If you’re making 150k and are living paycheck to paycheck you either live in a crazy expensive area or are a total fucking idiot when it comes to managing your money.
Hmmm you’re not going to be making 150k a year in a shit fly over state.
I moved from the Bay Area to the East side of Washington near Seattle, folks here don’t make as much as I do for sure, at least not on average. We both have good salaries so we can afford a lot of things. We essentially got to keep most of our bay area salaries.
But even then if we need a big repair we still have to sit down and plan out the money.
I can’t even imagine what it’s like for folks around here.
Go look at a mortgage or even rent in any major city.
Hi, this is pretty much me, and I concur. If you can’t live on $150k then you are definitely making some questionable decisions. That’s around $8k/m take home. Even if you are spending $4k on rent/mortgage, you should have plenty left over to live on.
Do you have kids?
I’m pretty sure I covered the questionable decisions.
Yeah, if you’re a single man who doesn’t have anyone to take care of and has no physical or mental health problems $150k is great. If you’re part of a house with two incomes you’re probably OK. If you’re on a single incoming supporting parents with disabilities, kids, partners with disabilities, or any combination of similar things, you can maybe get by on $150k as long as you never fuck up and everything goes perfectly in your life and you don’t care about or try to help anyone else.
Edit: and I say man, because men are less likely to take on caregiver roles that cost large amounts of money.
My wife is disabled FYI. I get what you are saying, but there is still a good amount of wiggle room in our budget. I also still don’t really like the idea of lumping kids, which are a choice with a very clear financial impact, in the same category as dealing with illness and disability. That doesn’t seem to be a good faith argument.
A society where having kids is an unsustainable financial decision is a society that can’t continue to exist, and a society where caregiving for someone with a disability or having one yourself makes life impossible is also a society that can’t continue to exist.
There are also a ton of other factors that can easily push someone over the edge. “We have lots of wiggle room” is great for you but lots of people don’t… And even if someone did make a mistake, why should some small mistake put someone in inescapable debt?
I just think the idea that $150k is fine and everyone who can’t make it is an idiot isn’t taking in to account the obvious data that shows the opposite.
Can confirm. My wife and I live in a high cost of living area. Combined we make about $155k and our budget is painfully tight.
I make 150k, have 3 kids (one in college), a home, 2 cars, etc and I am most assuredly not living paycheck to paycheck
Or you only consider your expenses after savings and think that you are “living paycheck to paycheck” because you use up all your non-invested money by the end of the month.
Student loans
100% agree
I mean you can make any income be paycheck to paycheck by spending too much.
Yep, my mother used to manage pays for engineers making up to 300k and for some of them it was a disaster if a mistake lead to 200$ being missing from their cheque and they would be in her office first thing in the morning in full panic mode…
I mean, if my cheque was off by a couple of hundred dollars, I’d want to follow up on the discrepancy (not in panic mode though). My wife’s a high earner and some pay was delayed a month due to staff turnover.
Leadership was like “it shows financial stability to be able to wait for pay,” but people have budgets and plans for that money. Otherwise it’s an interest free loan to the organization - the money should be paid out timely.
But I do agree, overall, that folks should be able to manage their budget, especially as a high earner.
If you’re making 150k per year and “living paycheck to paycheck” you suck with money, full stop.
That’s more than double median household income
My combined household income is more than 150k per year and I have not changed my spending habits since I was in college… caveat being I own a house but my mortgage may only be twice what I was paying in rent. Also I now have healthcare.
Still living paycheck to paycheck. I guess I’d be ok if I missed one or both my wife and I missed one. Though, my marriage would start to be in jeopardy after 2 or three I’d guess.
Wholely agree. I live in the most expensive region in the US on $160k base salary. My total annual expenses (including vacations, wants, gifts) don’t exceed $50k, and of that $20k is rent.
Well yeah, but you probably make good choices which is arguably cheating.
If you are living in an area with a high cost of living, $150k won’t feel like $150k.
