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- news@lemmy.world
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- news@lemmy.world
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I wish I was making even $50k. I don’t really think leaders in this country care about the majority of Americans. They see what we make, they KNOW the majority of us are struggling, but they refuse to help anyone but themselves.
Oh no, they discovered right wing politics
Six figures is a huge range. Could be $100k/yr or $900k lol. I doubt the latter are in survival mode unless they just can’t stop leasing jet skis or something.
Yeah, I read this title, I thought this means $100,000 households are no longer above the liviable wage line. Less catchy headline, but more believable.
If they’re in survival mode then what the fuck are the other 80% of us in??
I thought making >100,000 would be awesome but I’m just living paycheck to paycheck.
I was just telling a co-worker the other day; growing up in a family of 4 with a stay at home Mom. We didn’t struggle, 4 bedroom home, 2nd 2 car garage in the back my dad built, pool in the backyard (above ground, but a pool nonetheless) and my brother and I basically got what we wanted. The most money my dad ever made in a single year was about $80k as a union pipefitter. My wife and I both work full time, I make 6 figures alone plus her salary, with a single child who’s now 16. We are barely making it in our 2 bedroom duplex. Which we were only able to purchase thanks to a USDA loan with zero down.
Edit: corrected grammar
80K 30 years ago is is 175K today, probaby more if you think about purchasing power.
you were upper middle class dude.
but also where you live matters. 6 figures is nothing in a major city. it’s a lot in a rural area or minor city. six figures in nyc/sf/boston/seattle is a necessity for a studio apartment. if you make like 60-80K you need roommates.
my dad made like 25K a year so we had to live 2-2.5 hours from a major city in order to afford a basic life. when he retired at 66 he was only making 50K a year in 2004, and we still lived 1.5 hours from a major city even though we had ‘upgraded’ from the crappy rural town to a exurb.
But wages haven’t mixed to match. I’d be very surprised if pipe fitters are making anything close to 175k.
100k and up is still frequently thought of as being a well paying job.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=80000&year1=199511&year2=202509
You were pretty close.
Big keyword there is Union it helped even people not in the union. Graph union membership to avg income from 1970 onwards and its crystal clear.
It’s crazy, I feel so irresponsible but it’s just the economic situation we’re in.
I cannot find a single place to rent that’s only 1/3rd of my income and not half.
People who have not looked for apartments or houses right now have no idea what the true cost is. We just moved and to rent a house in our old neighborhood (1700sqft, 2 car garage, nice suburb but build in the 80s, near the freeway) is $2100/month. The first apartment I rented out of college is now $1500/month and it was a 1 bedroom 650sqft. Not luxury or anything, a normal inner city apartment.
Probably because when you first formed that idea, 100k was quite a bit. But 100k today is worth what 72k was just 10 years ago
Same
So sick of this mythical number. Most of the places you can earn it, life is correspondingly more expensive. There is no universal magic number.
how? are you living in a mansion?
Before my dad retired, he ran his own business. Nothing big, just him and a couple of others, but enough to afford a decent sized house, two cars, and a comfortable lifestyle.
A few years ago, he and I were talking about how the CoL has gone crazy since the early 2000s and he looked up the apartment he rented while he was in college in the 80s. It’s still there, a small studio apartment in the city near the college. In his own words, he said that the cost to rent that apartment a couple of years ago was more than he made running his own business.
Where I live - wages have always been shitty but it was a low cost of living city (we literally had the lowest grocery prices in the nation and housing market was “depressed”. You could and can always get a job of some sort here, and because costs were low a roommate or two got you through with money to go to shows on the weekend or have a car. And a cat!
Housing and food now are average for the nation but wages are still lower here than average.
My NET pay after taxes and benefits and 401k is not twice the average rent for a one bedroom apartment here now. And you used to be able to rent houses so cheap, there were slumlords and people who owned a couple of houses and rented one out. No more. A house costs more than my whole monthly net to rent, before electricity or water, just the rent.
We bought a house for 5x what my old shithole of a house did cost (and there are none of those left, they get flipped or torn down for luxury housing) and even that amount would be cheap for it now, and we love it, but yeah we struggle with the cost to pay for it and maintain it. That’s a choice, yes, and we know it, but in a very limited set of choices.
All that is being built is high end expensive housing but there are not many people here earning enough for that.
No, you’re overspending.
Depends on the area, and it can be hard to move out of big cities sometimes.
it’s also hard to stop buying ubereats evernight.
Uhhh… no, it’s not. Learn to cook. Hell, just learn to heat up frozen foods.
Damn you’re right I should think about cutting out avocado toast and lattes
GTFO boomer
deleted by creator
This. Probably lives in some fancy apartment
Americans with six figure incomes are not the enemy. We need them on our side in the fight against the Americans with eight, nine, and higher figure incomes
Put bluntly, those who live off labour aren’t the enemy. Those who live off property (aka others’ labour) are.
Yes, but that definion isn’t that clear cut anymore as it was during the industrial revolution. Common people have pensions, i.e. stocks. Workers ‘invest’ in their home as real estate. Executive managers can be still just workers even if they make a million bucks. The analysis isn’t that cut and dry if lots of people have investments on top of their wage job. Everyone not living hand to mouth is a kind of petit-bourgeoisie. The vast majority are not proletariat anymore.
I don’t want you to think I’m anti-leftist, because I definitely support significant redistribution and an end to capitalism. Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold. Alternative suggestions are welcome
If you can’t quit your job and live off your investments and previous earnings, you are firmly in the proletariat.
Lumping in those who day trade on T212 with those buying into investment schemes at the clubhouse isn’t helpful. “It’s a big fucking club” and it’s pretty obvious whether you’re in it or not.
I think the definition of working class is still pretty simple regardless of modern financial complexities. If you rely on a paycheck to make a living you are proletariat. If you own enough capital that you don’t have to work, congrats, now you are petit bourgeois.
Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold.
Yeah, one of the things that really shaped my views on fairness in wealth distribution was studying corporate law (and the legal cases that shaped what Delaware corporate law is today). That history adds a lot of complexity to figuring out who is the “owner” class and who is the “labor” class. Highly compensated executives often have their shareholders over a barrel, and the legal system is designed to protect management from shareholders, so long as the corporation makes some minimal token gestures towards shareholder value. In practice, shareholders have very limited means of controlling a corporation (mainly by electing directors, who tend to be officers/managers of other companies and sympathize with managers and give quite a bit of leeway when only part time supervising the officers they often play golf with).
And we can see this play out in the modern era. We have a bunch of wannabe finance bros, hopeful future millionaires, talking about financial topics and cheerleading their heroes (CEOs and founders), often being willing marks in financial investment scams. They believe that holding capital will help them survive further divergence between the haves and the have nots, but history shows that when push comes to shove, only power matters. No amount of accumulated wealth can protect against power, and those with power can always use that power to enrich themselves.
So I don’t find it particularly useful to draw bright lines on who is or isn’t the enemy based on their financial situation. We should recognize the power structures themselves, and how power is exercised (politically, financially, legally, culturally, and the old standby, violently), and work to influence things through those levers (including the power to change the levers themselves).
That’s stupid, under that definition small business owners are the enemy. Not to mention that there’s no genuine argument as to why owning property or living off it is inherently bad in any way.
This is why I keep saying that Marxism has and well truly lived past it’s usefulness. Now it’s just an outdated ideology that people try to slap on to a world it wasn’t made for.
under that definition small business owners are the enemy
The absolute worst employers I ever had were small business owners: micromanaging, exploitative zero-sum-minded swine. There was a reason their businesses stayed small.
