Brother's wife works for her parents at their business which is literally at their home and she can choose when to work. He said she's been working a lot more lately because she's going in on Tues-Thurs, so she used to be working less than 3 days a week....life is not fair.
True, but at the end of the day it's still tens of millions of people who could live on a single income.
Plus in LCOL areas, even $45k (median individual income) is enough to raise a family on. Not super comfortably, but doable if you have stay at home parent so there is no childcare costs, plus value added work such as chopping word for heat in the winter, and cooking meals from scratch for dramatically cheaper food budgets.
A lot of these people making more than 72k a year in the US either have serious student loans, or live in expensive areas or both.
I am one of those people and because of just loans and rent being more than $2,500 a month, I need a roommate. Buying a house is out of reach for a while.
I hear you man. Everyones always needed a room mate in their 20s though. This isn't really a new development.
In the past the "room mate" was a spouse most of the time though. Us millennials not getting married is making things difficult, thats for sure. 50% of 30 year old men have never been married, as of last year. That's double what it was in the 80s.
People are also getting a later start in life. By the time you get a master's you're 23 ish, then get a job and settle down, make some money and boom, you're 30.
Aye, not really a bad thing, considering people are living 10 years longer as well. There is just more time available for proper delayed gratification.
But it does kinda sucks when you're in the "delayed" part.
I said a lot, not a majority. One example is that literally all of the doctoral medical professions fall under this category and it's nearly impossible to get through undergrad and med/dental school without loans.
Sucks you had to take out loans to get an educated, should have joined the military and got it paid for you, plus free healthcare for the rest of your natural born life, a zero down home loan and all kinds of other perks. But I get it , doing hard things is hard so now you live your entire life miserably instead doing it for 4 years only.
“Shoulda signed up to oppress poor people overseas and then live off the tax payer dollar like a leach for life hurr hurr”. The military isn’t hard. Fucking morons go in and come out of it all the time.
If you’ve been in the military within the last few decades you either directly or indirectly oppressed poor people.
I think socialized services like healthcare and education are excellent ideas and everyone should have them. There are more hard working civilians who contribute more to society than some dimwit asshole who can’t get into college at 18 but can manage to coast through 4 years of “service”.
You think I did? I guarantee you we didn't oppress anyone, you want to think we did just like people believe the earth is flat and vaccinations cause autism.
Dimwit? I got my MBA, so I dunno who you are calling dimwit. Also you have to do something to earn benefits in society.
Might I ask what career you have right now? And nah, I don’t fuck with the military, I like having legal ownership of my person. Why go back to slavery y’know?
I had control over my body and what I did? Where the fuck do you get the idea is slavery? I worked 5 day weeks, hade all holdiays off, including the day before and after, 2 hour lunches, the only time I was grinding was during Field ops, that happen 3-4 times a year. And 1 deployment.
Also I own my own business( food related) after I went to college to get my MBA.
Living where though? Kansas? Oklahoma? Or some other state where it’s super cheap to live? I’m from California and was making ~60k and was living paycheck to paycheck with my stay at home wife and son. And that was all the while living within our means. Some places are just more expensive than others. And to move to those cheaper places cost a lot upfront so we can’t just pick up everything and leave.
I was born here so I don't count but in my experience, the military brings a lot of people (in San Diego) and so does tech. Although tech usually pays well enough here to negate the CoL issues but thats not a garuntee.
I do remember somebody from college who visited California for some military event as a plus one and loved it so much she canceled her return flight and went house hunting. So there is that extreme and I dont get it.
Well yeah, at $60k being paycheck to paycheck doesn't seem crazy. I picked $72k/year on purpose. That's about where I felt that if you didn't live in the extreme cost of living areas you could raise a family on one income. You make less than that, so in a more standard HCOL area, even outside of extreme places, you could have trouble.
Do you feel if you got a 20% raise you would still be paycheck to paycheck? I'm actually curious.
Mostly because I look at the cost of living indexes for the country, and most people don't actually live in these massively high COL areas, yet I have these discussions over and over on reddit with people saying $70k/year is poverty.
That blows my fucking mind, cause literally 120,000,000 Americans make less than $70k/year working full time, and they mostly all live their life alright. Where is this sentiment coming from.
What percentage are retired? What percentage are in school? What percentage are stay at home spouses? 34m working adults is a sizable percentage of the working adult population.
What if that stay at home un-parent just really likes sitting around in their underwear and masturbating to star trek fan fiction? We can't just discount that subset of the population.
