bills, child care, a psychopathic narcissist of an ex-husband (who literally lives off of credit cars and spends like Paris Hilton) and housing costs. She didn't buy her home until she was over 50, she's Gen X. She's on thin ice just like me, even though she's doing better by a lot of measures. The only "investments" she has is her fucking 401K to try to have a halfway decent retirement (ha, as if).
EDIT: Second Source: Just remembered a conversation I had with a friend years ago when I worked at a local mexican restaurant. He was upset at the owner, because he had like a million dollars in the bank. I explained that a lot of that was because he had been in business a long time, and frankly, you need that kind of money to keep a restaurant running (thin margins). I told him at the time that any huge disruptive thing could eat into that million and make a lot of it go away fast. COVID hit, and that restaurant nearly bit the dust, but only JUST scraped through the other side. I bet they don't have a million in the bank now, they had to shut down to satellite stores where they sold their tortillas.
Hey, re your teeth, if you can afford this, and it hasn't changed since then, my dad had to get something like $25,000 in dental work, so they took a trip to Costa Rica, spent about $3000 on the trip, and got the dental work for free. It sucks that people have to resort to things like that, but if you think you could afford that, I would definitely recommend looking into it.
they’re still treading water, just like us
I currently have 1200 dollars and live in my mother's basement, because I'm her full time carer while she recovers from cancer. My current retirement plan is a rope. I have a master's degree in STEM, but you'd be surprised how many homeless people have those too.
Someone earning 150k would have to work thousands of years to become a billionaire, true.
The ultra rich are the true enemy, true.
But Jesus Christ, people earning 150k are not 'just scraping by'.
Seriously. Get a grip. How out of touch do you have to be to think that? No concept of what true poverty looks like.
As a 40-something guy who literally has cancer and no retirement savings and is wondering how he can even stay alive and has had a year of nothing but suicidal ideation, I still have the capacity to have compassion and not blame other working stiffs for how bad things are for me. I have a degree and I work at a fucking pizza place.
Out of touch my ass, I'm literally living a similar experience. Sorry I have the ability to consider other people's situations instead of just my own. It's called empathy, motherfucker. Have you heard of it??
Look, I'm really not in a good place either, as I assume you gathered. It's been so long for me. At one point I found myself crying into the toilet I was cleaning for one of my night time temp jobs. Like you, I'm basically hanging on by a thread. It's been going on so long, I no longer know where depression ends and I begin or if the original me still exists.
I don't know about you, but I really shouldn't be having this discussion, so we'll leave it at that.
I'm just going to wish you luck, strength, or whatever gets you through today and tomorrow. Even if it's drowning out the noise, even if it's spite, anger or curiousity about something like the conclusion of a dumb tv show you don't even really like.
Maybe things will get better for us, even if right now we perhaps don't really believe in it anymore.
Thanks for that, friend. Life is hard, and I don't blame you for being in a low place because of it. I appreciate your candor, openness, and willingness to hear me.
I wish and hope for the best for you, too. All of us deserve better.
Also, unrelated, dope username.
I'm not who you were replying to, but I just want to wish you the absolute best of luck in your health battle. Empathy is in short supply at the best of times, but showing empathy when you're in the middle of something so hard is next level. I bet you also make an excellent pizza, even if that's not where you expected to be working.
I'll have my fingers crossed for you, friend. Fuck cancer and everything that it entails.
Cheers, mate. I hope for the best for all of us. It can happen to any of us at any time, and that's part of why it's so stressful. Making good money isn't some sort of panacea against your life falling apart.
I mean, Christ, just think of all the people who have chronic pain that became opiate addicts who also had real, productive jobs who ended up on the street due to addiction to the solution to their chronic pain. Life isn't fair, and even having money saved away can't protect you from everything.
If these people are financially struggling, it’s by choice (e.g. buying property).
And I don’t feel sympathy for them. They can reduce their spending and survive.
People could literally say the same things about my financial situation, which is dire. I was on the verge of homelessness earlier this year. I have heard plenty from discompassionate people who say I could have tried harder/worked harder/done more and that my shortcomings are things I brought on myself.
They wouldn't be entirely wrong, but I would still think they are kind of a stuck up asshole.
Same difference. Do you talk about the homeless the same way?
Do I talk about the homeless the same way as the top 20% of income earners?
No.
Do you have any more bad faith leaps you want to take here?
Now we can't even buy property at $150k without being called out for making bad choices? Holy shit the working class is lowering their expectations way too much.
People used to be able to have a house, a car, hobbies, have medical help, all the house appliances, and yearly vacations on one income at some mindless factory job. Expect more, people. Demand more. You only can't have it because the rich are hoarding everything and stealing your money. Don't shrug and take it. Don't criticize others for expecting it. Fucking demand it for yourself. It's your work making them rich.
You might have heard of student loans. They can get rather high. You might have also heard about high cost of living areas. Houses can be pretty expensive. Another thing you might have heard about is high mortgage rates.
A new veterinarian with a specialist cert (which requires an undergrad degree, graduate degree, a shitty pay internship, and a shitty pay residency for a long time) will be sitting on $200,000 in loans and make about $200k. Now, if that person lives in Los Angeles and wants to buy a home they are going to have a loan for a million at 7%. Take-home pay on $200k after retirement/insurance/taxes is around $10k/month. Mortgage on a million is $7k/mo. Loan payments on $200k is around $1000/mo. Taxes on that house are about $1000/mo. Right there the take-home pay comes down to $1000/mo to pay for food ($600), utilities ($100), cell phone ($70), car ($300), car insurance ($100), gas ($100) internet ($100), etc. You might notice that those numbers add up to more than $1000.
Sure, that veterinarian who is already 35 years old now after all that schooling can just rent instead of buy a tiny house, but rent still costs $3000/mo in a big city for a small apartment.
I don't see how that's possible unless you have a huge family, you have some sort of chronic disease that insurance doesn't cover, or you're wildly irresponsible. Even in a high cost-of-living area, a normal family of four could live quite comfortably on that much money and still save some of it.
(I don't think that many high-earning people are wildly irresponsible. I suspect that this statistic isn't right.)
It's called living in a city. Housing is expensive as fuck in cities.
I live in a one-bedroom in midtown Manhattan. It costs me about a hundred dollars a day and I'm still saving money on my software developer salary.
That's pretty steep for a 1 bedroom apartment, 3000ish I assume based on what you said, and I'm guessing it's not that big. I meanwhile live in a college town in the middle of nowhere and my 3 bedroom house with a garage and basement is 2100 a month.
Yeah rent in desirable cities is high. It’s the price you pay for being in a cultural mecca with a lot of career opportunities. Not for everyone obviously but a lot of people would absolutely not want to live in a college town either.
I’ve done both and enjoy cities way more and consider the rent money well spent. Making that transition to a big city was transformative for me personally and my career.
The funny thing is that despite spending all that money, I actually hate living here. It's crowded and I can't get around by driving. I used to pay $450 a month for a parking spot but I gave up on that because even though I could park near where I lived, I wasn't able to park at most of the places I needed to go. (And now they're adding tolls and I will have to pay about $20 each time I drive to my own home.)
My elderly relatives are here and I want/need to be close to them. It's not realistic for them to move, but if they could then I would immediately go with them somewhere where a cabin on a 40-acre lot costs less than my apartment. 40 acres is like having 8 Manhattan city blocks all to yourself!
You're software developer tho. So you're a rich person anyways. You don't understand the struggle
The OP is talking about people with software-developer salaries.
A lot of people live in cities and make far less than 150k, even when you add both parents income. They do just fine. Housing where you live might be expensive ,but there are more affordable houses around. Probably not in areas you would be willing to live.
When people hear "living paycheck to paycheck" they automatically assume it means barely making enough money for essentials. It for sure can mean that, but often people living paycheck to paycheck make good money, they just don't live within their means. It's not hard to buy a nicer house and a nicer car than your can really afford, and run up credit card debt, and find yourself in a situation where you can't pay your bills because you're overextended, even with a good salary.
A few additional things to consider:
Accrued debt
Areas with highest cost of living tend to also be areas with relatively high population density (San Francisco is usually the go-to example for this)
Inflexibility of living in austerity
Intuit benefits from scaring people in the lower and middle economic classes
I continually rotate debt through 0% interest deals on credit cards, it's how I've paid for a lot of my home improvements.
Paid for a new roof and awning on the house that way, currently paying for solar panels and a large electrical project.
If a credit card offers me 0% interest for a year, why WOULDN'T I do that instead of paying cash?
I have three different cards now that every time I pay them off they're like "Heyyyy... here's some balance transfer checks... 0% until January '25..."
Boo hoo? I make a bit over half of half of that, and I'm getting by just fine. Maybe cut back on the avocado toast if you make 4x what I make and can't manage to live within those means.
Cost of living varies from state to state, and city to city.
And where is this place where you can't live and save on 150k USD?
You can pick just about any city in the U.S. and you'll find insane housing prices.