Living off of owning property isn’t inherently bad? Whatttttt
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm
It is. Of course living off of property is bad. Who is doing all the work for those leeches?
If one man gets a dollar they didn’t earn, someone else deserves a dollar they didn’t get
“living off of your property” is shorthand (and so maybe we should be more explicit) for “living off of the production and labor of other people who need access to your property to do that labor”.
So yea, i think it is exploitative to restrict access your property to someone who would use it to reproduce themselves each day (a home) or would use it to produce other valuable goods and services (a job) and to require that person to pay you for access (that home again) or you’ll pay them wages less than what they produce (that job).
And i think exploitative is inherently bad.
There’s quite a few assumptions here that I disagree with:
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Property relations are inherently tied to exploitation - That’s just not true. Voluntary exchange is not exploitative. For example, let’s suppose a musician makes their livelihood by owning a music school where they sell music lessons, and they need more instructors to meet demand so they go out and hire one. The person being hired is someone who sells their skills for a living, and they applied for this position of their own volition and signed a contract for a wage they find satisfactory… how is that exploitative? This is a win-win situation.
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Ownership of property is the same as extraction of surplus value - Again, this is just not true. For example, someone living off their own farm without tenants or employees wouldn’t fit this critique.
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Restricting access to property is inherently bad - First of all, I don’t know what “reproduce themselves each day” is supposed to even mean, that’s just nonsense. Regardless, restricting access to property is literally how societies manage resources. Exclusion is often necessary to prevent overuse and conflict, and when based on fair agreements, it supports both individual rights and social stability. There’s a reason why human civilization evolved throughout history to favor private ownership.
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Labor is the only source of value in a society - This is false. Things like land (natural resources), technology, knowledge, entrepreneurship, innovation, and capital (tools, infrastructure, machines) also produce value in an economy. Of course labor is important and valuable, but it is not the sole source of value. Holding this assumption as true is just economic illiteracy because you can’t run an economy with just labor alone.
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Inequality is the same as exploitation - Inequality is a difference in outcomes or opportunity while exploitation is unfair advantage. Not all inequality is exploitative, some of it is caused by things like effort, talent, merit, or choice. Exploitation, on the other hand, involves coercion or injustice, which makes it morally distinct. Exploitation can cause inequality, but not all inequality is exploitative. In this sense profit is not inherently exploitation even if it can be if obtained in certain ways.
When you remove these assumptions from the equation, there isn’t really a coherent argument left. Your argument only makes sense if you accept the Marxist framework as true without a second thought, which I don’t. I reject both Marxist analysis and proposals. I’m not entirely dismissive of Marxist critiques, but they have to be framed in a way where they’re able to stand on their own merits for me to consider accepting them. Otherwise, there’s no point because Marxism and its assumptions are simply outdated. It’s an 18th century framework and ideology that was made by men of that time for societies of that time. The world has changed since then and modern economies don’t work the same way anymore.
It’s an 18th century framework
You’re off by a century.
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Well said
Those who live off property (aka others’ labour) are.
This is everyone with a 401(k) for retirement. Ie, what they will be loving off of. Not sure why you are labeling the vast majority of people the enemy…
Hell, since you are including ‘other’s labour’, then this would also include anyone living off Social Security, a pension, disability, etc. All of that money comes from other’s labour.
Your brush is way, way, way too broad. You have marked almost everyone the enemy at some point in their lives.
There’s obviously a difference between people benefitting from social services and people enriching themsleves by hoarding capital.
The person I replied to should not label those people the enemy then. As I said, he is painting with much too wide of a brush.
Lower 6 figures today is middle class. Or at least what middle class buying power was 40 years ago.
You can’t afford to buy a single family home on $100k/yr in my area. So I’m not sure it really meets the classic definition of middle class anymore.
Middle class didn’t mean a big McMansion or desirable area. It meant a modest house in a small lot in a boring suburb of someplace like Detroit where you’d work for Ford or something.
Our ideas of what kind of house we should have is really distorted. It’s like pickup trucks. What was considered an everyday pickup 40 years ago was 1/3rd the size of the behemoths available today, and of course today’s trucks cost $80,000 compared to the $6,500 of something like a ‘85 Toyota Pickup ($20k in today dollars).
Every 1950s 1k square foot track home in my area is 1 million or more no matter how dilapidated within 2hours of the metro
“Desirable area”
It’s where the jobs are
“…high paying jobs are.”
And that is the problem.
Capitalism run amok with the increasing need to push the line higher and maximize profits resulting in gluttony eating up all the spare money in a market.
Lots of homes are easily affordable with that income. Buy elsewhere.
Show me the place where you can both earn the $100k AND afford the homes. Places with higher wages also have higher costs. It doesn’t help someone in Seattle to tell them go buy a home in Oklahoma.
There’s quite a few major cities in the US where houses are averaging around 300k which a 100k salary would easily cover the purchase of. Pittsburg, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, St Louis for examples just off the top of my head. And if you look in rural areas between these major cities you can easily snag a 100k home so if you ever find yourself burnt out from your high paying career there’s that option too
Sure but that doesn’t say anything about the wages there. How many $100k jobs am I going to find in Milwuakee and Detroit? I work in tech so I can tell you now the answer is close to zero.
This source says that median household income in Pittsburgh is in the low $60ks. And while housing costs are 2% below national average, utility costs are 20% above national average 🤷♂️
How many $100k jobs am I going to find in Milwuakee and Detroit?
These are literally major cities with populations measured in the millions. There’s plenty of high paying jobs to be had. And the best part is, since home prices aren’t measured in the millions you can survive on a lower income.
Also I work in tech too. I’ve interviewed for jobs making $80-120k in some of the listed cities. I know people making over 100k in some of the listed cities. Median income is just that, the median. Some people are going to make more and some people are going to make less. Highly skilled workers in any major city will make high pay. Sure you might shave off 10-20% from your expected wage in your sector in a lower cost of living city but your housing costs will likely be literally be half or a third of that when compared to LA, New York City or the San Francisco Bay Area, plus with that lower cost of living comes more options if you become burnt out from your highly paid and likely high stress job, you can afford to jump ship and change careers
Yes… but you have to choose more slum-y areas. And if you have kids, they’re gonna get buillied so much.
Source, I am that kid. Moved from Brooklyn to Philly, sure, housing was more affordable, but school ratings went from 8/10 to like a 3/10. Such hell.
you have to choose more slum-y areas
Here is a random home I found after only a few seconds of looking. 3 bedroom home in Colorado Springs for $265k. Easily affordable at the stated $100k/yr income.
You can’t afford to buy a single family home on $100k/yr in my area.
you have to choose more slum-y areas
Lots of homes are easily affordable with that income. Buy elsewhere.
Cmon, you can’t cherry pick a house and say “just uproot your entire life, there are cheaper houses out there!”
Schools, job market, support system and more all play a huge part. It isn’t as simple as “just move.”
Keep in mind you’re replying to a literal Nazi, they don’t do much arguing in good faith.
The thing is though that unless you have a fully remote job you are probably not going to stay earning 100k in colarado springs
Median household income in Colorado Springs is $83k/yr. Said 3 bedroom home for $265k is quite affordable on $83k/yr.
unless you have a fully remote job
And if this is the case, you are doing even better and have a shitload more options.
There’s the additional cost that my whole family and all my friends live in the “Greater Seattle area” where housing is outrageous and climbing. If I were to move somewhere more affordable it would mean losing my entire social support system.