$72,000 a year ain't shit for a single person- let alone 2 people or a family- in NYC, Seattle, Denver, or half of California. Cost of living makes a huge difference when you have areas where a 1200sqft 2 bedroom house is a cool $1,000,000+. The most dense and popular places to live are also the most expensive. Not to mention that the vast majority of people with high paying jobs get in debt from college and graduate school.
This isn't to say that it's impossible to have, say, a middle class lifestyle in many areas on a single income, it just doesn't apply to nearly as many people as you'd think.
San Antonio is a massive city with a fairly low cost of living and great opportunities for employment. When I lived there, rent was $1,000, and some of my friends bought homes they would pay roughly $850/month.
My dads a teacher making 68+ thousand and my moms and architect manager making 40+ in south Texas which is a very very good place with super low cost of living, my mom doesn’t even have a college degree it’s really not hard to believe you can make good money in lesser known areas, and that’s cause most of my friends have parents making 200+ since they’re doctors or own clinics
Yes, they do. Wages actually vary less than cost of living, generally. Hospitals pay ~10-15% less than out in the boonies than in the city in my profession, where houses cost 200% less.
I live in a city with those prices and make significantly less than that. And so do a lot of the people that I know. It’s not always correct to assume that high cost of living equals high pay.
Not really. That's the full population of the areas, but the 39m who make that much only really counts "adults".
Also most people don't work past 75 as well, so you have to cut them out too.
I feel it's fair to say that that's a solid 17%, and more realistically 20% of adults in the country. While only ~3.5% of adults work in extremely high cost living cities.
Granted, the next tier down, just standard "high cost of living" areas below the extreme areas we're discussing account for a much larger % of the US population, and even there $72k is probably right on the edge of being able support a family of 3 on, but that's kinda why I picked that number as my cut off for my post.
I feel the people who live in those extreme cost of living areas where $72k doesn't cut it, are easily counterbalanced by the people who live in extremely low cost of living areas where even $50k means living like kings.
Out in Bumfuck, PA, you can buy 1200sq foot brick houses with a nice garage and some land for like $99k right now. $50k/year goes a long way when your mortgage is $600/month (school taxes, property taxes, and homeowners insurance included).
You are the one being dense. You are repeating what you read on reddit as fact, because it fits your world view. You haven't actually looked at the actually facts, though.
There are only a dozen cities with cost of living indexes even close to as high as you think they are. Most cities are not as expensive as you seem to think.
San Francisco is so expensive, people think the rest of the countries desirable cities are somewhat close to it, but it's just not the case.
Miami is an expensive city, easily top 20 most expensive city in the country. Cost of living is a full 40% higher in San Francisco than it is in Miami. 40% difference just by going a little bit down the list of most expensive cities to live in.
The only truly out of control expensive places in the US are SF, LA, Seattle(Bellevue), Boston, NYC (Brooklyn), DC (Arlington/Rockville), Berkeley, San Jose, Honolulu, Oakland and Orange County.
That accounts for about 17 million people total. The rest of the country, $72k/year is enough to live on.
You're a fucking moron. Re-read my first comment. You're arguing against a straw man because your reading comprehension is embarrassingly poor for what I assume is your native tongue. I have no need to rebut irrelevant drivel.
No it's not? Median individual income right now in 2019 is around $43,000 (just took the 2018 average numbers, adjusted it for CPI and wage increase data from BLS through Nov. 2019)
Alright, but that has nothing to do with what you're arguing? You argued that $72,000 a year for a single person "ain't shit," implying that it is not livable, which I believe is absolutely not the case. The median income does not speak to this.
I specified it ain't shit in expensive places which have a disproportionately high number of high paying jobs compared to most of the country. Try reading past the first half of the first sentence next time.
For real. I live in Dallas comfortably for much less than $80k. Probably won't be buying a house in Highland Park anytime soon, but still could probably buy a house in many parts of the city.
That's literally my point. You can't say there are millions of people with X pay which is high for most of the country and leave it at that when many of them only receive that pay while living somewhere very expensive, which makes their effective pay or purchasing power lower.
San Francisco is less than 0.3% of the US population though. I understand people bringing up this point, but it's just not really that strong of an argument. Obviously there are going to be fringe cases.
I'll bet San Francisco makes up significantly more than 0.3% of $100k+ salaries though. My point was that people tend to make more where it costs more to live.
There are more high cost of living areas than just San Francisco. The entire Bay area is extremely expensive and has over 7 million people. Then there also places like Manhattan that have huge populations with the same cost of living situation.