I'm worried "paycheck to paycheck" is up to the interpretation of the person filing it the survey and how the questions are phrased. Depending on how the questions are worded, they'd possibly include me. My wife and I max our IRAs, 401ks, and HSAs each year. Anything that can be put on the credit card, is (then paid off before any interest can accrue). Like sure if you look at our monthly expenses vs income hitting the bank, we are "paycheck to paycheck". But we could both lose a significant portion of our income and be just fine (provided we scale back retirement savings).
Unless they address that in these articles or surveys, it just sounds like they're trying to get the poor and middle class to just agree to this shared misery while the rich keep fucking the world over.
Speaking anecdotally, I've always heard "living paycheck-to-paycheck" to mean having insufficient savings to cover a missed paycheck
I.e. if you don't get an expected paycheck then you cannot pay your monthly debts/utilities/rent and still have enough money to feed.yourself and your dependents
Which is why I'm worried it's not adequately defined. I'm definitely not paycheck to paycheck. But they could word the questions in such a way that I'd be included.
Oh, absolutely. If you click through to the Quicken press release they have a small section defining their methodology but don't list the specific questions
I wish more people appreciated the lengths that Pew et al. go through to both minimize and recognize sources of bias, confusion, etc
"We asked a group of gambling addicts if they run out of money regularily" /s
I think that's the point though. It's subjective.
Many people think the phrase applies to them because paycheck to paycheck is their budget cycle. They're not living hand to mouth.
But it would affect you, just longer-term than shorter-term. You don't know what things will be like when you're old, which is why most people who can do put the max amount in their IRAs, 401Ks, and HSAs. That doesn't mean they're bad people or misspending their money or not living paycheck-to-paycheck.
If you suffer in your old age because you had to cut back on retirement, that's a huge impact on your life. It's way easier to live paycheck-to-paycheck when you still can work than it is when you literally cannot and are relying on Society Security or retirement investments. I think that matters.
I'm poor as fuck, but I don't feel like I need to judge people who barely make more money than me in the context of fucking billionaires.
Also, do you have kids, because that's a huge impact on the bottom-line of people who make a decent salary.
Only furry ones with four paws. And the cost of raising kids is a not insignificant factor in that decision.
Exactly my point.
Well your certainly buried your point at the end of your tirade. Sounds like you just want to argue with people on the internet that making 150k isn’t a livable salary for a person in this day and age. There’s a lot of nuance and factors to consider. Like children and life situations. People making 50k also have to deal with those same issues - and it sounds like you’re one of them. I feel bad for anyone living paycheck to paycheck because of their circumstances but at the end of the day this is life under modern capitalism.
So have some class solidarity for fucks sake then. If you think people making $150k are the people who are the problem in this society, I think you're the one wildly out of touch.
The average CEO salary in the US is $832,576 right now, and they don't actually fucking work.
I don’t think $150k wage people are the problem at all and never said that. Overpaid CEOs and corporations are wildly disgusting and the root of a lot our problems so I guess I’m not sure what we’re arguing about.
I'm not sure that they asked that directly. It looks like they asked if people are using their credit cards to cover bills more, and whether they expect to be able to fully pay the credit card bill off by the end of the year.
This is like all those surveys saying that 70% of Americans have less than $5000 in a "savings account."
No shit, yields on savings accounts have been pointless for about two decades. Everyone with spare money puts liquid savings into index funds in margin accounts and runs on credit cards.
If you're making 150k and are living paycheck to paycheck you either live in a crazy expensive area or are a total fucking idiot when it comes to managing your money.
Rent in NYC where I live is insane. My partner and I recently toured a place where they broke up the basement of a building into 4 apartments, none of which had a real bedroom, and were asking for $3k each
This is a trend everywhere, I just recently moved to different apartment and I’d say 8/10 apartments I saw on Zillow and the other sites were these “open concept” or whatever 1 bedrooms and hallway kitchens. It’s depressing
Move to Ohio and you can buy a house for significantly less than your current rent.
And work?
These answers are always aimed at WFH "professionals" but blue collar schmucks like me always get the short end of that stick ever since the WFH trend kicked up. I have to live within range of a job that I have to physically be at (I've done the 1 1/2 hr drive one way) and any lcol area that I look in doesn't have anything even remotely close that pays enough to not make it a relative repeat of my current situation just with lower numbers. It's not that easy for everyone to just do.
There are lots of blue collar jobs in Ohio, yes.
Idk how to answer beyond that without specifics but my point is that changing jobs within your skillset and moving for opportunities is basically what the country was built on, and is not a new concept.
If you're not willing to relocate or change roles for more money there's not a lot anyone can do for you.
I began my career as a high school teacher. Had I remained one, I would make less than half what I make now. Had to change jobs and states to grow my wealth.
Look at the positive side. When sea levels start rising, you'd be first to notice that!
Supply and demand.
You can always move somewhere else and have hope of one day owning property. Or you can rent forever and have nothing to pass on to your kids.
The choice is yours. I wouldn't wait around for others to solve your problems.
Ya, people should be forced to move away from their family and friends and home by insane cost of living and instead of sympathy we should just expect them to single handedly solve an entire fucked up economic system.
🤡
Entitlement. Thanks for understanding.
Douchebaggery. Thanks for your support for high income inequality and low social mobility
What are you talking about? I support spreading out so there are more developed areas that people want to live.
Passing a bunch of money around in major cities is what exacerbates the disparity in wealth. Why should city people who already have more wealth get even more before those who have less?
I really don't think that's how any of this works, dude
You need to invest in areas if you want them to be "developed" so people want to live in them. If you force poor people to leave places where there are more opportunities (e.g. economic, educational, occupational, etc.) for them, you're basically dooming them and their following generations to poverty. This is why I said you support low social mobility and high income inequality.
Now just think of who the poorest people are in cities - it's a lot of minorities, single parents, people in debt, etc. That should immediately tell you "city people" don't have more wealth than most people elsewhere. As far as I can tell, the working class anywhere serve mainly to enrich the wealthy class.
I've always looked at it this way: should the people that scrub toilets in NY or SF or LA be paid enough to live in the same city? Everything I've seen tells me the average American answers this question with a resounding "No!" People in those areas have to make hour-long commutes to put food on the table for their family. I don't see why we should accept essential workers being paid less than they deserve.
That's exactly how it works. Why do you think it's more expensive to live in major cities than outside of them? Supply and demand. There's more demand and less supply. Why is there more demand? Because more people would prefer to live there.
Why should we invest in major cities that have already reached diminishing returns on their investments instead of spreading out to make more places attractive to more people? Entitlement. Life outside of major cities isn't good enough for some, and they think people living in major cities should get more before everyone else who has less.
Try making $150k in a "reasonably priced area." It can be done, but is not the norm. The problem is that to make a good salary, you have to be in a place that pays those wages. Obviously, this attracts more people, so real estate is more expensive.
The trick is to make $150k in some kind of sweet spot where housing does not compensate. But it's always a moving target and is extremely difficult. Then in you lose your job? Start all over again.
I started working remotely and then left America. Now I live in a very low cost of living city and haven't owed more than 1-2% taxes in years.. It blows my mind that more people don't do this.
If they did, it wouldn't be a low cost of living area for long
There are many low COL areas, so yes you can do this quite a lot.
Gentrify the planet.
Most people won't do something if they think it's "too hard," even if it will solve their problems.
Where did you go? And how do you not pay fed taxes working for an American company? Or is it a foreign company?
Georgia (the country) and Turkey mostly.
Qualifying for the FEIE (stay out of America for 330 days per year) means you don't pay taxes on the first $120k you earn. Maxing out the 401k ($22,500) will reduce taxable income as well so it's really like the first $142,500 is tax free.
I work for an American company as a W2 employee.
Thanks, looking to emigrate with a remote job, so good to know. Do you know if the FEIE is for any country or only select ones? And how hard did you find the entire transition in general?
The FEIE is only concerned about your relationship with America. It doesn't matter what country/countries you decide to live in.
As far as the transition, I didn't know it was happening until much later. When I left America it was to travel full time. I wasn't specifically going to one place so saying goodbye to friends and family was like, "I'll be around. Catch you guys later." 2-3 years later I was thinking to myself, "Oh shit.. You're like.. really gone."
For work, I hold myself pretty strictly to working on US east coast hours so there is as little friction as possible with the employers. I moved my phone to a virtual provider and updated all banking and W4 paperwork to use a mailbox service in Florida (no state level income tax in FL).
You do get very bored with tourist stuff though. I think I would rather die than set foot in another museum or see some old building or religious site or whatever.. Now 100% of the travel I still do is to see people I care about.
Good luck.
You just explained how work from home jobs will transform how people buy housing and where they buy it.
Let's pump up the flyover real estate market?
Yeah, my job went remote in 2020 and this year I moved out of the city and just bought my first house in my home state where the cost of living is almost 1/2 of my former city. I
could'vewould've never bought a place where I was before. I'm sure someone would have loaned me the money but that felt like a death sentence for my small amount of disposable income.I make $150k and learned to manage a very strict budget living in the city. Now I have some disposable income and my own house with a yard.