Low 6 figure is the minimum required to have a middle class lifestyle for one person (not a family) in California. And when I say middle class lifestyle, I mean not having to worry about bills, but still not able to buy a house or a new car without decades of saving or massive debt. Maybe you can afford a vacation once a year if you haven’t had any unexpected medical problems.
Especially when you factor in the cost of living in places where $100k jobs are to be found. “Six figures” may sound like a fortune if you’re sitting in rural Ohio but it’s little more than a decent wage in Seattle.
Yeah. The problem is that the goalposts keep getting pushed away faster than income is keeping up. Someone might have what is considered a good paying job, but the buying power for major purchases like cars and homes keeps taking hits. On top of that the bills get steeper and steeper. Six figures should be a fortune.
100k when you are salaried and working 70 hours while technically is still 100k it’s not really lol.
Average that shit out and stop lying to ourselves. 500k a year? Yeah fuck those people. 100k a year? Join us. Burn it all down.
Also, a quick reminder that it’s not normal to be working 70 hours a week.
Id even be content to let the eight figure incomes slide… at least at first. Lets start with the 100-200 dudes that have a ten digit income and work our down… the tens and nines might be enough to fix things and still leave us with plenty of ultra rich to complain about.
Trying to actively seek and categorize enemies is inherently problematic. A good ideology doesn’t seek to eliminate enemies, but to bring about positive results.
A long-lasting ideology recognizes enemies and how to defend against them, and sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
This isn’t a video game. Long lasting ideologies are flexible, practical, unifying, and care deeply about the means of achieving their goals. Short lasting ideologies are rigid, idealist to a fault, seek to divide and exclude, and care more about the ends than the means.
I don’t consider them my enemy. I consider them privileged. Am I supposed to weep for them that they can’t buy their kids the top of the line xyz or go on vacation this year? Should I spend emotional labor because they need to move to a smaller house or stop eating out? 6 figure salary isn’t rich these days I grant you but it is a comfortable amount unless they’re trying to live beyond their means.
Six figures could be anything between 100k and 999k. If they are on the lower end, they aren’t really that privileged, especially if they are living in an area that necessitates a pay that high.
Hell, there are some places that 100k would be closer to the regions “poverty line” so to speak.
Yep, CA Dept of Housing considers an individual making less than $109k in San Francisco “low-income” - that’s about what you’d need to qualify for a 1br apartment there.
Upper middle class, used to be poor. I’ve been fighting for things my whole life that would disadvantage our current comfort if they were put in place. I also just helped organize a union at work, because most of my coworkers make half what I make (I’m not in management, but with a tech salary). In contract negotiations. We are not all shitty, though many of my neighbors in a nice neighborhood are greedy trumpists, whining about the scary poors, so I could certainly understand some animosity towards people who enjoy comfort in this shitty economy. But I think many people that grow up poor and get money remember what it means to be poor.
I used to make low 6 figures. Work owned me. I had to be reachable nights, weekends, holidays, vacations. 50 hour weeks were slow weeks. I finally walked away. Money is no good if you don’t have time to enjoy it. I make half of what I used to make but am much happier. I actually get to spend time with my wife, hobbies, and friends.
I used to make well into six figures as a programmer. Now I drive a school bus and I’m vastly happier. I’m always surprised when I wake up on a Monday morning and realize that I’m not dreading going to work (I actually look forward to seeing my elementary school kids). I make less than one-sixth of what I used to but I have savings and already own my house outright, so it’s all good.
It’s going to suck when AI takes over for CDL holders, however.
Is this… A real possibility?
The AI driving thing? I don’t see why it won’t be a thing eventually. If kids get run over from time to time, they’re easy to replace at that age.
No I mean quitting tech to be a bus driver
It’s all a numbers game really. But chances are the savings and spending you made while working a high paying job will greatly work in your favor when shifting to a much lower paying job. 5 years of 12% 401k savings (6% plus employer matching) while working at 100k will save equivalent to 10-15 years at 50k thanks to compound interest. Nice furniture, clothing and electronics you bought while working a high paying job will still be there while you work a lower paying job. Ultimately if you can downshift your spending, you can downshift your income, and cost of living is going to be a massive factor. If you can move from a HCOL area to a LCOL area you can kinda become a big fish in a small pond. I know a person who works remotely for a bay area tech company while living in rural Wisconsin. They have the biggest house in the town they live in because they make 4-6x what a local middle class household would want to make to live comfortably.
But for such a shift you have to be prepared to make changes to your spending, to how you view values of money, etc.
One side note: if you do move to a rural area, you have to plan on spending more on your vehicle. When you live in a rural area you might easily find yourself with a 40 mile daily commute, or going to a town 50 miles away for a specific store or service regularly. When you look at a rural area vs a city the age of folks’ vehicles drops dramatically because of the sheer number of miles people are putting on their vehicles
Great insight. Thanks for your response.
I don’t think it’s all that common. In my case, I was laid off by a west coast tech giant and actually got something of a severance for the first time in my life. Instead of finding another job right away, I bought a used school bus and converted it into a motorhome. Since I thereby already knew how to drive a big bus, getting a job as a school bus driver was a natural progression. Mainly I do it for the health insurance which is otherwise pretty useless and insanely fucking expensive.
If you save a bunch early on from a big salary, you can kind of coast on a lower wage job (no longer making enough to contribute to your retirement funds, as much at least) until a normal retirement age.
The FIRE community refers to his as being Barrista FI (financially independent), due to, long ago, a few coffee shops having decent benefits before they went all union busting…
Yes. Whether it’s rewarding or profitable or safe will vary wildly with where and when and who knows what. There may also be license requirements and in some places you’ll need to drive a truck or something professionally before you are allowed to drive a bus. And any work with children may have extra requirements. Either way, it’s customer service and a lot of techs consider that the most stressful thing there is.
Worth looking into, though, if there’s any chance you might like it.
Edit: Oh, and traffic! I hate traffic. I can’t imagine having to pilot a bus in traffic. I don’t know how I forgot to mention that.
Looks like they paid off the big debts with the Big Tech salary first, then took the lower pay job. So yeah, if you grind out the big bills first it’s absolutely possible.
I woke up early today so I snuck out of bed quietly and decided to read lemmy on my phone so I don’t wake up the spouse… And then this comment made me snort.
Well played, well played.
I’m very happy for you!
This is what I’m thinking about daily. What change did you make?
My sister, who earns several times the average income of the city she lives in:
- constantly complains about taxes. She says she wants to pay, believe it or not, zero taxes, because “what is she getting in return for that money anyway? Nothing”
- complains about how she “has to” work “four jobs” (she means 4 clients) then she casually drops something like “I saved up enough to buy two apartments. I want to buy and rent and quit my job”. She sees herself as someone who HAS TO work multiple jobs for rent and food
- she constantly complains about how poor people “pay less taxes” than her and absolutely hates anyone who works a low-income job as if they’re “dirty” or something. I assume if “no taxes” is her wet dream, then “everyone pays the exact same amount regardless of their income” is something she’d be ok with
- this is happening in the EU, with free healthcare and all that, so she’s getting plenty out of the taxes she pays (or would, if she didn’t insist on using overpriced private clinics instead and hell knows what other “rich people” alternatives)
She’s not poor. She’s practically a one percenter. She’s just upset it’s a lot of effort saving up to buy property to turn her favorite hobby of “fucking the poor” into a job by becoming a “professional landlord”. I don’t need Trump. I have Trump at home.
Most rich people I’ve met are disconnected assholes… I’m sure some are cool, and where I’m at they tend to vote liberal (but not progressive), but goddamn I have not a thing to share or discuss with them. Bless’em and may I never wait on them or paint their house or be their nurse or anything like that, cause I’m not putting up with their attitude.