From Bungalow, 10 Mist Expensive Cities in the US,
- San Francisco, CA The cost of living in San Francisco is the highest in the country. Jobs in the City by the Bay pay well, with average annual incomes of over $100,000. In 2019, the city had an unemployment rate as low as 1.8%. But a good chunk of each check goes toward the nation’s highest housing costs. As of January 2020, the average rent for an apartment in San Francisco was $3,700, and the median home purchase price was $1.35 million. Prices are sky-high because of limited housing stock and lack of new construction.
If you are making $100k and renting at the average rental price of $3,700, in one year the cost your housing is $44,400 which is almost 45% of your income. The goal is to spend 30% of your income on housing. If people with would be normally considered to have a good income are struggling then the poor are completely fucked.
There is a small group of people who are making money off this system and ain’t us.
San Francisco, CA The cost of living in San Francisco is the highest in the country. Jobs in the City by the Bay pay well, with average annual incomes of over $100,000
Now imagine one just doesn’t choose to live in the literal most expensive place on the planet.
FWIW the only people benefiting from this shitty exclusionary zoning are the boomers who rigged the zoning so they stay rich forever. It’s entirely a localized problem.
I’m almost there.
I also live in the Bay Area. My rent is locally cheap but nationally very high. My wife has a chronic illness and an unrelated acute issue that recently required surgery. She can barely work. Until this most recent surgery I was keeping ahead, but expenses are up and income is down and that’s not true anymore.
I have good health insurance but there’s a lot more to medical costs than just doctors, and to partially manage her daily quality of life it’s not weird to cook her three different dinners and she can only stomach one. This explodes our meal budget.
We’re childfree but one of our dogs recently also got diagnosed with chronic illness. They are our kids, full stop.
Shit happens. Don’t be a dick about it.
This is out of touch. There is a huge number of factors that dictate what amount of money is enough to live a fulfilled live. A bachelor can live a fulfilled life on 30k a year and still save money, but a family of 5 can definitely be living paycheck to paycheck on 150k, especially if they live in an expensive area.
Children are a choice, plan accordingly for the children’s benefit.
Do you not live in America? Children are not a choice is a country that doesn’t enshrine access to abortion.
Lol wat? Ever heard about condoms?
So poor people shouldn’t have kids, got it.
I’m just saying good parents consider what is best for their children before having them. Having 6 when you can only reasonable support 3 is a ‘poor’ choice. Bad parents, on the other hand, have children to benefit themselves rather than the child.
And anyway, statistically, lower income people have more children per person so no one is preventing poor people from having kids. I’m just questioning if that is what is best for those children, because I care about children’s suffering.
Stop arguing if people making 150k a year should be fine.
It’s the billionaires. Look at them.
Removed by mod
Famine, disease, collapse, or war. Those are historically the only ways inequality of anywhere near this level has been rectified.
We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health’s.
You can see it in how it went from “essential workers are heroes!” back to “you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!” pretty much overnight in early 2023.
As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.
On the plus side, millennials aren’t having fucking babies so we’re killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it’s a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
When they won’t have enough workers to keep pushing exponential “growth” each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.
Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that’s even possible.
As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.
Capitalism (depending on how you define it) is coming up on 600 years soon. That’s usually the point at which systems start to break and new ones emerge. Unfortunately, if you’re a fan of Marx you’ll be aware of his theory that cycles of power relations and exploitation tend to reproduce themselves within these new systems - unless that cycle is broken.
Sounds like this might rectified soon, then.
Republicans don’t want a revolution and the Democrats don’t want people to own guns.
Such a rusty axe head
Seeing this first hand between myself and some of my close coworkers who all earn similar incomes with similar sized families, I’d be willing to bet a majority of those 32% (who don’t live in the bay area or Manhattan) are financially illiterate and live paycheck to paycheck because they blow all their money on stupid shit.