My salary is $160k in the most expensive region in the country. My total yearly expenses don't exceed $50k, $20k of which is rent. The rest maxes out my 401k and goes towards a house down payment fund. I have a $30k emergency fund in case I lose my job which gives me 9 months of runway.
I'm not a nomad by any means. I have very nice things and I spend a grand a month on wants (eating out, my hobbies, whatever else I impulse order from Amazon), but I'm extremely aware of all my purchases and budget out every transaction at the end of every week. Hell, I just spent $2k on Christmas to get my family very nice gifts, but I've been spending less and sacrificing wants the past few months to offset that to prevent lifestyle creep.
This is a financial literacy problem, not a $150k is not a lot of money problem.
ETA: I split rent 50/50 with my partner in the California Bay area for a decent-sized 2b2.5b townhouse. My friends who do have 5 housemates, as so many of you seem to think I do, pay $1050 a month in rent, or $12.6k a year.
You live in the most expensive region of the country but you only pay $20k in rent? Is your idea of "most expensive" Akron or something?
No, I bet he has five housemates or something.
I live in the California bay area (not going to get more specific than that), and split rent of a townhouse 50/50 with my partner. I live in a stupid bougie area too, so I'm not doing myself any favors there pricewise.
You cannot get a SFH here for under $2 mil, and our townhouse we rent is worth well over $1 mil. I could easily afford the whole place by myself, but that would be financially irresponsible. I was very fortunate to be taught at a young age that being able to afford something does not make it a good or okay use of money.
If I weren't living with my partner, I'd get a one bed or studio apartment for ~$2200 a month, or an extra $6400 a year. Unless someone took on a mortgage way larger than they could actually afford (again, a financial literacy issue), or has an extremely expensive medical condition, I have 0 idea how anyone could be paycheck to paycheck on $150k a year and unable to massively cut back. The world is expensive, but it ain't THAT expensive.
To get a townhome in the bay at ~2k a month is a complete outlier with respect to rent. I live in a similar COL area and the cheapest you could rent that kind of space is for ~3.5k monthly in the present market.
I didn't say I got a townhome for ~2k a month. The place I split with my partner is $3300 a month, and if I didn't live with them I'd get a smaller, much cheaper apartment.
Edit: Alright everyone can go on believing you need a million dollars a year to scrape by in the bay area lmao. I'm done responding since everyone already has their minds made up about what it's like here, and somehow saying I could get a studio or one bed for $2200 is the same as a whole ass townhouse.
I just hope more people can learn to be good with money, and we can stop this terrible capitalistic cycle of consumer over-spending and debt.
How many housemates do you have?
Go look at a mortgage or even rent in any major city.
Hi, this is pretty much me, and I concur. If you can't live on $150k then you are definitely making some questionable decisions. That's around $8k/m take home. Even if you are spending $4k on rent/mortgage, you should have plenty left over to live on.
Do you have kids?
I'm pretty sure I covered the questionable decisions.
Yeah, if you're a single man who doesn't have anyone to take care of and has no physical or mental health problems $150k is great. If you're part of a house with two incomes you're probably OK. If you're on a single incoming supporting parents with disabilities, kids, partners with disabilities, or any combination of similar things, you can maybe get by on $150k as long as you never fuck up and everything goes perfectly in your life and you don't care about or try to help anyone else.
Edit: and I say man, because men are less likely to take on caregiver roles that cost large amounts of money.
My wife is disabled FYI. I get what you are saying, but there is still a good amount of wiggle room in our budget. I also still don't really like the idea of lumping kids, which are a choice with a very clear financial impact, in the same category as dealing with illness and disability. That doesn't seem to be a good faith argument.
A society where having kids is an unsustainable financial decision is a society that can't continue to exist, and a society where caregiving for someone with a disability or having one yourself makes life impossible is also a society that can't continue to exist.
There are also a ton of other factors that can easily push someone over the edge. "We have lots of wiggle room" is great for you but lots of people don't... And even if someone did make a mistake, why should some small mistake put someone in inescapable debt?
I just think the idea that $150k is fine and everyone who can't make it is an idiot isn't taking in to account the obvious data that shows the opposite.
It does always strike me as ridiculous when we live in a world where continuing the existence of the human race is considered bad financial planning. No wonder birth rates are declining massively when the incentives are all on personal productivity and streamlining your life rather than having/raising a family. I don't plan to have children for a number of reasons, but the fact that society is filled with active disincentives certainly doesn't help persuade me otherwise.
Kids are not always a choice, especially now that abortion is illegal in so many places.
In addition, the idea that if you don't have enough money then you just don't get to have a family seems abhorrent.
Why would it matter how many people it takes to make the 150k?
If you're making $150k and someone else is making another amount of money...
Then your family isn't making 150k and you're not part of this discussion.
Also if you're making more than 150k and can't pay your bills, I have 0 sympathy for you.
It must feel good to feel superior to all these people who are struggling. I bet that makes you feel really smart and capable.
You wanna stop lashing out and make an actual point?
I make 150k, have 3 kids (one in college), a home, 2 cars, etc and I am most assuredly not living paycheck to paycheck
Good for you. I'm glad you don't care about other peoples problems because you're fine.
That's the opposite of my stance. These people are fine and they're comparing themselves to people who are not.
I own a home just outside of a city and my mortgage is 1060/mo. 3BR, 3 bath, finished basement, on a half acre.
Good for you. I bet you have to drive everywhere and you don't even realize that the cost of the infrastructure to make your life convient is bankrupting your closest city.
What a dumb shit comment lol.
I literally volunteer on campaigns to change local zoning to be more dense and contain more public transport.
"You countered my point so quick let me think up some way to attack you as a person" lol.
Telling people to "go move outside the city like I do" does exactly the opposite of what you say you're trying to support, so why even bring it up?
When you advocate for density, you are de facto arguing to have more people where you are.
Look, I'm glad you're advocating for good things. People need to be doing that. I'm done with the US and I really have no hope for it so it really doesn't matter anymore to me either way. I'm lucky enough that I never have to come back.
It fucking sucks getting gentrified out of places you lived when you're making over $100k, and its absolutely absurd. I live in the Netherlands now. Because there's a functional tax system my neighbors are bike mechanics and students, instead of literally everyone either being a boomer who bought their house in the 80's or a tech bro on a single income. People should be able to live in cities, and cities should be high density. If people say they're struggling on $150k/y then believe that what they're saying is real, because it is. If people are struggling on $150k/y then theres a huge problem. But you know what's nice? It's not my problem anymore.
I really hope your volunteering works out because it's needed.
How were you able to move there? On paper I'm absolutely worthless... I'm stuck in a place I can't afford to stay in, but too poor/undesirable to be welcomed into another country.
I'm really privileged and I sacrificed a lot. It's not an option for most people and if I didn't work for a big evil company I probably couldn't do it. They paid for most of it and organized a lot of it, but it was still a ton of work that we couldn't have done without a bunch of help from our family. Also being fueled by pure terror helped.
As much as I say I don't care, I have so many friends who couldn't do the same thing and are stuck like you. If I thought I could help by staying, I probably would have. I thought about leaving when Trump got elected, but decided to stay and try to make things better. Then I got shot by a Trump supporter. So this time my family and I figured out an exit plan and left. Well... My partner and kids got out, but everyone else is still in the US.
Everyone should have the opportunity to live in a place that makes sense. I wish I could make the US a place with living in. I wish that borders didn't exist.
But if you want to escape to Europe, you want to figure out how to get citizenship in a place in the Schengen zone. The easiest to get in to legally are Spain and Portugal, which are a lot cheaper. It's also easier and cheaper to move if you're not taking anything and not supporting any kids or a partner.
I wish I could give you useful advice.
I appreciate your abrupt change in tone and your effort to engage with me as a person. I feel like we share many of the same goals and ideals, and are not as far apart as pithy comments may make us seem.
I hope the Netherlands is as kickass as I've heard it is from friends
Good thing there are plenty of places to live outside of major cities.
The only people who this isn't a solution for are those who feel they're entitled to live in places they can't afford 🤷
A lot of people like not commuting several hours a day, or having access to actual culture, or not being constantly robbed by meth heads, or not being murdered because of their Identity, or about a million other things that are difficult to impossible outside of cities...
But fuck all the queer and trans people who escaped to the safety of cities. If they can't afford t, they shouldn't be there, right? /s
What makes them exempt from supply and demand?
"The invisible hand" is literally a metaphor for god. Sorry, I'm not in the capitalist suicide cult.
So... what do we do when there is scarcity?
Share
Totally. I wish we lived in a culture that valued taking excess from those who have it and giving it to those who need it.
We have to create that culture. You're not alone. That's the world that most people want to live in. The more we talk to each other and the more we're able to connect, the more we can work together to make that happen.