Sorry if I sound like a dick. Just blowing off steam.
What have I ever gotten from paying my taxes?
Except the roads of course, that goes without saying
And okay, okay, police keeps order and makes it we have a lawful nation
And sure, sure, firemen will always be there to protect my house from burning down but that’s nothing!
And I had free education, but come on, isn’t that what you’d expect at the very least?
Nothing!
And okay, they did get me free healthcare too, fine, but that’s nothing
Investments to promote local businesses? Fine…
So aside from the roads, police, firemen, education, healthcare, investments, what have taxes ever done for me?
Nothing!
People like that feel like a Monty Python sketch
Basically this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdV0AdgjPgo
Well, if you’re living in the USA, you have the largest military budget on the planet and now your paying for the Orange Fuck Nut to play golf.
Yes, What have the Romans ever done for us?
…the aqueduct!
Your sister is a piece of shit.
Thank you
And a dicknosed douche-canoe.
I appreciate this
I appreciate your appreciation
I appreciate how appreciative you both are
I appreciate your appreciation of our appreciation
That makes me feel so appreciated. I’m glad that my appreciation of your appreciation was appreciated.
You will never sound like a dick mouthing off about rich people, because we know they all deserve it.
She says she wants to pay, believe it or not, zero taxes, because “what is she getting in return for that money anyway? Nothing”
I like to tell libertarians that express such to move to a developing country for two years.
4 clients
who are these clients? what’s her job?
She works in IT. Her main tool is Salesforce. Some of the clients she’s mentioned are universally known. Volkswagen and IKEA are two I remember.
I don’t know what she does exactly. But, to be fair, she doesn’t know what I do either, cause I have a Film & TV degree and our latest argument was about her insisting that I use that degree to “become an influencer, because influencers make money”. That conversation would have been hilarious if I wasn’t part of it. Like listening to a tween tell you what she wants to be when she grows up…
She works in IT. Her main tool is Salesforce
Why am I not surprised that she’s a Salesforce admin?
according to a google search first page intermediate level salesforce admin earns €50-60k per year which is roughly the average salary for Amsterdam for example.
I meant it not in terms of pay but in terms of personality. There’s a few too many Salesforce admins with personalities like what SethTaylor@lemmy.world described
Oh, wow! Can you tell me more about that? I didn’t know that was a thing and I can’t ask her
So the thing with Salesforce Admins, is its a sub-career within IT that requires minimal technical knowledge to be good at, plus by the nature of the job you end up working with vendor support, so if you’re really not good at your job you can simply pass everything to the vendor to do and just get paid to manage the projects and pass them between the business and the vendor.
I worked with a Salesforce admin who did exactly this and he collected a crazy salary for about a year while his boss tried to convince his boss’s boss to fire him for not being able to demonstrate the skills that his resume implied. I also later learned that he was also working at his brother’s Salesforce consulting firm at the same time, so extremely unprofessional and a clear conflict of interest.
Anyways, my point is, I’m not at all surprised that your sister who sounds like they’re kinda disconnected from reality works as a Salesforce admin. That’s just the aura that some Salesforce admins give off!
My sister’s husband is a software developer and frequently helps her with the technical aspects of her job. She has a degree in sociology. All she did to get her first job was a 6-month course or something like that. I guess now I understand how she was able to even make the switch in the first place.
Oh, and, coincidentally, a while ago she was also juggling a conflict of interest situation between a full-time employer and her own company. Amazing what people can accomplish if they’re greedy enough haha
Thanks!
if a 6 months course lands you a crazy salaried job with almost no work why everyone isn’t rich by now?
I love not having kids. I’m happy I have a small dog.
FYI private equity has come for veterinarians. It made more sense when we confirmed the vet we took our small dog was one of those once they started recommending a lot more procedures that we knew would be requited for our dog’s condition. Also familiarize yourself with the “emergency pet hospitals” in your area, those are prime locations to extract several thousand dollars on a visit. Avoid them.
I brought my dog to the emergency vet. She died in the car on the way but I wasn’t ready to accept that and carried her inside. They asked if I wanted her ressicitated, I was like yeah of course I do. They took her and came back a while later. They said we can’t get her breathing, she’s dead. But the drugs did get her heart beating so we have to put her down anyway. They euthanized my dead dog. Total cost? $1500.
Professional services and medication cost money, especially not having to wait as much (the “emergency” part). They’re not a charity.
It absolutely sucks what you had to go through.
Professionals who have professional equipment and expenses themselves should be expensive.
Yep, find one you trust and stick to them. We followed our vet when they left a Big Clinic and started their own practice and it’s been completely worth it.
Good choice to not bring kids into this world.
Anyone who doesnt understand this should find some YouTube videos with young people talking about feeling extreamly unhappy in our societies.
They dont want to be here but their parents got them because they wanted more meaning in their own lives.
At the same time… try not to let the fascists win.
If you want to start a family, start a family. People can’t control the conditions or nations they were born in, and they shouldn’t be expected to deprive themselves of the small solace in life that is having a loving family just because it’s the “responsible choice”. That’s eugenics bullshit.
Yeah I see your point of view. But still, bringing kids into this future? Would they be able to be happy even? All signs points to no at this point.
I dont follow politics but I guess “responsible choice” comes from there? I just look at the world and think about any future a kid would have. At least in America, I would really not get a kid.
I’m not as pessimistic as you about the future, and I don’t think of today’s children as people passively experiencing things that happen in the world. They’re participants, and they’ll have a lot more agency about their futures during our lifetimes.
Politically, I still think that fascism is brittle. Competence is actively discouraged (independently competent people are minimized to prevent threats to centralized power), so I think any fascist system is bound to fail when the people actively resist.
Economically, the business cycle ebbs and flows, and whoever’s on top today might not be on top tomorrow. I believe the current economic system is dominated by bubbles that have no future, so we’re gonna see some future chaos where new bases of power will rise. Good guys can win in those scenarios, and those good guys may very well be my own children.
Culturally, nothing is permanent. Trying to predict things is a fool’s errand. Better to just prepare our children for resilience through flexibility and adaptability, and raise them to be kind, well adjusted, socially plugged in.
Living a good life is possible even in a bad world. That’s happened throughout human history. And so if people want to raise children, let them.
I want to be wrong, so thank you for giving a more positive view.
Yea… my country did birth control stuff, One Child Policy, I was the second child. I wasn’t supposed to be born. And even though I did suffer a lot, I’m still glad to exist, to have felt some joy during childhood, even as I lived in an autocracy and in a very impoverished area, and later in a declining democracy, I still have experienced life, and I’m glad that I had the opportunity, to have existed as a living being, as rare as life is, and even rarer, as a human, the ability to just think about things, philosophy, to gaze upon the stars, to have experienced parental love (well… sort of… later on they kinda got a bit more rough), to see cities and the countryside, to see the magnificence of nature, and tall skyscrapers.
Even through poverty, I still feel like this existence is worth it, no matter how this would end. Whether we all die of nuclear apocalypse tomorrow, or whatever. It was a fun ride. And I’m glad my mother gave birth to me, regardless how negative I might feel about them as parents.
Very glad to see a take that isn’t more depressed doomerism, the world needs more of that.
I also love you not having kids! Small dogs for all! ❤
Pets are ridiculously expensive and definitely a luxury.
My cat costs 100 bucks a month. And brings me the only source of joy I have.
That’s cheap and I consider not having suicidal thoughts to not be a luxury.