I still manage to save, pay my credit card off each month, and pay all the household bills while still having money for stupid hobbies and yearly vacations while they constantly take out loans, loans to pay for other loans, finance even small purchases, have multiple maxed out credit cards, and keep kicking the can down the road on paying off their 20 year old student loans. I’d have a little more sympathy if they didn’t make snide comments like “must be nice” when I mention an upcoming trip, or argue that I’m stupid for upping my 401k contributions during our recent market dip while suggesting its better to sell it off when the market is down so you don’t lose your money.
Adam Smith observed in his epic that when people get more money they generally spend it on more/better housing. Today we have a few more luxury goods, to add to a house, but a house is still something people spend more and more money on when they get it.
I’m not sure that is bad. My dad died at 65 - what was the point of all the retirement savings he had saved up (at least my mom can enjoy it). Even if you live for much longer, most old people I know have failing bodies and so they can’t really enjoy those old years. More and more my advice to people is save for a rainy day and an okay retirement, but don’t save for a rich retirement - instead enjoy that difference now.
Sorry about your dad - I hope you got to enjoy some good times together before he passed.
This is a completely unfair assessment. I make way less than that, and this is what results they get? Either they didn’t try hard enough with more taking the test, or they are THAT financially tone deaf. Soo stupid
I don’t understand your point? The article and the survey found a 3rd of people earning over $150k were living pay cheque to pay cheque, but also 36% in the bracket below and over 55% of people on $50k or less.
Living pay cheque to pay cheque is a sign of financial distress but not the only sign. People’s living costs also match their lifestyles - it’s possible for someone earning $150k to be living pay cheque to pay cheque as the cost of living, schools, transport, etc are higher. Of course people in that bracket have the “luxury” of being able to move down the quality of life ladder - move to a cheaper area, cut back on their lifestyle.
Whatever you may think about people earning that much, the message is that the cost of living crisis is affecting everyone and pulling down living standards for everyone. Not only is it hard to live your previous lifestyle but it’s impossible to aspire for more.
The only exception is the millionaires and billionaires who continue to screw the rest of us over. We have more in common with someone who earns $150k a year than someone who earns $500k or who is sitting on millions or billions in asset wealth.
The sooner the middle classes realise they’re aligned with the poor and not the rich, the better. Maybe then they will stop voting for shit right wing politicians who only benefit the truly rich.
I don’t see how that’s possible unless you have a huge family, you have some sort of chronic disease that insurance doesn’t cover, or you’re wildly irresponsible. Even in a high cost-of-living area, a normal family of four could live quite comfortably on that much money and still save some of it.
(I don’t think that many high-earning people are wildly irresponsible. I suspect that this statistic isn’t right.)
Oh boo hoo. Try making about half that, like me and my wife do (combined). It isn’t fun.
Dude. Get a grip. These people are far closer to you in wealth than the people who fund SuperPACs or own news organizations. You have much more in common with someone who makes $150k/year than you do with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch, or whoever the fuck else has obscene amounts of money. Those people, the billionaire class, the 0.01%, are the people using their larges to influence politics and media.
These people making $150k/year are overextending themselves, I get it, but if I actually spent the money I wanted to spend on improving my life, especially in relation to things like my health, I would be looking at needing to spend that kind of money each year. My teeth are falling out of my god damned head and I’ve gotten the cost of such things shared with me and it’s out of fucking control. I’m talking like $10k for one of the many problems I have in my mouth. The others aren’t cheaper. All it means is that we are so poor that we’re literally putting off life-saving medical care because it’s fucking unaffordable. All people making $150k a year are doing is just barely scraping by while actually getting that care.
Oh no, they own a single super shitty, hollowed out house that is busted as hell and needs massive repairs constantly. Yeah, man, they’re doing so much better than us just because they have a house. /s Like maybe take a minute and understand a lot of those people just bought their house, and it’s not like they were buying it in their 20’s.
People making this much are not your enemy, they are the people you have to convince that the system is broken and get them on your side.
People whose entire wealth and income comes from investments are the people who are your real fucking enemy.
Because guess what, these $150k/year stiffs still work for a fucking living.