There's obviously enough for everyone, but we choose to pretend there isn't. We choose to pretend that the people who artificially restrict access to things people need to survive are ligitmiate and have the right to restrict access to food and housing. We pretend the people who enact that violence on behalf of these borders are heros. We pretend the imaginary rules they enforce on us have power. We pretend paper and imaginary numbers should dictate who lives, who dies, and who has the right to dictate the actions of others.
We're playing a game together with made up rules. We pretend that there isn't enough so that people who have too much can take even more from people who don't. This is a stupid game that we should stop playing. Just by being aware of this, we can start to change the rules.
Hmmm you're not going to be making 150k a year in a shit fly over state.
I moved from the Bay Area to the East side of Washington near Seattle, folks here don't make as much as I do for sure, at least not on average. We both have good salaries so we can afford a lot of things. We essentially got to keep most of our bay area salaries.
But even then if we need a big repair we still have to sit down and plan out the money.
I can't even imagine what it's like for folks around here.
I live in Nebraska, and all comp included make around 155k per year salary + bonus. You can make that kind of money even here in the "shit"
What's your title?
I'm a software architect, though even when I was just a senior java developer I was making 130k, software pays well even in the fly overs.
I'm a level 2 Engineer and I make close to what you're making TC. Hopefully maybe more come next year. And I don't work for the big 5. I work for a hospital group. Seniors make well close to double that in TC. Principals make slightly more.
Also there are more jobs for higher levels than in non tech hubs. Career wise you'll probably be making more complex systems too.
You have it good for sure, but you're the outlier my guy.
I know that, I was just refuting the claim that "your not going to make that kind of money in a flyover state", it is possible, and you don't have to work the big 5 here either, and the cost of living is way less.
In California, a new mortgage payment is 8-15k/month. Rent on an apartment is 3-4k/month. $150k salary isn’t enough for the mortgage and will struggle to cover that cost of rent.
Buddy of mine lives in LA and was just posting angry complaints about his rent going up to 1800/mo, so no.
I've got three friends in the LA area and one in the Bay and none of them pay anything close to 3k/mo rent or 8k(!!!!!) on their mortgages.
Those numbers are insane.
LA is cheap compared to the Bay Area. Also, I’m quoting numbers for new mortgages and new rentals. If you got your mortgage even 3 years ago, the numbers will be different.
Terrible assumption
Household income not personal income? And gross not net, correct? After healthcare, taxes and retirement deductions my net is 50% of gross so let's say that calculates to 6,250 a month. It is a lot of money! But for a household of 4, 2 paid off cars 3 drivers and one college student with no tuition costs, and one high schooler in a school that gives everyone lunch(so it could be much worse) here the average community monthly costs are:
2.5k mortgage with the tax & insurance in there, make that 3k if you are renting.
800/ month car insurance
600/month electric, water, internet
200/month family cell phone service
50/month streaming and donations to community radio
600/month average repair & maintenance on home and cars
Leaving 1700 for food for 4, gas, vet bills, credit card payments (because if someone is making bank now, they got there by making less for years). It's certainly reasonable but here it's about the least you can make household - wise and be solid, so if you are making 50k, you need three people working not two. And I can see how a family could get behind. That 2.5k plus $600 housing cost can be much more if you bought a house in the last year or so, and car loan or tuition could also blow this up, as could a medical emergency.
The fuck? Why is your car insurance so expensive?
The fuck? Why are you water and electric bills so high? I live alone, but my water bill is always <$40 and my electric bill is $70-$150 depending on if I'm running the A/C or heater.
Internet for me is only $25/month because I use my phone for Internet and have unlimited data with Visible.
Switch to Visible, like I said. $25/month per line and you all have unlimited data so you can cut your cable Internet.
Complete waste of money. You don't get to do these and then complain you don't have enough.
Lol, what? Are you constantly hitting your walls with hammers? Do you do offroading in a sedan? No way you're spending $600 per month on home/car repairs (on average) unless you're driving a Benz or BMW.
That said, thank you for listing out your expenses. It's a way more fruitful discussion when we talk actual numbers instead of vague "I don't have enoughs."
Nope. 2 cars and 3 drivers here with one of them 18 years old. Highest cost car insurance market in the nation. But without that third driver our household income wouldn't hit the $150k.
Electric, Water, Internet. That's mostly electricity. Electric bill is higher since I'm working from home, and everything in the house is electric (no gas bill) we don't eat out much, cook a lot. Very high in the summer. Big windows, high ceilings, old house. Water includes garbage and is usually $100 or so. Internet about $75 FIOS so I can work from home mostly (2 cars not 3 that way).
The $200 is a legacy t mobile plan covering 8 people so if needed I could get the grown kids to cover half of it, that one is high but not per line, we just pay it because if we cut them off it would still cost us $200 for 4 lines.
House is older and cars are too. Tenting for termites has to happen every 10 years and costs 10k, we've had to fix plumbing, electric, replace an old porch, need blinds to help with the electrical cost, and the cars won't last forever - I honestly think the $600 may be underestimating the cost of maintenance, not overestimating.
And of course every month something happens. Vet bills, or some medical cost, or car repair eats the 600 AND the plumbing springs a leak, or I have to work weekends and we buy restaurant food - no month is just bills.
It's easy to go cheap for awhile, I have done that plenty. We have dry beans, rice, a garden. But things fall apart. I am putting here the cost of maintenance because if we don't accrue this $600ish, it will end up costing even more. It's a real cost.
Oh, and I know this isn't poor, lol. In my 20s lived with 3 families in one house and dumpster dived to make ends meet. Then raised 4 kids with a guy who, halfway through, decided he couldn't work. 6 people living on what I could make, we are paying that deficit now too. Even so, this is is an awesome life, I am not complaining at all. Just saying that the bills do take most of the netpay if the real cost of housing and transportation is included.
I'm driving a 26 year old car and don't even spend $600 on maintenance in a year. $600/month ($7200/year) sounds crazy high. That's like replacing an engine or transmission every year.
Correct, it's mostly house. For a year, cars are about $400 in oil changes plus $300 in regular maintenance (brakes, etc.) and usually one repair or tires purchase of high cost, $600-1200. Its staying way below the cost of a new one.
The house is the real money eater.
Ah, I didn't realize you were lumping home and vehicle maintenance together. My water heater recently died after 19 years of solid use and that was more than a $2k project. I'm dreading the day the furnace goes out. Homes aren't cheap.
These people lol
Student loans
Or you only consider your expenses after savings and think that you are "living paycheck to paycheck" because you use up all your non-invested money by the end of the month.
I know a few programmers that are broke because they spend every penny that comes in and bought a $90k car the moment they got their jobs.
I don't understand why people give up financial security willingly like that
It's both. People try to always live above their means. Inflation causes that to catch up
100% agree
PS: porque no los dos?
I mean you can make any income be paycheck to paycheck by spending too much.
150k for me would be a dream right now. I have a dog, a gf, and I rent. But if you're making 150k and you have two kids and a spouse for example, suddenly that 150k doesn't go very far at all.
Yep, my mother used to manage pays for engineers making up to 300k and for some of them it was a disaster if a mistake lead to 200$ being missing from their cheque and they would be in her office first thing in the morning in full panic mode...
I mean, if my cheque was off by a couple of hundred dollars, I'd want to follow up on the discrepancy (not in panic mode though). My wife's a high earner and some pay was delayed a month due to staff turnover.
Leadership was like "it shows financial stability to be able to wait for pay," but people have budgets and plans for that money. Otherwise it's an interest free loan to the organization - the money should be paid out timely.
But I do agree, overall, that folks should be able to manage their budget, especially as a high earner.
It shows financial instability if an organization can't pay its workers on time. Or management incompetence.
That's wild to me.
Especially considering that at the time they could have just bought a house minutes from their office on a year's salary instead of being over their head in debt because they preferred living in the next city in a house worth a couple millions...
That's why lifestyle creep is a tough one. You make more money and then start thinking you want a bigger home, nicer car, eat out a lot more etc. It's hard to scale back from that when the times get tougher as selling a multi-million home isn't that easy.
Don't let this sensational headline fool you. These are not the 1% not even close.
If you're making 150k per year and "living paycheck to paycheck" you suck with money, full stop.
That's more than double median household income
If you are living in an area with a high cost of living, $150k won't feel like $150k.
From Bungalow, 10 Mist Expensive Cities in the US,
If you are making $100k and renting at the average rental price of $3,700, in one year the cost your housing is $44,400 which is almost 45% of your income. The goal is to spend 30% of your income on housing. If people with would be normally considered to have a good income are struggling then the poor are completely fucked.
There is a small group of people who are making money off this system and ain't us.
Now imagine one just doesn't choose to live in the literal most expensive place on the planet.
FWIW the only people benefiting from this shitty exclusionary zoning are the boomers who rigged the zoning so they stay rich forever. It's entirely a localized problem.
Ah, the classic, "Why don't they just move?"
Checkmate
Because the jobs I want to work will relocate to the midwest to help me cover rent. /s
And before you tell me to take a less-fancy job, some of the problems a person might want to solve are far more interesting and rewarding than the kinds of "tech" jobs available in a place like Austin, TX. No comparison at all. People don't work hard to do things that don't interest them.