This seems expensive.
How tf does your cat cost $100/month?
Mine lives a life of luxury and it cannot be half of that even when all yearly spending is averaged.
Easily. Combination of pet insurance and normal medical bills plus a canned diet with occasional toys, treats, litter, specialty furniture, and cleaning supplies. You can do with less and gamble with health problems, unexpected emergencies, and boredom-linked destructiveness.
(I had a diabetic cat. Between him, a girl that can’t eat dry food or cheap canned without getting bladder stones, and a third cat that eats whatever but isn’t worth the effort of separating at meal times I was spending $400+/month just on food. It’s less now without the diabetes to manage but still not cheap.)
Pets are the new kids
Goldfish are the new pets
Pet rocks are the new goldfish
Kids are insanely expensive and time consuming. Which normally isn’t a problem in a healthy society with functional communities and affordable goods and services. We aren’t in a healthy society.
What? Compared to having a kid they’re extremely cheap. My small dog costs me at most about $2000 a year.
Tell that to the tremendous number of homeless people in poverty who have pets.
lol, I can assure you that is a very yuppie mindset. Vast majority of people with pets can’t afford much beyond the food.
More than half of six-figure earners said they would have to double their income to feel financially secure.
“People used to feel when you got to six figures or above that it was a sign of financial stability,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer and futurist at The Harris Poll.
Mr. Rodney is full of shit, whether he knows it or not. There was a study done on the psychology of earning more money than you need to live. There’s an interesting phenomenon that arises; people always think they need more to feel secure. $100k feels they need $150k, $400k needs $600k, and this pattern continues all the way up to $15m, on average. I wouldn’t be surprised if the peak is even higher nowadays, the study was conducted in the early 2000’s I think. I will come back and edit this with more details of said study so I’m not just talking out my ass.
I thought that there was a study that showed limited returns on happiness beyond a certain threshold ($75k at the time, which is now surely well out-of-date).
Those could both be true. People feel like they need $125k more to be secure, but when they get it, it doesn’t make them as happy as they thought it would. They need another $25k more to feel that way.
the issue is they get that extra $125K. And then the start spending 95% of it on shit they weren’t buying before. They don’t get the extra 125K and not spend it.
It’s called lifestyle creep.
The ‘poorest’ people I’ve ever met were often part of the 300K+ club. Most of my friends making 100K or under aren’t the ones whining about how poor they are. It’s the people who are buying designer clothes and luxury cars.
so many people I meet are making like 100-150K a year. but they are spending way about their means on luxuries they don’t need but feel are ‘necessary’. like dropping $500 each weekend going out, which is $2000 a the end of the month. gym memberships, travel, luxury apartments, designer clothes, etc.
I mean that really isn’t the issue. If they actually do that they are doing exactly what trickle down economics says.
The issue is that in reality people don’t so that - they save a lot of that extra cash for a cushy retirement, and then work less.
Honestly, I suspect limited returns come as you fill in a checklist.
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Are you and your family clothed, fed and relatively safe?
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Are you working only one job per person?
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Is your family healthy and/or getting adequate healthcare?
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Is your family at least getting an entire high school education under their belt?
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Do you have safe and marginally convenient transportation?
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Do you at least have enough money for occasional entertainment outside the house
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Do you have a second bathroom?
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Do you have at least a small line of credit?
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Do you have a retirement? Will you be able to retire?
You don’t need all that, but once you cross that line, having more money around for things doesn’t make you happier.
Having more money would let me retire earlier, which would make me happier.
But I’m lucky and already have all my other needs met.
I think I could be creative enough to make myself happier.
Give me a lavish bunker on a small island with a hill looking over the ocean in the edge of the Caribbean latitude, let me take most of the people I care about. Food, gadgets, internet, maybe a helicopter or a small plane to come back to the mainland for concerts. Enough money to pay for protection.
But I don’t think that fits linearly into the scale of money versus happiness.
for most rich people those aren’t goals. the are forgone assumptions.
rich people care about going to elite expensive institutions, working for elite companies, and having designer level lifestyle in clothes, housing, and consumer goods. they love to go on about how they value ‘experiences’ while they drop 30K on some week long spiritual retreat in Bali, or some $10K weekend spa weekend in Palm springs.
the 100K people who feel poor feel poor because they thought they could afford a designer lifestyle. and all they are getting is a basic middle-class lifestyle
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I think 75k was where commute time started mattering more than income
I think that the idea was that there is a special point where you feel secure and nothing beyond that makes any difference. But that $75k number sounds familiar. It’s probably more like $120k today.
Found it- from 2010. Today that is $111,333 if you believe the bls CPI.
https://time.com/archive/6597645/do-we-need-75000-a-year-to-be-happy/
Also, people’s goals change and “secure” means something different.
When I was making half as much as I am now, I felt fairly secure. I could pay my rent, I had no credit card debt, and I had a few months’ worth of savings. Money was not a day-to-day worry. Most of my peers were in debt and/or living paycheck-to-paycheck so I felt like I was living large.
Now I am objectively more secure but I feel less secure because I am thinking about retirement, childcare, college funds, and elder care. I have nowhere near enough savings to retire in the foreseeable future. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get there.
Keep your head up bro, you’ll make it. Sounds like you’re already putting in the effort and thinking about the hard stuff and the costs involved, which is more than most ever do. Lotta folks just spend and spend and put their heads in the sand when the future comes up.
Bingo. People typically spend more and more as they make more… making themselves financially insecure in perpetuity.
When I was making 30K a year I was spending only about 20K in expenses. Now that I make 150K a year I’m spending more like 120K. According to most of my peers I am ‘struggling’ because I’m not driving a brand new BMW 5 series and living a 2 million dollar house. So much of people’s fiancially problems is just them overspending to impress other people. I drive a 10 year old Honda. It works great. I also chose to get rescue animals rather than designer purebred animals. I shop at a cheap grocery store, not the luxury ones. and I live in a ‘boring’ area where rents/mortgages are cheaper.
I have a very modest setup and as of last year it required eighty something thousand per year to be in the black. Basically 90k if I was to be handle even the slightest of externalities. Im afraid to renew the math for prices this year and don’t even know yet for healthcare which I have to figure out by end of month.
it’s almost as if security is never actually produced by hoarding more and more resources for your personal nuclear family. Odd.
I make low six figures, definitely not in survival mode. I’m probably abnormal, as I grew up with money insecurity, and had to file bankruptcy in the early 2010s.
When my income started going up, after a certain point I just started living like it didn’t. I save 30-40% of my pay every month. I’m not cheap, but I’m frugal and willing to wait for sales on stuff if it’s not something I need right this moment.
I have well over a year of expenses in a HYSA.
I bought my last car in 2020 for 24k USD fora new previous year model that was still on the lot and paid 1/3rd cash up front with a zero interest deal financing to keep the monthly cost down.
Paid off all my debts, student loans, everything but the mortgage. And since I work remotely and am an introvert, my wife and I moved to the rurals and got a mortgage for half of what it would be in our previous city. I will likely have it paid off in 2-3 years, maybe 6-7 years into a 30 year mortgage.
Living on six figures had not been all that difficult. I don’t even really think about money anymore and it’s a weight off me. It’s living on six figures while keeping up with the Joneses, celebrity influencers, and advertisers, going into massive debt for sake of appearances and potentially invoking the envy of others to prove you’re somehow better or you’ve “made it” and “deserve it” … that’s hard.
life is easy if you live on a budget.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
most of their consumption is impulsive and based on peer pressure. most common example is how many people buy cars that are like 50%+ of their salary. I knew so many people buy 40-50K cars on 60-70K salaries then constantly whining about how expensive their car was…
when i was making 60-70K… I bought a 20K car. but of course everyone made fun of me for being ‘cheap’ and driving a ‘shitbox’. etc. apparently I was supposed to buy a overpriced luxury car like a BMW/Mini or SUV?
