'An economic divide that is widening': Almost one third of Americans earning $150,000 a year or more say they're living paycheck to paycheck and many rely on credit cards to close the gap

finance.yahoo.com 'An economic divide that is widening': Almost one third of Americans earning $150,000 a year or more say they're living paycheck to paycheck and many rely on credit cards to close the gap

Some say they won’t be able to pay off their credit cards by the end of the year.

'An economic divide that is widening': Almost one third of Americans earning $150,000 a year or more say they're living paycheck to paycheck and many rely on credit cards to close the gap

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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 3 I'd guess. Not that she would leave me because I'm not making enough but the added stress would quickly become unmanageable.
  
  Same, except I have a functional TV now lol
- 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.
  
  Ah, the classic, "Why don't they just move?"
  Checkmate
  
  Now imagine one just doesn’t choose to live in the literal most expensive place on the planet.
  Because the jobs I want to work will relocate to the midwest to help me cover rent. /s
  And before you tell me to take a less-fancy job, some of the problems a person might want to solve are far more interesting and rewarding than the kinds of "tech" jobs available in a place like Austin, TX. No comparison at all. People don't work hard to do things that don't interest them.
  
  It's so weird that you just pretend nothing exists away from a coast lol
- This is out of touch. There is a huge number of factors that dictate what amount of money is enough to live a fulfilled live. A bachelor can live a fulfilled life on 30k a year and still save money, but a family of 5 can definitely be living paycheck to paycheck on 150k, especially if they live in an expensive area.
  
  If you're living paycheck to paycheck on $150k you're stupid full stop.
  
  I rarely downvote, but you earned it.
  
  I already did this one elsewhere. $150k is a decent middle class life barely in lower cost of living areas. Probably shouldn't be paycheck to paycheck, but it wouldn't hard to be either.
  
  Children are a choice, plan accordingly for the children's benefit.
  
  So poor people shouldn't have kids, got it.
  
  Eugenics with extra steps, sounds peachy
  
  I'm never having kids, by choice. How is that eugenics?
  
  When you start advocating for a particular group to not reproduce, what else would you call it? You can choose that for yourself but if you suggest it for anyone else you're gonna need to choose your words very carefully to avoid coming across like a super racist from the 19th century.
  
  To be clear, I'm anti-capitalist and not blaming poor people for anything, nor suggesting they should not have any children. But I stand by my position and wording.
  Don't have more children (or even pets) than one can support. It's objectively cruel.
  Would I prefer a world where there wasn't such dramatic (or ideally any) inequality? Definitely. But even in a world where every single parent could support 6 kids I'd be against people having 17.
  
  You seem to think that the only way for people with children to to be poor is if they are poor and have children. You know you can have children, loose your job, and become poor, right? I'm telling you, you are out of touch and that is clearly evident in you're inability to come up with non circumstancial examples.
  
  I'm just saying good parents consider what is best for their children before having them. Having 6 when you can only reasonable support 3 is a 'poor' choice. Bad parents, on the other hand, have children to benefit themselves rather than the child.
  And anyway, statistically, lower income people have more children per person so no one is preventing poor people from having kids. I'm just questioning if that is what is best for those children, because I care about children's suffering.
  
  Are you quoting facts from Idiocracy right now????
  https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-population-tech-2022-11
  Are you sure that, since there are proportionally more poor people in the world, you aren't just forming an availability bias?
  And besides that, poor people are more likely to get pregnant from rape without the ability to terminate the pregnancy. If that is not enough they also have less access to reproductive healthcare, reproductive education, abortions, birth control, and prophylactics.
  You've mentioned you're a anti-capital, yet you see impoverished children as the fault of the parents who have them as opposed to the system that creates poverty in the first place. Capitalism demands cheap labor which means there are a ton of incentives built into it for procreation. Families don't just choose to be poor.
  
  In my experience, bad parents are those that think people act with a single motive - they tend to label kids as manipulative. People can have kids for a selfish reason and still put their interests first.
  
  As if it's never the case that people have children in the expectation that their current financial situation won't suddenly take a turn for the worse; as if what made perfect sense 10 years ago doesn't make sense now when you have a 10-year-old kid to support.
  This idea of yours, that people should somehow be able to magically predict their financial future is pure bullshit.
  
  Do you not live in America? Children are not a choice is a country that doesn't enshrine access to abortion.
  
  Lol wat? Ever heard about condoms?
  
  Ah yes, condoms. Famous for stopping rape and never breaking.
  
  Look, I'm not arguing that restricting access to abortions is stupid. Of course it is.
  But having children in our day and age is of course a choice. There are countless contraceptives available and what you mention are merely edge cases that are not responsible for people not being able to make a living because they pop out children non-stop.
- I think location definitely plays into this. 150k in some places is nothing.
  