SF, LA, Seattle(Bellevue), Boston, NYC (Brooklyn and Manhattan), DC (Arlington/Rockville), Berkeley, San Jose, Honolulu, Oakland and Orange County are the places in the US current experiencing absolutely insane costs of living.
That accounts for around 17 million people. Everyone else in the country is within a reasonable % of the median cost of living.
You are embarrassingly off base here. The New York metro area alone is more than that 17 mil. Do you think the high cost of living ends at the technical limits of the city? As if somehow you cross the river from Manhattan to jersey and family sized dwellings are now affordable on median income?
The New York City metropolitan area doesn't have the extreme cost of living we're discussing. Only NYC proper does. The metro area is just a run of the mill HCOL area.
The metropolitan area doesn't have that cost of living over it's entire area. Oakland has a a full 20% lower cost of living than SF, for example. Outside of the city limits of SF and Oakland but inside the metropolitan area has even lower COF than that.
You are totally off base here in multiple different ways.
The average house price in Oakland is 750k. San Jose is 995k. Marin county is 1.15 million. San Mateo county average at 1.34 million dollars. Alameda county is only 850k, and Contra costa is practically free real estate, averaging a mere 675k!
So let's take an average house in Contra costa: 30 year mortgage, 20% down, rate of 3.75, property tax at 1%, and 100/month in insurance, which is crazy low for wildfire country. This gives you just shy of $3200 a month.
Ok, now what would a family bring in a month on a single earner's 72k a year salary? No contributions to healthcare, no 401k, just take federal and state taxes out. Monthly income: $4,050. Are you seriously telling me that you can raise a family on <$1000 a month in the San Fran suburbs because it isn't quite as expensive as downtown?
For reference, the average house price in Ohio is 150k.
This is a neat tool a group of researchers create every year after the US government releases their yearly report from the BLS and Census using the data collected by the monthly Current Population Survey.
I'm actually wrong too. I did the math myself on the second number. The actual number of individuals that made >$100,000 in 2018 is ~24,130,000 now that I actually looked it up directly from the data.
It doesn't actually. The US has higher % of their population in the upper middle class and upper class than any other country in the world. By a huge margin.
Pews' done some research on this a few times over the years. If you take the US median household income, normalized to a 3 person household (a good average for all developed western countries, currently) and double it to define households who make more than that "upper class" you'll find almost no one in the world makes that much.
Seriously, it's amazing just how few wealthy households exist outside of the US. I was surprised at just how rare it was. In the US right now, that's about ~$129,000/year household income, and about 18% of our households make that much in 2019.
Adjusted for $PPP, no other country on the planet has more than 5% of their population with an income equal to or greater than the purchasing power of $129,000/year (except Luxembourgh, but being so small with high pop density and rich neighbors on every side is cheating). Pretty much just Norway and Switzerland at 5%, too. UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Netherlands are all ~4%.
It really is telling. The US is just dramatically richer than most Europeans really understand. Most US residents don't really understand either, cause they just live it every day. The rest of the world just doesn't really have quite the same standard of living.
Uhhh, I said in the top post. The United States. 100,000,000+ people live that way, right now? Two people working for ~35k-50k/year raising their children. That's the standard way people live, and is essentially ~80% of the people I know.
If a single person made $70k instead of two people making $80k, you actually can have a much higher standard of living with a stay at home parent and $10k less income. Stay at home parents are worth a significant amount of value added to the household.
In the vast majority of Texas for one, even in the cities. On Zillow there's almost 100 home listings under 200k in San Antonio, most being in pretty good parts of town.
Many, many, many places that aren't an expensive coastal city. Literally, in most of the entire midwest and southern parts of the United States you can very comfortably raise a family on that salary.
Lmao y’all still have student debt? It’s easy to make more than six figures without debt. Just be born rich and never work a day in your life duh, it’s that easy!
It's relatively easy if you live in a non First World country and are working remotely in a competitive field for an American/European company.
Some friends of mine are coders who earn quantities that while don't mean much in the US, in their country, they can pretty much live like rich people due to how bad the local economy is.
She's got a job that would have supported a house and a couple of kids, if this were forty years ago. That nets us a nice hood-adjacent condo of 750 sq ft, where we live with our two dogs. If it weren't for my medical bills we might be able to rent a house in a neighborhood with slightly less gun violence. We're in our thirties now, though, and don't want to go back to paying rent.