I’ve had so many girlfriends… who just lost their shit at me for not spending my money on stupid expensive shit. Once I had one go through my bank statements, find out I had 50K in cash (was saving for a house), and demand I spend it on taking her on a trip to Africa. I said no and she flipped out and screamed at me, called me names, and we broke up. In her mind I was huge selfish asshole for ‘hoarding’ my money to buy a house and not spending it on taking her traveling.
I broke up with 3 different women too because when it came to living together talk, they basically refused to budget. and when I found out how much they were spending… well it was over. They were spending like 120% more than they made and just piling up debt year after year with credit cards and personal loans. And when you tried to explain to them that was not how you become financially secure, they just told you what a rich asshole you were and that you should be ‘generous’ and give them your money to ‘help’ them.
life is easy if you live on a budget.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
While I share some frustration on the matter, I’d also point out:
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It’s not as if we’re taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that’s it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
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We live in an environment where the risks aren’t, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don’t disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But…think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
It’s not as if we’re taught to do that in school.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I went to a “good” school (non-public school, better education from elementary through high school) growing up and even then our home economics courses only taught us how to sew and make pillows and shit (I’m not entirely knocking it, I can stitch up and patch clothes). The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
It’s been like… 25 years now or something. Mr. Roland, bro, sir, if you’re still out there, thanks for the head start. I completely bombed financially in my 20s, but recovered in my 30s after bankruptcy, in part remembering and working on a lot of the stuff you taught, and I’m thriving now.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don’t disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But…think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
I mean, yeah. But… consumerism. It’s literally the problem. People need to work on their susceptibility to this. Just because something is sold to you does not mean you have to buy it. I don’t buy anything major without at least a few weeks to a month of research, and longer the more expensive it is. And I’ll commonly wishlist something if I feel an overwhelming sense of desire to buy it and can’t figure out why. Sometimes I legitimately want something, but other times it’s just social or advertising pressure, memetic desire. I figure if I come back later and still want it, it’s worth considering, but often it just gets removed from the list. The desire, the want is temporary. Marketing is very good at manipulating your base desires and making something seem like a need when it’s far from it.
People and businesses will always be selling, always manipulating.You have to learn to curb your impulses and tame the monkey brain. There is a level of personal responsibility required.
The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
I mean, we definitely didn’t even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver’s ed — an elective course — where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
People need to work on their susceptibility to this.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and that’s gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don’t get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn’t a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren’t doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I’m not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you’d kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I’d say that that’s relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it’s on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
EDIT2:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
This one doesn’t go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
EDIT4: One more fun chart:
EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses
“We’ll do anything but think”
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I’m at about $160k and I still drive a 2012 base model manual Kia Soul haha.
GM at my local Lowe’s is probably near that. Drives a POS pickup older than my 2004 F150. :)
Seriously, people are nuts about spending, cars and trucks especially. Some of these things cost more than my monthly mortgage, and nearly always financed with crap terms.
My last car before I got the new one in 2020 was an ‘07 Hyundai Accent hatchback and I beat it up for 14 years.
If I hadn’t moved out to the boonies and needed something that could handle at least light off-road, I’d still be driving it. I went for a 2020 KIA Sportage CUV with AWD I put some good all-terrain tires on it (Nitto Nomad Grapplers). It’s not fancy but it has an ICE engine and can handle hills, mud, etc. and goes where I need.
I get that people want fancy cars and shit, but I just can’t even. I got a decent direct drive racing wheel for my PC setup; if I wanna drive something fancy I’ll do it virtually, without the $800+ monthly payment.
Edit - yikes about the girlfriends. My wife is as frugal as I am, probably even more so. She’s very anti-materialism. Back when we were actually broke I spent a lot of time stressed and angry over financial stuff, especially over “big” purchases (like anything over $50 or $100, which is sad to think about now). Nowadays I encourage her to get stuff she wants. She rarely wants things, and when she does, it should be quality, no point in skimping. We have it and we’re talking like hundreds sometimes, neither of us is springing for huge purchases without consulting each other.
I also make a point to donate to our local food bank monthly and buy food for the holiday food drives in the area because I get I have it better than most these days and feel like I should be doing what I can to help.
I get that people want fancy cars and shit, but I just can’t even.
I drive a Z3 that I bought eight years ago for $8K. It is by far the cheapest car I’ve ever owned on an annual cost basis, and it still only has 120K miles on it. Even some fancy cars can be had for next to nothing.
marketing works. most people are convinced that buying a expensive car is a reflection of their personality and that if you buy a cheap car you’re a cheap shitty person. hence why so many people buy awful, expensive, objectively shitty vehicles like Jeeps, because it means they are ‘tough and adventurous’.
same applies to clothing, electronics, travel, blah blah. travel is cheap if you go to places that aren’t popular.
awful, expensive, objectively shitty vehicles like Jeeps
Jeeps are the most hilarious brand out there. Absolute pieces of shit and insanely overpriced. If you buy a jeep Jeep, like the real Jeep thing with the canvas top and the doors that come off, I can at least understand the appeal of that basic form factor. The truly mind-boggling thing is when people buy Jeep-branded cars and SUVs that aren’t even real jeeps. Paying a huge premium just to own a pointlessly gilded piece of poo.
It helps, but there is no budget that makes U.S. minimum wage livable, unless you’re somehow getting free housing and don’t need a car. Even then, it’s barely enough.
Wow! I cannot fathom women acting like that. I’ve have 50 lovers in life, most of which were relationships or tentative relationships. Not one woman has ever chastised me for not making enough or not spending enough on them. I’d be horrified, kick 'em to the dirt instantly!
I’ve been stone broke, made good money and thrown it at them, everything inbetween (but mostly broke). For reference, I’m short and scrawny. LOL, I’d so love to talk IRL and see what’s up with that. Bet we could learn a thing or two from one another! (Or maybe I’m just coasting on my gargantuan penis. 🤷🏻😂)
I make just under six—because I choose to work ten months instead of all twelve. I save about the same amount every month as you mention. Phone/rent (high as most people’s mortgage tbh), groceries and insurance for bills. If I want something I buy it, but idk. I could have a bigger place but I’m not trying to impress anyone so …why bother?
I’m with you. I’m around $120-125k depending on bonuses. I could in theory make more, but I work remotely, have plenty of PTO, the job’s pretty cushy for several months the year and only rarely super busy and stressful, and I’m already saving aggressively. I haven’t capped off and could make more (heck, I’m not even senior where I am), but it would likely come with work life balance issues and a side helping of misery. No thanks.
Having enough money to live and thrive is important, but knowing when it’s enough and enjoying your life outside of it is just as important.
yeah we’re in for a real good time in this country when the middle class can no longer service the debts they’ve taken on, historically that’s just a grand ol’ time to be alive in a capitalist nation state built entirely on credit and debt…
That’s by design. End stage trickle up economics
This was some years ago - even before the first Trump presidency - I read a perfectly reasonable sounding piece from someone about how he’s struggling as a dual-income family making $400,000 a year. There’s the mortgage for the house and the summer home and the vacation condo and the kids’ tuitions at prestigious schools and family vacations and the 401ks and the kids’ college tuition funds and how there was NOTHING LEFT after the bare necessities!