It's so weird that you just pretend nothing exists away from a coast lol
This is out of touch. There is a huge number of factors that dictate what amount of money is enough to live a fulfilled live. A bachelor can live a fulfilled life on 30k a year and still save money, but a family of 5 can definitely be living paycheck to paycheck on 150k, especially if they live in an expensive area.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck on $150k you're stupid full stop.
I rarely downvote, but you earned it.
I already did this one elsewhere. $150k is a decent middle class life barely in lower cost of living areas. Probably shouldn't be paycheck to paycheck, but it wouldn't hard to be either.
Children are a choice, plan accordingly for the children's benefit.
So poor people shouldn't have kids, got it.
Eugenics with extra steps, sounds peachy
I'm never having kids, by choice. How is that eugenics?
When you start advocating for a particular group to not reproduce, what else would you call it? You can choose that for yourself but if you suggest it for anyone else you're gonna need to choose your words very carefully to avoid coming across like a super racist from the 19th century.
To be clear, I'm anti-capitalist and not blaming poor people for anything, nor suggesting they should not have any children. But I stand by my position and wording.
Don't have more children (or even pets) than one can support. It's objectively cruel.
Would I prefer a world where there wasn't such dramatic (or ideally any) inequality? Definitely. But even in a world where every single parent could support 6 kids I'd be against people having 17.
You seem to think that the only way for people with children to to be poor is if they are poor and have children. You know you can have children, loose your job, and become poor, right? I'm telling you, you are out of touch and that is clearly evident in you're inability to come up with non circumstancial examples.
I'm just saying good parents consider what is best for their children before having them. Having 6 when you can only reasonable support 3 is a 'poor' choice. Bad parents, on the other hand, have children to benefit themselves rather than the child.
And anyway, statistically, lower income people have more children per person so no one is preventing poor people from having kids. I'm just questioning if that is what is best for those children, because I care about children's suffering.
As if it's never the case that people have children in the expectation that their current financial situation won't suddenly take a turn for the worse; as if what made perfect sense 10 years ago doesn't make sense now when you have a 10-year-old kid to support.
This idea of yours, that people should somehow be able to magically predict their financial future is pure bullshit.
Are you quoting facts from Idiocracy right now????
https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-population-tech-2022-11
Are you sure that, since there are proportionally more poor people in the world, you aren't just forming an availability bias?
And besides that, poor people are more likely to get pregnant from rape without the ability to terminate the pregnancy. If that is not enough they also have less access to reproductive healthcare, reproductive education, abortions, birth control, and prophylactics.
You've mentioned you're a anti-capital, yet you see impoverished children as the fault of the parents who have them as opposed to the system that creates poverty in the first place. Capitalism demands cheap labor which means there are a ton of incentives built into it for procreation. Families don't just choose to be poor.
In my experience, bad parents are those that think people act with a single motive - they tend to label kids as manipulative. People can have kids for a selfish reason and still put their interests first.
Do you not live in America? Children are not a choice is a country that doesn't enshrine access to abortion.
Lol wat? Ever heard about condoms?
Ah yes, condoms. Famous for stopping rape and never breaking.
Look, I'm not arguing that restricting access to abortions is stupid. Of course it is.
But having children in our day and age is of course a choice. There are countless contraceptives available and what you mention are merely edge cases that are not responsible for people not being able to make a living because they pop out children non-stop.
I think location definitely plays into this. 150k in some places is nothing.
No.
https://lemmy.world/comment/5728493
I'm almost there.
I also live in the Bay Area. My rent is locally cheap but nationally very high. My wife has a chronic illness and an unrelated acute issue that recently required surgery. She can barely work. Until this most recent surgery I was keeping ahead, but expenses are up and income is down and that's not true anymore.
I have good health insurance but there's a lot more to medical costs than just doctors, and to partially manage her daily quality of life it's not weird to cook her three different dinners and she can only stomach one. This explodes our meal budget.
We're childfree but one of our dogs recently also got diagnosed with chronic illness. They are our kids, full stop.
Shit happens. Don't be a dick about it.
You sound like the exception not the rule.
I think you'd be surprised how many people live in cities and have medical expenses. This dude doesn't even have kids.
Word
Nope. If people having been living the exact same without changing many of their habits then it is absolutely fair that they would also be struggling paycheck to paycheck. They're effected just as the rest are. We need to focus on the jackass causing us to turn on eachother. We shouldn't be comparing ourselves because there are people who consider 30k/y as living lavish and think they also shouldn't be complaining.
If you can't play for the future you will be poor. I owe you no sympathy
You're one of the richest people on the planet, by default, and I think you should pay more in taxes and it should be on you to figure out your finances, because you're fucking rich and you just don't realize it.
The most wealthy places on earth should not be held up as the norm and most people should not live in those places. We should tax all of those people excessively and they should not have guaranteed wealth.
They use the median instead of mean here for a reason... Can you guess it?
Because mean income is a useless metric in most contexts due to it being extremely warped due to outliers (billionaires) since this country has the worst income inequality in the first world by far..? Do I get a trophy now
Wholely agree. I live in the most expensive region in the US on $160k base salary. My total annual expenses (including vacations, wants, gifts) don't exceed $50k, and of that $20k is rent.
Well yeah, but you probably make good choices which is arguably cheating.
I don't think that would be a winnable argument.
I think the point is, they are living paycheck to paycheck unless they choose to decrease the quality of living.
On one hand we can say these people are way better off than they deserve and laugh at their stupidity.
On the other hand, that's not a great sign for the economy. The "every day" kind of rich person isn't even that rich anymore. And lowering the ceiling pushes you into the floor.
If society were healthier and functioning, relative costs would be going down for everybody. But enshitification is the new big thing to earn another buck.
People who actually live paycheck to paycheck don't have this option and this is ludicrously offensive to people who actually live this way.
It's not about laughing at their stupidity but about the situation itself being laughable.
I thought lowering these gaps was the intention of Progressivism. Is it not?
I think it's just one more side effect of "American exceptionalism" and the culture of individuality and "me me me me" here, that people don't even see "change your lifestyle" as an option.
They were told about the American dream or whatever, but they were sold a bill of goods, and now they can't even comprehend cutting back on expenses in any meaningful way.
Lowering the gap between 10th and 90th percentile is meaningless if the very top doesn't change too
I mean, this depends on a lot of factors. Stop applying your own prejudice to this?
$150/y = ~$100-110k take home
The average monthly expenses (Living very much in your means, in an area with avg cost of living, not performing maintenance...etc) for a family of 4 is ~$101k/y
So you have between ~ -$80/m to +$700/m in disposable income. If you start doing the necessary maintenance & long term cost amatorization of living in the U.S. (ie. Having to buy a car eventually, if you own a home replacing the roof....etc). Suddenly you're close to negative. Meaning that when these events happen you have to cover their cost with credit card debt or some other form of debt, which means your cost of living is over time partially covered by debt.
This also seems that you are living not surviving... Much of the US is not really living, they are simply surviving. We should not measure the bar that low for what we consider acceptable quality of living standards.
Or, if you are in a marginally higher cost of living area that $700/m evaporates.
Even for a single person, a HCOL area will eat way that income to the point where eating out is a monthly luxury.
It sounds like a lot of money but depending on where you live it can be an incredibly small amount of money.
Famine, disease, collapse, or war. Those are historically the only ways inequality of anywhere near this level has been rectified.
We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health's.
You can see it in how it went from "essential workers are heroes!" back to "you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!" pretty much overnight in early 2023.
As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.
On the plus side, millennials aren't having fucking babies so we're killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it's a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
When they won't have enough workers to keep pushing exponential "growth" each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.
Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that's even possible.
As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.
Capitalism (depending on how you define it) is coming up on 600 years soon. That's usually the point at which systems start to break and new ones emerge. Unfortunately, if you're a fan of Marx you'll be aware of his theory that cycles of power relations and exploitation tend to reproduce themselves within these new systems - unless that cycle is broken.
Sounds like this might rectified soon, then.
I’d love to see this as a paycheck breakdown. Unless you have a history of debt, a huge house, or like 8 kids I don’t see how it’s not possible to do at least moderately well on 150k/y
Edit: before folks reply with a comment about people being worse off, I know. I agree. This is just a scenario description.
It is very easy to be strapped with a modest sized house or apartment in the "right" zip code.
As in a 1.2mil mortgage on a 3 bedroom house that's never been renovated since the 70s. That mortgage could be 5k / month.
150000 a year is 8.7k a month, after taxes. If you have student loans, any medical debt, kids, that remaining 3.7k is pretty critical. You aren't swimming in liquid chocolate every night and wiping with singles.
If you own a home things can happen out of nowhere. I personally just had to replace my sewer line last month. 17k for the work and 1.5k for new concrete. Not covered by my home insurance because I didn't opt for the rider on my account. My fault there... My finances are a bit different than the above description but if you were the 150 + paycheck to paycheck situation, you'd be in hot water.