Because I get it, it feels like they have so much more when they’re making over $100k a year more than you, but like, they’re still treading water, just like us, just like this article points out. Trust me, if you were making that money, you’d still be pretty broke unless you didn’t have kids.
Source: my broke ass sister, a lawyer who lives in a fucking hovel that needs tons of repair and is being bled dry by medical bills, child care, a psychopathic narcissist of an ex-husband (who literally lives off of credit cars and spends like Paris Hilton) and housing costs. She didn’t buy her home until she was over 50, she’s Gen X. She’s on thin ice just like me, even though she’s doing better by a lot of measures. The only “investments” she has is her fucking 401K to try to have a halfway decent retirement (ha, as if).
EDIT: Second Source: Just remembered a conversation I had with a friend years ago when I worked at a local mexican restaurant. He was upset at the owner, because he had like a million dollars in the bank. I explained that a lot of that was because he had been in business a long time, and frankly, you need that kind of money to keep a restaurant running (thin margins). I told him at the time that any huge disruptive thing could eat into that million and make a lot of it go away fast. COVID hit, and that restaurant nearly bit the dust, but only JUST scraped through the other side. I bet they don’t have a million in the bank now, they had to shut down to satellite stores where they sold their tortillas.
they’re still treading water, just like us
I currently have 1200 dollars and live in my mother’s basement, because I’m her full time carer while she recovers from cancer. My current retirement plan is a rope. I have a master’s degree in STEM, but you’d be surprised how many homeless people have those too.
Someone earning 150k would have to work thousands of years to become a billionaire, true.
The ultra rich are the true enemy, true.
But Jesus Christ, people earning 150k are not ‘just scraping by’.
Seriously. Get a grip. How out of touch do you have to be to think that? No concept of what true poverty looks like.
As a 40-something guy who literally has cancer and no retirement savings and is wondering how he can even stay alive and has had a year of nothing but suicidal ideation, I still have the capacity to have compassion and not blame other working stiffs for how bad things are for me. I have a degree and I work at a fucking pizza place.
Out of touch my ass, I’m literally living a similar experience. Sorry I have the ability to consider other people’s situations instead of just my own. It’s called empathy, motherfucker. Have you heard of it??
I’m not who you were replying to, but I just want to wish you the absolute best of luck in your health battle. Empathy is in short supply at the best of times, but showing empathy when you’re in the middle of something so hard is next level. I bet you also make an excellent pizza, even if that’s not where you expected to be working.
I’ll have my fingers crossed for you, friend. Fuck cancer and everything that it entails.
Cheers, mate. I hope for the best for all of us. It can happen to any of us at any time, and that’s part of why it’s so stressful. Making good money isn’t some sort of panacea against your life falling apart.
I mean, Christ, just think of all the people who have chronic pain that became opiate addicts who also had real, productive jobs who ended up on the street due to addiction to the solution to their chronic pain. Life isn’t fair, and even having money saved away can’t protect you from everything.
Look, I’m really not in a good place either, as I assume you gathered. It’s been so long for me. At one point I found myself crying into the toilet I was cleaning for one of my night time temp jobs. Like you, I’m basically hanging on by a thread. For me it’s been going on a decade now.
I really shouldn’t be having this discussion, so we’ll leave it at that.
I’m just going to wish you luck, strength, or whatever gets you through today and tomorrow. Even if it’s drowning out the noise, even if it’s spite, anger or curiousity about something like the conclusion of a dumb tv show you don’t even really like.
Maybe things will get better for us, even if right now we perhaps don’t really believe in it anymore.
Thanks for that, friend. Life is hard, and I don’t blame you for being in a low place because of it. I appreciate your candor, openness, and willingness to hear me.
I wish and hope for the best for you, too. All of us deserve better.
Also, unrelated, dope username.
Many of them bought this on themselves
If these people are financially struggling, it’s by choice (e.g. buying property).
And I don’t feel sympathy for them. They can reduce their spending and survive.