Yeah, I live more in the realm of having emptied my 401k twice after leaving different jobs because the only other option was homelessness. Have I made bad decisions in life, never intentionally… but owning a home is being taken off the possibilities for me. At 36 it’ll be years before I ever have 1000s in the bank, let alone the 20% of 400,000 or whatever a small house will cost in future. Shit they turned me down to get a car loan and buy a used Kia which left me with a broken down vehicle and losing my job because I couldn’t transit 104 miles a day to the decent paying job I landed. So now I’m getting paid 1/3 to half of it on a job I found I can work from home. I’ll make rent and food, but retirement is likely out of the picture.
Yeah I’m 42 and my work is well-paid (for me) but not regular. It’s been particularly bad lately. I do not even have health insurance since I got divorced this year. I long ago realized I will have to work until I die, and I think most Americans are in the same situation. This is in a low cost of living area, I travel for work as an independent contractor.
Couple of observations. I am the sole earner in our house. I am fortunate that I make about $140k and we live suburban Texas. In our family of 4 our basic expenses are as follows.
Mortgage is $2100/ month
Homeowners insurance $400/ month
Property tax $200/month
Car insurance $185/month
Electricity $250/month (average)
Natural gas $40/month
Water+trash $200/month
Internet $90/month
Streaming (disney/netflix/audible) $45/month
Groceries $400-600/month
Gas $200/month
Toll roads $50-100/month
Cell phone $200/month
Coffee once a week $40/month
Date night food (once a week) $500/month
Fucking health insurance for the family is $750/month (my contribution, my employer pays the majority)
Roughly $6250/month give or take.
We don’t have consumer debt, no car notes, no child care (stay at home parent cares for the kids) no daycare, and no paid child activities.
That is just our fixed expenses, something always comes up so obviously there is more but its inconsistent.
My car is a 2019 wrx that was $30k we paid it off last year but the note on that was $470/month. I couldn’t get that car for that price today.
We have an older suv for my partner and I have an old pickup that sits unused unless we need to make a hardware run, those vehicles are paid for, no loans and have been for 10+ years.
Our last house was purchased for $191k in 2016 and we sold it for $295k this past year.
Our insurance went from $1200/year to $4800 per year on that house before we sold it. Similar thing with property taxes.
Unless you have managed a 10% return or salary increase, your money doesn’t go as far as it used to.
I am happy to pay my fair share of taxes. For what I am paid, I feel like its reasonable to contribute more in taxes based on my earnings, but as a result, my take home is obviously not $140k. So when you figure fixed expenses are ~$75k, plus my 401k contributions, savings for my kids college fund, and incidentals for stuff like car tires, birthdays, christmas, house repairs, medical expenses, etc, its relatively easy to eat up the remainder of that pool.
And all these rich jerks saying if you stop paying for streaming services you’ll be rich too
Don’t forget about my one $7.70 coffee per week. That’s what is the issue.
What would Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey say about this extravagant internet connection you’re using right now? And did you eat today? Just expense after expense with you.
I’m just impressed by the groceries. Our family spends twice that much but boys do eat a lot.
My kids are young but yeah, that cost is going up with groceries and them growing. Its impressive how quick you can eat money.
Dude my boys are 6 and 9 and they eat like I did when I was 16-19 and a lineman.
Idk where it goes.
Why pay $200/mo for cell service when companies like Mint and Cricket exist? You could be paying under $200/yr for that alone.
I’ll have to look into it. Last I checked, att, tmo, and Xfinity were all about the same for a 2 line unlimited plan. We talked about doing google fi a few years back but they were limited on devices.
$200/mo likely includes equipment repayment plan.
That’s how they get you to justify a $1200 phone every two years…by charging you $30/mo for it and a $20/mo promo credit as long as you stay a customer with them. If you switch you gotta pay off the full balance.
Imo that’s insane. I’ve always considered myself a technophile and I don’t replace any of my tech on that kind of a schedule, except for my phone…and that’s mostly out of wear and tear and not being economically repairable.
But I’m still out of that ERP game. Better to buy outright when there’s a good deal from the OEM with a OnePlus or a Pixel. Even better if you can find a $50 eBay phone that’s worth a $200-$300 trade-in credit.
I was explaining this to my neighbor on a fixed income, that it costs over $6k a month to run my household, she looked genuinely confused for a second as she runs her life on about 1/30th that cash. What’s awful is we’re still going in the hole and I’m just using my 403(b) to collect my employer match so I can cash it out regularly and pay off expenses. So no savings is occurring.
I’m sorry to hear that. I was there 3 years ago on a smaller budget. I thought we were in a decent spot financially and then we had our first kid (planned) and my partner stayed home with our baby. Our income went down by roughly a third overnight and we had a $10k delivery bill and all the other new baby stuff. We burned though our savings in about 9 months even though I was working. I almost opted to sell my car but I was very fortunate to find a new job making about 30% more and we recovered. The stress in that situation is immense and I hope you find a way out.
Thank you, yeah I took a $30k pay cut into my current job after being laid off for 5 months, which destroyed us. Now I have to figure out how to consolidate and secure all the debt so we can get enough credit to consolidate and secure all the debt :) Hoping for a reversal like you, glad you found it.
Surely there’s some significant expenses you can cut.
What vehicle insurance do you have that is 260 a month in insurance? I have two cars both fully insured and I am paying 800 a year TOTAL.
Bruh, what? Mine is $2000 for two cars. Full coverage on both, and both of us have spotless driving records. Not even a single parking ticket in over 15 years (since we both started driving). My car is $1200 per year, and my wife’s is $800. Her car is 3 years older than mine.
FWIW, my area (North Texas) is notorious for bad drivers and uninsured drivers. Even if my driving record is spotless, the rest of the idiots on the road make my premiums go up.
My bad, its $185/month, just checked. The drivers, comprehensive coverage, my old truck, wife’s old suv, and my wrx. Progressive was cheaper by a significant margin vs state farm.
AH, 3 cars would do it. I saw you mentioned the WRX which I know is a “risky” car. But I was like, dang I haven’t had those prices since I was a 19 year old with an accident on record.
Yeah, clean record for 8+ years I am older than 35. Its gotta partially be the area. We got a homeowners insurance quote on one of the houses we looked at, regular house, $400k price, they wanted $16k per year in homeowners insurance… Not in a flood zone, no historical damage, no extra risk factors.
In suburban texas, you’re probably getting hit by the uninsured drivers bit, even if you’re not actually getting the uninsured drivers coverage. The area is just bad in regards to the amount of drivers on the road without it.
Wouldn’t surprise me. At least the state is not using paper temp plates anymore. Its the one good thing they have done in the last 20 years.
HEB means you probably saved 40% on your grocery bill each month. If you had to shop at Publix in Florida your monthly would be $1000+/month. Your insurance might also be double on both car and home.
HEB is significantly more than Aldi where we do most of our shopping. We do a HEB trip roughly once a month or every other month to get the stuff Aldi doesn’t carry.
The mortgage usually includes the principle, property tax, and the interest (also mortgage insurance too if you have that). Why do you have them all listed separately?
You can escrow them or pay them separately. Ours is separate. Our last house was an escrow account all lumped together.
That makes sense
How suburban in Texas?
Bc for real I live in Massachusetts (suburb, but closer to Providence than Boston)…and my mortgage is the same as yours, but that is including property tax and homeowners insurance.
There’s a fair bit of luck in that though…we bought in 2018, and refinanced in 2021…
Our house has increased in value, nearly double since then…so we couldn’t afford to move to a similar house in the region if we wanted to. We’re kinda stuck here now. Many of our neighbors in the same boat.