This isn't a "woe to the 150 crowd" comment. I'm well aware folks are way, way worse off, but when a 150 household talks about being paycheck to paycheck, it's totally possible.
At least in CA where the property tax is 1%, last time I fed the info into one of those calculators a few months ago, a 1.2m house (exactly the type you describe) with a standard 20% down-payment would run closer to $8k/mo with good credit. That includes property tax and homeowners insurance, which is required to get a loan.
So yeah, that doesn't leave a whole lot to live off of.
There's also the upkeep cost for repairs and to renovate.
We've let our gutters stay broken for several years now because we just can't afford to get them fixed. We had to have an emergency repair to our heat pump yesterday and that's going to be hundreds of dollars out of pocket. We're on a single income. My wife gets paid well (not $150,000 a year well) and our mortgage is low, but we're barely making it.
$150k is twice what my parents made combined back in the 90s, and they lived a solid upper middle class life in an upscale suburb of a small city. Always had a nice TV and my dad and I both had PCs that we upgraded every year AND they saved up two years worth of college for me. Amazing how quickly things have changed. They bought their house for $180k and it's now worth nearly $500k.
My career now is generally a higher valued one than theirs, but adjusting for inflation, my pay has always been lower than theirs at the same point in their careers. And that's the story. Incomes may have doubled since the early-mid 90s, but everything else has tripled or quadrupled.
Inflation has doubled since 1999 so I'm not sure what your point is
Isn't a mortgage as high as your whole salary for 10 years unwise from the get go?
In general yes, but many many people are doing this to attempt a "normal" home the likes of which they grew up in, and that they themselves want to raise a kid in.
OR consider a household where 2 incomes of around 150 were earned when the house was purchased, but now one earner is not earning appreciably any more...maybe a stay at home parent or illness or whatever.
Again just saying some possibilities, not the normative experience.
I guess the rough reality is that some people want to live where their family lives but can’t easily afford it. I don’t know how far you need to live from SF for prices to return to reality, but I suspect it’s a 1h+ drive
Bay area
Yeah I could see 150k being poverty level there.
Such a rusty axe head
They couldn't afford a new one
Welcome to the jungle fellas. How’s that trickle down working for you now?
A lot of, if not most, folks in that income bracket vote democrat and hate republicans. These are tech folks who voted for Bernie. It isn't until you add another couple of zeros that you find the people funding the Republican party. 150k isn't elite, it's literally just barely middle class in any major city.
No, at that income level these people tend to vote Republican.
I linked to the data showing that in here yesterday if you want to go back it up, unlike your bogus claim.
So are you stereotyping democrats as poor and republicans as rich? And only republicans tout trickledown? Oh, and if you voted for any trickledown policies, you have to be a rich elite? Please. Saying six digits is middle class is elite speech. Maybe in tech hubs like California and Washington, but in the REST of America, 6 digits is still upper class. Or at the least upper echelon of middle.
Personally I know many people in that “bracket” and lower that DO give to the GOP and vote for them too. They even vote for trickledown policies because they believe they are rich and they will benefit. I’d love to see some statistics on your claim that a lot if not most people in the middle class vote blue.
And other thing, there is a metric fuckton of blue and white collar work out there that makes six digits. Not everyone that makes that much is in the tech sector.
Consider what that income will get you. Ignore the actual numbers. There's also a very big variable on lifestyle- dual income no kids is very different from a single breadwinner with 8 kids.
I am in a fairly big city in the Midwest (you've heard of it, but you would never think of it unprompted). $150k/year (household) would buy a medium-large single family home (2000 square feet, 3 or 4 bedrooms) in a good (but not exclusive) area, a pair of decent cars (well equipped new Honda Accord or similar, trading in after 5 years), retirement around age 65. Any kids would attend a good public school, or possibly a very inexpensive religious school. You would have yearly vacations, but it would be mostly domestic. Road trips to the grand canyon, Disney world, etc.
Does that describe upper class?
I live in a capital of a southern state, no more than 30 minutes outside city limits $150000 a year will get you several acres, 2500+ square foot house, multiple cars, trucks, ATVs, boats and all the goodies to go with them. Three weeks of vacation a year, with a hunting cabin in the mountains.
Does that describe middle class?
Location does matter. Both ways.
Oh absolutely. My point was that it being a middle class lifestyle is the norm, not the exception.
Understood, my point being classes are created by the .01% and have no meaning, we are all “lower class” unless you can buy a government representative.
Adam Smith observed in his epic that when people get more money they generally spend it on more/better housing. Today we have a few more luxury goods, to add to a house, but a house is still something people spend more and more money on when they get it.
I'm not sure that is bad. My dad died at 65 - what was the point of all the retirement savings he had saved up (at least my mom can enjoy it). Even if you live for much longer, most old people I know have failing bodies and so they can't really enjoy those old years. More and more my advice to people is save for a rainy day and an okay retirement, but don't save for a rich retirement - instead enjoy that difference now.
Sorry about your dad - I hope you got to enjoy some good times together before he passed.
That's because they're just passing a bunch of money around at the top.
All of them live in major cities and don't own property.
The only way I could reasonably see that is if those people bought houses when rates went up. I live in a high cost of living area and $150k would not be living paycheck to paycheck for my family (wife, 2 kids, and a dog). I guess I also don't have expensive tastes.
Define high cost living area. Wife with 2 kids and a pet, I assume you're going to need at least a 3 bedroom condo for a modest living arrangement.
Where I live, southern California, the average cost for a 3br condo is $4k per month. Mortgages at this time would be way more (standard 20% down).
Someone else estimated 150k is around 8.7k a month after taxes. So that's already almost half your income just for a roof over your head.
Include the expense of kids, student loans, car loans, health insurance, etc. Yeah, paycheck to paycheck isn't unrealistic.
Not everyone was lucky enough to be in the financial place in their life to buy a house 5 years ago.
I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, that's a bit high for after tax.
I make 172/year and after tax and benefits and what not in South Carolina, I'm at 8.6 a month, which is less than the 150 estimate. So in an average tax state and making 20k less? Might be more like 7.5-8.
Edit: granted of course, 401k contribution can change things a bunch
Fair enough. I'm sure there's a calculator to make it easy per state. But yeah, take home is deceptive, because typically someone making that kind of income is going to have health insurance contributions, retirement contributions, social security (not technically income tax, but fair enough to deduct IMO) taken directly out of their paycheck.
Without doing the estimates myself, either of your claims sound plausible, and even taking 8.7k as a generous estimate, it doesn't look good.
Big facts. Worker wages need to be adjusted for the last ${years since Reagan took office and initially screwed everything up for the common American} and then we should be okay.
My family is very similar. We aren't quite paycheck to paycheck, but things feel a lot tighter than they did before - we make 190 ish combined, which ends up being about 9k a month. We have one paid off car.
Mortgage - $2500 Utilities - $800 (electric, water, plain Internet and mnvo cell phone plan) Daughter's school - $1200/mo (obv this is a "non essential", but it's pretty cheap for a year round private school) Prescriptions - $1200/mo with insurance (although this usually comes in a single lump in January. Insurance also refuses to cover a few essentials which we pay out of pocket for, about $100/mo) Student loans - $800/mo
Which leaves us with around $2500/mo for entertainment, car/house repair (it's 40 years old and needs new things like a roof or hot water heater from time to time), groceries, any vacations, etc. My wife and I both have chronic conditions which are exhausting to deal with so we get house cleaning for $300/mo as well.
We are doing fine, but it seems like an exhausting cycle to try and build savings, and if we ever had to buy another car I don't know how we would swing an extra $500 payment every month, with what it seems vehicles cost these days.
All this to say, while we are ok, I have no idea how families making under 100k get by.
Most people are not paying $1200/month for childcare or $300/month for a maid. They also probably put a lot less toward retirement.
That said, good on you for recognizing that the average household is struggling.
Sure, for school age kids like my daughter that is true, but I will push back that toddler and infant childcare is, on average, extremely expensive.
If you don't have a grandparent or other relative to watch your kid, in a state like North Carolina you will be forking out around $800-900 a month per kid on average.
Which is why publicly funded options for preschool would be life-changing for so many people, especially single mothers and fathers.
I live in Seattle. Like I said, I can see this being true for people who got a mortgage at 5+%. But I don't think a third of people got houses at that rate so it would likely be closer $3k. Here the average 3br is around $3k/month.
But you missed one large part of the headline. It's people making $150k or more. So that includes a ton of people that make more than that. And also a ton of people not in SoCal or other HCOL areas.
To be fair, I live in a low cost of living area and having purchased a house this past January, if I dropped to 130k I might be paycheck to paycheck after a while. Which, granted is lower than the survey.
This being said, my mortgage payment is only $50 more than what my rent was about to increase to, because landlords are the devil.
I also didn't get a big house, it was well under the national average for cost and size, very much a "starter house". But still over 300k, because housing is a nightmare.