  No.
  https://lemmy.world/comment/5728493
- I'm almost there.
  I also live in the Bay Area. My rent is locally cheap but nationally very high. My wife has a chronic illness and an unrelated acute issue that recently required surgery. She can barely work. Until this most recent surgery I was keeping ahead, but expenses are up and income is down and that's not true anymore.
  I have good health insurance but there's a lot more to medical costs than just doctors, and to partially manage her daily quality of life it's not weird to cook her three different dinners and she can only stomach one. This explodes our meal budget.
  We're childfree but one of our dogs recently also got diagnosed with chronic illness. They are our kids, full stop.
  Shit happens. Don't be a dick about it.
  
  You sound like the exception not the rule.
  
  I think you'd be surprised how many people live in cities and have medical expenses. This dude doesn't even have kids.
  
  Word
- Nope. If people having been living the exact same without changing many of their habits then it is absolutely fair that they would also be struggling paycheck to paycheck. They're effected just as the rest are. We need to focus on the jackass causing us to turn on eachother. We shouldn't be comparing ourselves because there are people who consider 30k/y as living lavish and think they also shouldn't be complaining.
  
  If people having been living the exact same without changing many of their habits then it is absolutely fair that they would also be struggling paycheck to paycheck
  If you can't play for the future you will be poor. I owe you no sympathy
  You're one of the richest people on the planet, by default, and I think you should pay more in taxes and it should be on you to figure out your finances, because you're fucking rich and you just don't realize it.
  The most wealthy places on earth should not be held up as the norm and most people should not live in those places. We should tax all of those people excessively and they should not have guaranteed wealth.
- They use the median instead of mean here for a reason... Can you guess it?
  
  Because mean income is a useless metric in most contexts due to it being extremely warped due to outliers (billionaires) since this country has the worst income inequality in the first world by far..? Do I get a trophy now
- Wholely agree. I live in the most expensive region in the US on $160k base salary. My total annual expenses (including vacations, wants, gifts) don't exceed $50k, and of that $20k is rent.
  
  Well yeah, but you probably make good choices which is arguably cheating.
  
  I don't think that would be a winnable argument.
- I think the point is, they are living paycheck to paycheck unless they choose to decrease the quality of living.
  On one hand we can say these people are way better off than they deserve and laugh at their stupidity.
  On the other hand, that's not a great sign for the economy. The "every day" kind of rich person isn't even that rich anymore. And lowering the ceiling pushes you into the floor.
  If society were healthier and functioning, relative costs would be going down for everybody. But enshitification is the new big thing to earn another buck.
  
  I think the point is, they are living paycheck to paycheck unless they choose to decrease the quality of living.
  People who actually live paycheck to paycheck don't have this option and this is ludicrously offensive to people who actually live this way.
  On one hand we can say these people are way better off than they deserve and laugh at their stupidity.
  It's not about laughing at their stupidity but about the situation itself being laughable.
  The “every day” kind of rich person isn’t even that rich anymore. And lowering the ceiling pushes you into the floor.
  I thought lowering these gaps was the intention of Progressivism. Is it not?
  
  I think it's just one more side effect of "American exceptionalism" and the culture of individuality and "me me me me" here, that people don't even see "change your lifestyle" as an option.
  They were told about the American dream or whatever, but they were sold a bill of goods, and now they can't even comprehend cutting back on expenses in any meaningful way.
  
  Lowering the gap between 10th and 90th percentile is meaningless if the very top doesn't change too
- I mean, this depends on a lot of factors. Stop applying your own prejudice to this?
  $150/y = ~$100-110k take home
  The average monthly expenses (Living very much in your means, in an area with avg cost of living, not performing maintenance...etc) for a family of 4 is ~$101k/y
  So you have between ~ -$80/m to +$700/m in disposable income. If you start doing the necessary maintenance & long term cost amatorization of living in the U.S. (ie. Having to buy a car eventually, if you own a home replacing the roof....etc). Suddenly you're close to negative. Meaning that when these events happen you have to cover their cost with credit card debt or some other form of debt, which means your cost of living is over time partially covered by debt.
  This also seems that you are living not surviving... Much of the US is not really living, they are simply surviving. We should not measure the bar that low for what we consider acceptable quality of living standards.
  Or, if you are in a marginally higher cost of living area that $700/m evaporates.
  Even for a single person, a HCOL area will eat way that income to the point where eating out is a monthly luxury.
  It sounds like a lot of money but depending on where you live it can be an incredibly small amount of money.

274 comments