We could afford to take a significant downgrade in terms of neighborhood and home size. That would probably cost about the same as we have now.
We bought our new place in June of this year. Its a proper suburb. 30-45mins to downtown. Greater Houston area. Our new house is basically the median price, under 3000sqft with a decent back yard but nothing special. Its in an older neighborhood and it needed work when we bought it.
We purchased our first house in 2016 for 191 at 3.25% interest with 3.5% down. Homeowners insurance was like $1200/year. sold it this year for $295ish and homeowners insurance on the same house was at $4800/year. Bought our new house in June of this year for $425 at 6.7% interest and put 80k down (part of the equity we had in the old house we used for the down payment and the rest we put in our savings/emergency fund because I don’t have faith in the booming economy right now).
If I were starting out again where I was in 2016 (i.e. same salary as I made in 2016 but today), I would not be able to buy my old house. Its crazy.
I personally feel like we are due for a reconning on all this, the house prices, insurance, and property taxes are not sustainable. The market is starting to reflect that too.
When we were looking at houses, there were several that had been on the market for over a year because they were overpriced by 20-30%. Our old house was not worth 300k to me, it was to the market and the buyer but the people who bought and lived in that neighborhood pre covid are different than the new buyers and that isn’t a good thing imo.
Your house is too big and you own too many cars
The car are all fully paid for and have been for a while. Only one gets driven at a time and my commute is about 5 miles. The collective value of the cars is less than 35k. Other than my wrx, the others have 250k+ miles.
I won’t argue on the house, I will also say I don’t really care. We aren’t strapped for money, our needs are met, we contribute to savings at a good rate, and when interest rates drop we will refinance the house which will free up ~$600/month or we will reduce the loan term. Our interest rate went from 2.25 to 6.7 percent when we moved.
Its real easy to say "your house is too big’ without knowing anything about where someone lives or their circumstances.
Thank you for sharing. I’m curious why the water bill is so high, is it due to less water being available in Texas?
They lump trash and water together since the city provides them. Water bill is like $40 by itself, trash and recycling make up the rest.
Yeah, I saw that $30k for a car and immediately dismissed everything this person said. I’ve never in my life paid more than $8k for a vehicle.
30k is not an expensive car. You’re doing great buying used, but that’s a low price for a decent new car.
$30k was an expensive car… 10 years ago. The average price for a new car topped $50k last month. $30k in my area would maybe get you a used car, probably two or three years old from a car rental company dumping old inventory with too many miles. The used car market still hasn’t calmed down after the component shortage that nearly halted new car production a few years ago. And since used car prices are still astronomically inflated, new cars can sell for whatever the hell they want and they’ll still have wait-lists.
Covid and post covid, used cars are insane. When I bought that car, I could have gotten a 2 year old version of it with 70k miles on it for 27k or a new one for 30. The loan was 0.9% so it didn’t make any sense to get the used one.
You should have read the rest, the car is paid off. You can do that if you are responsible with your money. That new car that I bought in 2019 was because I was driving 40k miles per year for work at the time and I needed something reliable after my last car started showing its age and left me stranded a couple times. It had 175k miles on it when I sold it after having 3 water pumps, 2 thermostats, 4 high pressure fuel pumps, a radiator, several cooling hoses, an oil cooler, and a clutch replaced, all done myself. The mid 2000s minis were not reliable cars out of warranty.
Well. I made 35k in 1996 so apparently my salary has kept up with inflation, maybe? Google says that is like 75k today. 106.4% increase.
Together we do hit that 6 figures but
Housing cost increased by 500%
Grocery cost increased here by 500%
Electric bills by 300%
Those are the essentials, right? Other things, clothing and gas, didn’t go up as much but I drive less and (except for menopause, damn you) stay pretty much the same size and bought some items that last well, so it’s more discretionary.
I figure I’d have to be making closer to 200k to be making my 1996 salary with regard to essentials. Maybe more. I’m certainly NOT making that.
I think a simpler way of pointing this out is that the median US household income is $80k. A $100k household income is only 25% higher than average. It’s a pretty normal income. We just have “a six figure salary” as part of our cultural memory as some huge amount.
A “six figure income” is such a stupidly relative term. What a useless fucking metric.
First of all, that could literally mean anything from $100,000 to $999,999 a year. Someone making nearly a million dollars a year is not “in survival mode”, even in the highest cost of living areas.
Second, it depends on where you live. If you live in the middle of BFE Arizona or Minnesota, having a ~$100k salary could mean you’re living like a king. Living in San Francisco or New York, you’re probably living in a shoebox apartment.
I’m barely one of these “six figure” people. I make $103k per year. However, I also am the sole income for my family of 5, which means I pay for everybody’s health and dental insurance premiums. These are over $1200 a month. I also live in a moderately high cost of housing city where the cheapest, bombed out, sub-900 sq ft house is going for 1/5th to a quarter of a million $ plus. My neighbor has a 973 sq ft home with non-working plumbing, a roof that has shingles coming off and leaks, single pane windows, and foundation issues. His house has an estimated value of $237k if it sold today.
After taxes, nearly half of my salary alone goes to just housing and healthcare and I do not live in a fucking McMansion. My house is around 1000 sq ft. And I still need to keep the lights on, pay for gas, pay the water bill, pay for groceries…Oh and don’t forget about student loan debt to get that income. Have fun paying that at $600-700 a month. If I was renting instead of having a mortgage, I could not afford to live here.
Now I’m not “in survival mode”, as this article would have you believe, but I’m also not exactly “thriving”. If I lost my job, my family would be unable to live beyond…something like 2-3 months. And with the job market cratering in the tech world (which is my career market) right now, it scares the shit out of me. Literally keeps me up at night with anxiety.
What I’m trying to say is that not even us “middle class” folks are doing super great. We’re currently teetering on the edge of a knife and, with continually rising costs, will likely fall into “upper-lower class” territory in the next decade.
Unless a sentence like this uses the word “all” you should default to “some” as the implied qualifier. As in, not “all six future earners are in survival mode, but “some six figure earners are in survival mode.” Even that would have been shocking years ago, but nowadays, a family with a single earner bringing in 100,000 can very much be struggling to make ends meet in a high COL city.
scares the shit out of me
this is by design. by funneling all your moneys further and further up the food chain, they both ensure you’ll never take their place and keep you obedient and compliant. lest “something” happens, and you end up in an even worse situation
you and i don’t exist to “thrive.” we’re here to generate more wealth for our owners, and to be hoodwinked into thinking this is the way it’s supposed to be
You’ve nailed my family’s experience as well. I’m a sole earner, high COL area, student debt, groceries and other bills going up.
Verrrry close to my experience as well. I’m holding out hope that in maybe 5 years, when the last of my student debt is gone, we can start really climbing out of our hole, but electricity prices are skyrocketing (Ibpay about $500/mo now), and with the shutdown, our work ontract has not yet been renewed. We’ll be homeless in just a couple months if my income falls apart
Shit that sounds stressful. I hope your contact renews and things go according to plan, homie.
I’m in Minnesota, twin cities, sounds like property is comparable. To pay less than $300k you’re probably getting something you couldn’t realistically fit a family of 5 or likely something that needs $100k of work to bring up to code anyway. You could get a dump for $150k and fix it up yourself, but most people are not going to do that. Not the most expensive city, but far from the cheapest.
Yeah the only reason I’m able to afford my house is because I got it 5 years ago for $200k. If I had to buy it today, I’d be fucked.