People could literally say the same things about my financial situation, which is dire. I was on the verge of homelessness earlier this year. I have heard plenty from discompassionate people who say I could have tried harder/worked harder/done more and that my shortcomings are things I brought on myself.
They wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but I would still think they are kind of a stuck up asshole.
Same difference. Do you talk about the homeless the same way?
Do I talk about the homeless the same way as the top 20% of income earners?
No.
Do you have any more bad faith leaps you want to take here?
The only way I could reasonably see that is if those people bought houses when rates went up. I live in a high cost of living area and $150k would not be living paycheck to paycheck for my family (wife, 2 kids, and a dog). I guess I also don’t have expensive tastes.
I’m somehow sure that plenty of people were still buying houses when rates went up. Once again, people blaming choices and circumstances. It feels eerily similar to how people judge the homeless and talk about their “bad choices.”
To be fair, I live in a low cost of living area and having purchased a house this past January, if I dropped to 130k I might be paycheck to paycheck after a while. Which, granted is lower than the survey.
This being said, my mortgage payment is only $50 more than what my rent was about to increase to, because landlords are the devil.
I also didn’t get a big house, it was well under the national average for cost and size, very much a “starter house”. But still over 300k, because housing is a nightmare.
I make less than a third of that and make it work (barely). Some people need to seriously reassess their priorities or something.
You don’t get any sort of financial assistance?
I grew up on the poverty line. Food Stamps and Affortable Housing programs got us by.
I worked my ass off to get above the threshold of qualifying for any sort of assistance, and now I live at about the same level because food and rent eat up the difference between what I make and what my parents made.
Nope, no direct financial assistance. Though my parents are close by, and do help with things like inviting me over to dinner like once a month and helping me buy used furniture, if that counts. I shop very frugally and don’t have expensive hobbies. The only thing I’m really missing is savings.
We are cut from different cloths.
I hope you the best.
Maybe. At least I’m not making $150k and somehow still struggling lol
Ya.
You can’t figure out how to make 150k, but you think you are better than people who have.
Tried to end it nice, but fuck you are a raging asshole.
Do you make $150k and are struggling to make ends meet? Please clue me in to the struggles, I’m all ears.
Household, not solo, income of about 150k.
About same quality of life as I had growing up.
No kids.
Bottom barrel health insurance is a LOT more expensive than it is for people who make less. Drive a Honda Civic, but I still pay more for car insurance than my buddies that make less and drive Mustangs/Chargers/etc. My mom got WIC. I don’t. My mom qualified for Affordable Housing. I don’t.
I mean… I endorse you punching up, but I don’t think you aim those punches high enough, which makes you look like the kind of asshole who it makes sense that you can’t find actual gainful employment to advance yourself.
If this conversation proceeds, I need to know if you have reproduced, if you have been divorced, and if you are on any form of public assistance.
I’m no divorce/no kids/ can’t qualify for public assistance and my rent, food, and insurance costs have me living paycheck to paycheck.
At a current household income of, specifically, about 130k, far higher than I ever thought I’d pull off, there is NO shot at me getting a mortgage and I’m still living at the standard of life whose tax statements include kids, divorces, far lower paying jobs, and public assistance.
Many probably live in higher cost of living areas.
And it’s entirely possible/likely if they move to a lower cost of living area they will suddenly not make anywhere near as much and still live paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, I was making a flat 50k a few years ago, and seeing some college classmates making three times as much complaining about how poor they were could only make me laugh.
I’m doing much better now, but it still drives me nuts when people don’t know how to appreciate what they have.
Someone can appreciate what they have and still struggle to support a family, repair and maintaine a house, pay deductibles and co-pays for medical treatments, support an unemployed or ailing family member, pay student loans, pay car loans, send remittances to family in a home country, etc. They could simply live in a HCOL area. There are many not unusual scenarios that could have a household making $150k/year struggle.
It drives me nuts when people think their circumstances define someone else’s, too.
Boo hoo? I make a bit over half of half of that, and I’m getting by just fine. Maybe cut back on the avocado toast if you make 4x what I make and can’t manage to live within those means.
