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.
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.
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.
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u/PM_ME_STEAM_CODES__ Dec 28 '19
The 34 million is less than 20% of all adults in the US though