I'm somehow sure that plenty of people were still buying houses when rates went up. Once again, people blaming choices and circumstances. It feels eerily similar to how people judge the homeless and talk about their "bad choices."
Seeing this first hand between myself and some of my close coworkers who all earn similar incomes with similar sized families, I'd be willing to bet a majority of those 32% (who don't live in the bay area or Manhattan) are financially illiterate and live paycheck to paycheck because they blow all their money on stupid shit.
I still manage to save, pay my credit card off each month, and pay all the household bills while still having money for stupid hobbies and yearly vacations while they constantly take out loans, loans to pay for other loans, finance even small purchases, have multiple maxed out credit cards, and keep kicking the can down the road on paying off their 20 year old student loans. I'd have a little more sympathy if they didn't make snide comments like "must be nice" when I mention an upcoming trip, or argue that I'm stupid for upping my 401k contributions during our recent market dip while suggesting its better to sell it off when the market is down so you don't lose your money.
This is a completely unfair assessment. I make way less than that, and this is what results they get? Either they didn't try hard enough with more taking the test, or they are THAT financially tone deaf. Soo stupid
I don't understand your point? The article and the survey found a 3rd of people earning over $150k were living pay cheque to pay cheque, but also 36% in the bracket below and over 55% of people on $50k or less.
Living pay cheque to pay cheque is a sign of financial distress but not the only sign. People's living costs also match their lifestyles - it's possible for someone earning $150k to be living pay cheque to pay cheque as the cost of living, schools, transport, etc are higher. Of course people in that bracket have the "luxury" of being able to move down the quality of life ladder - move to a cheaper area, cut back on their lifestyle.
Whatever you may think about people earning that much, the message is that the cost of living crisis is affecting everyone and pulling down living standards for everyone. Not only is it hard to live your previous lifestyle but it's impossible to aspire for more.
The only exception is the millionaires and billionaires who continue to screw the rest of us over. We have more in common with someone who earns $150k a year than someone who earns $500k or who is sitting on millions or billions in asset wealth.
The sooner the middle classes realise they're aligned with the poor and not the rich, the better. Maybe then they will stop voting for shit right wing politicians who only benefit the truly rich.
Try living in a high CoL area on 150k. Don’t bother with the “just move” or whatever trite oversimplified solution. People live where they live. Not everyone wants to earn 75k and live in Ardmore, Oklahoma so that their money goes further. If you can find a 75k job in Ardmore, anyway.
Higher taxes, higher mortgage or rent costs, cost of commuting all add up fast.
That said, burning through $150k does seem a stretch. I lived in a major metro area on a lot less (we were definitely poor), it is possible to keep expenses low, but it sure isn’t comfortable at all.
Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it didn't. 75, 000 a year is still less than what I make.
I make less than a third of that and make it work (barely). Some people need to seriously reassess their priorities or something.
Many probably live in higher cost of living areas.
And it's entirely possible/likely if they move to a lower cost of living area they will suddenly not make anywhere near as much and still live paycheck to paycheck.
You don't get any sort of financial assistance?
I grew up on the poverty line. Food Stamps and Affortable Housing programs got us by.
I worked my ass off to get above the threshold of qualifying for any sort of assistance, and now I live at about the same level because food and rent eat up the difference between what I make and what my parents made.
Nope, no direct financial assistance. Though my parents are close by, and do help with things like inviting me over to dinner like once a month and helping me buy used furniture, if that counts. I shop very frugally and don't have expensive hobbies. The only thing I'm really missing is savings.
We are cut from different cloths.
I hope you the best.
Maybe. At least I'm not making $150k and somehow still struggling lol
Ya.
You can't figure out how to make 150k, but you think you are better than people who have.
Tried to end it nice, but fuck you are a raging asshole.
Do you make $150k and are struggling to make ends meet? Please clue me in to the struggles, I'm all ears.
Household, not solo, income of about 150k.
About same quality of life as I had growing up.
No kids.
Bottom barrel health insurance is a LOT more expensive than it is for people who make less. Drive a Honda Civic, but I still pay more for car insurance than my buddies that make less and drive Mustangs/Chargers/etc. My mom got WIC. I don't. My mom qualified for Affordable Housing. I don't.
I mean... I endorse you punching up, but I don't think you aim those punches high enough, which makes you look like the kind of asshole who it makes sense that you can't find actual gainful employment to advance yourself.
If this conversation proceeds, I need to know if you have reproduced, if you have been divorced, and if you are on any form of public assistance.
I'm no divorce/no kids/ can't qualify for public assistance and my rent, food, and insurance costs have me living paycheck to paycheck.
At a current household income of, specifically, about 130k, far higher than I ever thought I'd pull off, there is NO shot at me getting a mortgage and I'm still living at the standard of life whose tax statements include kids, divorces, far lower paying jobs, and public assistance.
Aha so you ARE taking it personally, I had a feeling. I'll go through the math with you for the sake of discussion, name calling aside.
I have no kids, no marriage, no car payment, no student loans, no public assistance.
Take home pay after taxes and benefits is about $2500. Housing is $1500. Utilities are $250 including A/C during summer. Car insurance I'm rounding up to $150. Gas is $150. Food is ridiculous of course, looks like $250 for groceries and let's say $150 for combined coffee/sometimes lunch/maybe a pizza here and there. Add em all up and I'm at... $2450. Like I said, I barely make it work. :)
There are many other details I'm leaving out for the sake of anonymity, and I will admit I did get lucky in some regards, but I can imagine my figures are quite extendable with someone who has a roommate or two, who got handed down a family member's car, who has a decent side hussle, who reaps the benefits of minimizing their bills, etc.
If made 3x as much as I did, with the same monthly costs, I would be in a ridiculously better place financially. I would have a decent amount of savings and could eventually have enough for a mortgage down payment. I could even have a good set of investments that would further contribute to my income. There would be no excuse to still be struggling, hence my hostility. Not saying to not eat the rich, also not saying our system isn't fundamentally fucked and that our current and future generations might not ever be homeowners, but I feel my original point still stands.
What's even the point of your comment, I'm not trying to be rude it just seems unhelpful and the attitude is prevalent. Sure, if people adjust their habits they could make due, but the problem is the fucking robbery of all working people so it's just wasting time bickering with points like this.
The point is that there is something fishy going on if you make $150k and still can't make ends meet.
My hunch is that there is obvious excess spending on things that aren't needed, and downsizing is the best solution. Families don't need a $80k SUV when a sedan would do for example. Joneses be damned.
Your 150k number continues to highlight how oblivious you are to the current state of the economy.
1 mil... maybe that has gotten past the orphan crushing machine/boring dystopia threshold, but there is almost no physical quality of life difference between someone making 50k a year and someone making 150k a year.
How does the old adage go?
Mo money mo problems.
The $150k was literally in the OP lol?
You've called me an asshole multiple times yet you've been incredibly toxic in this comment thread.
Yeah, I was making a flat 50k a few years ago, and seeing some college classmates making three times as much complaining about how poor they were could only make me laugh.
I'm doing much better now, but it still drives me nuts when people don't know how to appreciate what they have.
Someone can appreciate what they have and still struggle to support a family, repair and maintaine a house, pay deductibles and co-pays for medical treatments, support an unemployed or ailing family member, pay student loans, pay car loans, send remittances to family in a home country, etc. They could simply live in a HCOL area. There are many not unusual scenarios that could have a household making $150k/year struggle.
It drives me nuts when people think their circumstances define someone else's, too.
Oh boo hoo. Try making about half that, like me and my wife do (combined). It isn’t fun.
Dude. Get a grip. These people are far closer to you in wealth than the people who fund SuperPACs or own news organizations. You have much more in common with someone who makes $150k/year than you do with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch, or whoever the fuck else has obscene amounts of money. Those people, the billionaire class, the 0.01%, are the people using their larges to influence politics and media.
These people making $150k/year are overextending themselves, I get it, but if I actually spent the money I wanted to spend on improving my life, especially in relation to things like my health, I would be looking at needing to spend that kind of money each year. My teeth are falling out of my god damned head and I've gotten the cost of such things shared with me and it's out of fucking control. I'm talking like $10k for one of the many problems I have in my mouth. The others aren't cheaper. All it means is that we are so poor that we're literally putting off life-saving medical care because it's fucking unaffordable. All people making $150k a year are doing is just barely scraping by while actually getting that care.
Oh no, they own a single super shitty, hollowed out house that is busted as hell and needs massive repairs constantly. Yeah, man, they're doing so much better than us just because they have a house. /s Like maybe take a minute and understand a lot of those people just bought their house, and it's not like they were buying it in their 20's.
People making this much are not your enemy, they are the people you have to convince that the system is broken and get them on your side.
People whose entire wealth and income comes from investments are the people who are your real fucking enemy.
Because guess what, these $150k/year stiffs still work for a fucking living.
Because I get it, it feels like they have so much more when they're making over $100k a year more than you, but like, they're still treading water, just like us, just like this article points out. Trust me, if you were making that money, you'd still be pretty broke unless you didn't have kids.