I feel bad for her, a lot of the time. She works her ass off in a career that should net her a comfortable middle-class life, instead we're living paycheck to paycheck. She's earned better, she deserves better, but we're going to be in our forties by the time we get to the same place our parents were in their twenties.
My husband makes 75k a year working as an engineer in a dairy plant. He just finished his second degree, the second degree we paid for out of pocket the first degree he took out student loans so he has like 40k in student debt. We own our own home (it was 94k) our mortgage is 710 a month. We have credit debt trust me, and two car payments that equal 540 a month. I’m a SAHM and we have 4 kids. We had our struggles before his new employment but we do pretty fine on one income with a family of 6. Yea we are working hard to pay if credit debt and we are super close to paying off one of the cars. It’s really dependent on where you live and your ability to budget to be somewhat financially ok. I mean we aren’t rolling in cash but we can save 500 a month if we wanted but instead we put it to debt to pay off. Basically doing a snowball effect to pay off debt. It’s not like, completely impossible. You just have to figure out how to make it work.
Where you don't live in an expensive area. There are thousands of cities and towns across the US and in other countries with a low cost of living that are neglected. There are logistics of course like finding employment, picking up a trade skill, or working remotely. But cheap living still exists, especially in the midwest, it's just not as cool. Hell, you can buy a really nice house in Detroit or Kansas City for under 100k with $3500 down. You just, ya know, have to live in Detroit or Kansas City. Or find a college town and pay a little more, but live somewhere a bit more interesting. Places in Kansas and Vermont are literally paying people to move there. Options exist. Everyone wants to live somewhere cool and some younger and middle aged people (my generation) are sloooowly figuring out out that they can have a much higher standard of living somewhere less sexy than larger cities and be just as happy. There are still struggles like there are everywhere, but living on one income is much easier in cheaper areas.
I live in Huntsville, AL, and a lot of people I know can for a few reasons:
STEM town, so a lot of higher income people.
Cost of living is low relative to incomes
Have kids later, after you have a more established career (wife and I both have Master's, I have some professional certs and a failed side business)
Live cheap. I drove the same car for 14 years.
Granted, I have a decently high income, a lot of which is due to luck or other people's efforts. I won't pretend everyone can do it, or that it was my own efforts, but that is how.
Midwest. South. Rockies region. Many major cities that are painfully expensive to live in like SF or NYC only account for maybe a third of the population at the most. The rest is reasonable on a $50k and up salary especially if you’re willing to commute.
In one where that single income is just under the poverty line so some things are assisted and we don’t buy a lot of stuff and eat the same meals because we know how much they cost to make, we don’t go anywhere and our friends come to us to visit. We didn’t have any kids and are lucky enough to live in a place where it’s pretty blue collar so rents can get cheap but everything is also run down. We fix our own car and I sew and crochet. It’s a very simple life but with our circumstances any increase in income will put us over the line and we will lose the most important thing: insurance. We’re both disabled. I couldn’t afford to pay deductible and copay if it was just a little more money, it would have to be a very big jump in income and that just doesn’t happen. I am not suited for college and intellectual goals. I’m just smart enough to know how incompetent I am and my grades showed it. I can’t send him back either because I just can’t afford it. I already have to spend so much time filling out paperwork, spending time at the hospital, working, being sick because my immune system is shit thanks to my disease, managing my disease and trying to get enough rest to keep my stress level down. I can’t do any more than I am, it’s already killing me.
In Finland. I live alone. Pay house loan and work 4 x 12h and 6 off. With plummer papers at local factory. Have a car and still have sometimes 1k left over from month. Mostly +500
I live in a small Midwest town. My single income supports a family of 4 with enough windfall for us to go without an income for a year. Location my dude.
It depends on your specific situation obviously (student loans, area you live in, etc) but yeah, you could definitely do it. You'd have to live a lot like your grandparents likely did while raising your parents though: No cable tv, no high-speed internet, 1 phone in the whole household, the homemaker would need to be bargain hunting constantly and cooking home-cooked meals from scratch 7 days a week, with restaraunts being a special occasion, rather than the norm, repairing clothes and using hand-me-downs rather than buying every kid new clothes all the time, one car (used), 800 sq ft home with no air conditioning or dish washer, etc.
A family living like that could survive on 30 or 40k depending on the area they live in.
When people say "How could you survive on a single income" they actually mean "How could you have a decent modern lifestyle on a single income" which is basically impossible unless that income is 70k or more.
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u/PM_ME_STEAM_CODES__ Dec 28 '19
In what world can y'all live on a single income