Source: my broke ass sister, a lawyer who lives in a fucking hovel that needs tons of repair and is being bled dry by medical bills, child care, a psychopathic narcissist of an ex-husband (who literally lives off of credit cars and spends like Paris Hilton) and housing costs. She didn't buy her home until she was over 50, she's Gen X. She's on thin ice just like me, even though she's doing better by a lot of measures. The only "investments" she has is her fucking 401K to try to have a halfway decent retirement (ha, as if).
EDIT: Second Source: Just remembered a conversation I had with a friend years ago when I worked at a local mexican restaurant. He was upset at the owner, because he had like a million dollars in the bank. I explained that a lot of that was because he had been in business a long time, and frankly, you need that kind of money to keep a restaurant running (thin margins). I told him at the time that any huge disruptive thing could eat into that million and make a lot of it go away fast. COVID hit, and that restaurant nearly bit the dust, but only JUST scraped through the other side. I bet they don't have a million in the bank now, they had to shut down to satellite stores where they sold their tortillas.
Hey, re your teeth, if you can afford this, and it hasn't changed since then, my dad had to get something like $25,000 in dental work, so they took a trip to Costa Rica, spent about $3000 on the trip, and got the dental work for free. It sucks that people have to resort to things like that, but if you think you could afford that, I would definitely recommend looking into it.
I currently have 1200 dollars and live in my mother's basement, because I'm her full time carer while she recovers from cancer. My current retirement plan is a rope. I have a master's degree in STEM, but you'd be surprised how many homeless people have those too.
Someone earning 150k would have to work thousands of years to become a billionaire, true.
The ultra rich are the true enemy, true.
But Jesus Christ, people earning 150k are not 'just scraping by'.
Seriously. Get a grip. How out of touch do you have to be to think that? No concept of what true poverty looks like.
As a 40-something guy who literally has cancer and no retirement savings and is wondering how he can even stay alive and has had a year of nothing but suicidal ideation, I still have the capacity to have compassion and not blame other working stiffs for how bad things are for me. I have a degree and I work at a fucking pizza place.
Out of touch my ass, I'm literally living a similar experience. Sorry I have the ability to consider other people's situations instead of just my own. It's called empathy, motherfucker. Have you heard of it??
Look, I'm really not in a good place either, as I assume you gathered. It's been so long for me. At one point I found myself crying into the toilet I was cleaning for one of my night time temp jobs. Like you, I'm basically hanging on by a thread. It's been going on so long, I no longer know where depression ends and I begin or if the original me still exists.
I don't know about you, but I really shouldn't be having this discussion, so we'll leave it at that.
I'm just going to wish you luck, strength, or whatever gets you through today and tomorrow. Even if it's drowning out the noise, even if it's spite, anger or curiousity about something like the conclusion of a dumb tv show you don't even really like.
Maybe things will get better for us, even if right now we perhaps don't really believe in it anymore.
Thanks for that, friend. Life is hard, and I don't blame you for being in a low place because of it. I appreciate your candor, openness, and willingness to hear me.
I wish and hope for the best for you, too. All of us deserve better.
Also, unrelated, dope username.
I'm not who you were replying to, but I just want to wish you the absolute best of luck in your health battle. Empathy is in short supply at the best of times, but showing empathy when you're in the middle of something so hard is next level. I bet you also make an excellent pizza, even if that's not where you expected to be working.
I'll have my fingers crossed for you, friend. Fuck cancer and everything that it entails.
Cheers, mate. I hope for the best for all of us. It can happen to any of us at any time, and that's part of why it's so stressful. Making good money isn't some sort of panacea against your life falling apart.
I mean, Christ, just think of all the people who have chronic pain that became opiate addicts who also had real, productive jobs who ended up on the street due to addiction to the solution to their chronic pain. Life isn't fair, and even having money saved away can't protect you from everything.
Many of them bought this on themselves
If these people are financially struggling, it’s by choice (e.g. buying property).
And I don’t feel sympathy for them. They can reduce their spending and survive.
People could literally say the same things about my financial situation, which is dire. I was on the verge of homelessness earlier this year. I have heard plenty from discompassionate people who say I could have tried harder/worked harder/done more and that my shortcomings are things I brought on myself.
They wouldn't be entirely wrong, but I would still think they are kind of a stuck up asshole.
Same difference. Do you talk about the homeless the same way?
Do I talk about the homeless the same way as the top 20% of income earners?
No.
Do you have any more bad faith leaps you want to take here?
Now we can't even buy property at $150k without being called out for making bad choices? Holy shit the working class is lowering their expectations way too much.
People used to be able to have a house, a car, hobbies, have medical help, all the house appliances, and yearly vacations on one income at some mindless factory job. Expect more, people. Demand more. You only can't have it because the rich are hoarding everything and stealing your money. Don't shrug and take it. Don't criticize others for expecting it. Fucking demand it for yourself. It's your work making them rich.
You might have heard of student loans. They can get rather high. You might have also heard about high cost of living areas. Houses can be pretty expensive. Another thing you might have heard about is high mortgage rates.
A new veterinarian with a specialist cert (which requires an undergrad degree, graduate degree, a shitty pay internship, and a shitty pay residency for a long time) will be sitting on $200,000 in loans and make about $200k. Now, if that person lives in Los Angeles and wants to buy a home they are going to have a loan for a million at 7%. Take-home pay on $200k after retirement/insurance/taxes is around $10k/month. Mortgage on a million is $7k/mo. Loan payments on $200k is around $1000/mo. Taxes on that house are about $1000/mo. Right there the take-home pay comes down to $1000/mo to pay for food ($600), utilities ($100), cell phone ($70), car ($300), car insurance ($100), gas ($100) internet ($100), etc. You might notice that those numbers add up to more than $1000.
Sure, that veterinarian who is already 35 years old now after all that schooling can just rent instead of buy a tiny house, but rent still costs $3000/mo in a big city for a small apartment.
I don't see how that's possible unless you have a huge family, you have some sort of chronic disease that insurance doesn't cover, or you're wildly irresponsible. Even in a high cost-of-living area, a normal family of four could live quite comfortably on that much money and still save some of it.
(I don't think that many high-earning people are wildly irresponsible. I suspect that this statistic isn't right.)
It's called living in a city. Housing is expensive as fuck in cities.
I live in a one-bedroom in midtown Manhattan. It costs me about a hundred dollars a day and I'm still saving money on my software developer salary.
That's pretty steep for a 1 bedroom apartment, 3000ish I assume based on what you said, and I'm guessing it's not that big. I meanwhile live in a college town in the middle of nowhere and my 3 bedroom house with a garage and basement is 2100 a month.
Yeah rent in desirable cities is high. It’s the price you pay for being in a cultural mecca with a lot of career opportunities. Not for everyone obviously but a lot of people would absolutely not want to live in a college town either.
I’ve done both and enjoy cities way more and consider the rent money well spent. Making that transition to a big city was transformative for me personally and my career.
The funny thing is that despite spending all that money, I actually hate living here. It's crowded and I can't get around by driving. I used to pay $450 a month for a parking spot but I gave up on that because even though I could park near where I lived, I wasn't able to park at most of the places I needed to go. (And now they're adding tolls and I will have to pay about $20 each time I drive to my own home.)
My elderly relatives are here and I want/need to be close to them. It's not realistic for them to move, but if they could then I would immediately go with them somewhere where a cabin on a 40-acre lot costs less than my apartment. 40 acres is like having 8 Manhattan city blocks all to yourself!
You're software developer tho. So you're a rich person anyways. You don't understand the struggle
The OP is talking about people with software-developer salaries.
A lot of people live in cities and make far less than 150k, even when you add both parents income. They do just fine. Housing where you live might be expensive ,but there are more affordable houses around. Probably not in areas you would be willing to live.
When people hear "living paycheck to paycheck" they automatically assume it means barely making enough money for essentials. It for sure can mean that, but often people living paycheck to paycheck make good money, they just don't live within their means. It's not hard to buy a nicer house and a nicer car than your can really afford, and run up credit card debt, and find yourself in a situation where you can't pay your bills because you're overextended, even with a good salary.
A few additional things to consider:
I continually rotate debt through 0% interest deals on credit cards, it's how I've paid for a lot of my home improvements.
Paid for a new roof and awning on the house that way, currently paying for solar panels and a large electrical project.
If a credit card offers me 0% interest for a year, why WOULDN'T I do that instead of paying cash?
I have three different cards now that every time I pay them off they're like "Heyyyy... here's some balance transfer checks... 0% until January '25..."
Boo hoo? I make a bit over half of half of that, and I'm getting by just fine. Maybe cut back on the avocado toast if you make 4x what I make and can't manage to live within those means.
Cost of living varies from state to state, and city to city.
And where is this place where you can't live and save on 150k USD?
You can pick just about any city in the U.S. and you'll find insane housing prices.
https://www.zillow.com/manhattan-new-york-ny/apartments/
So get off Manhattan and you will be fine.
Fucking GREAT for you, no one asked, thanks for being an asshole.