The crux of this issue, why everyone has something to say about it: is because the word ‘comfortably’ seems open to interpretation. But it’s defined in a way that makes sense here.
For the purposes of the referenced study smartasset.com/…/salary-needed-live-comfortably-2…, they used the MIT Living Wage Calculator livingwage.mit.edu and extrapolated out total compensation needed to maintain the 50/30/20 rule, where 50% of your total income goes to necessities, 30% to entertainment and wants, and 20% to investments or debt payments.
So it’s really not up for debate unless you’d like to argue against the figures presented in the MIT Living Wage calculator or the 50/30/20 ‘rule’.
im like at least 3% sure the subtext is 503020 does not reflect the reality of if you can manage 100, closer to the actual median around 45k, then ==> follows some version of that is enough.,.
Agree they list the rule - but like a mean vs median thing, are crazy cities like NYC or LA skewing the average?
We make about half the bottom-right picture, but I AM at about the 50/30/20 balance. Yes, worthless anecdote, but still makes $240k seem a tad high for a median.
I’ll have to take a look at my spending and see where my splits really are. To the spreadsheet!
Are you fucking me? Tell me that is overestimate. I did not work my early life to get a good job just to be told it still not enough to live comfortably.
So around 80$ an hour for a single person. Hope you’re trained in a specialized area of work. Maybe one day I can aspire to eventually become lower middle class.
A bit misleading picture. So one adult is 96k, and a family of 4 is 235k. 2 adults would be around the 160k I guess, since they hare rent/mortgage. 2 children then cost around 75k.
Still, 96k for one adult? Seems high. They must factor in the highest rent and most expensive (middle class) car and vacations.
Yeah, their definition of “comfort” seems to be a solidly middle class experience of going to Disney world and…other middle class stuff? I live alone in nyc and I’m plenty comfortable, but I’m not making 140k.
No, going to Disney world and taking yearly vacations used to be considered middle class. On one income, by the way. We’re just so beaten down these days that we consider basic life enjoyment and time off away from the house “upper class.” I’m old enough to tell you it wasn’t, and it hasn’t been this way very long.
Two cohabiting adults get some economy of scale benefit, but then children add the entire childcare category to the expenses. Housing and Transportation costs, the largest fraction of the budget, both see only marginal increases with each additional family member.
All costs took the average for the region or metro area. It really does cost $96,000 on average to live in America.
The source is a SmartAsset report that pulled data from the MIT Living Wage calculator. It takes the average regional costs for housing, transportation, taxes, etc, and then SmartAsset used a 50/30/20 rule to estimate comfortable living wages from basic needs expenses.
You might want to get a device that connects to the interwebs and has a ‘searching engine.’ I’ve been using AskJeeves for years and haven’t had a problem yet.
Looks like these numbers came from a report by SmartAsset, which took it’s numbers from the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Here’s a link to their methodology:
At its simplest, a living wage is what one full-time worker must earn on an hourly basis to help cover the cost of their family’s minimum basic needs where they live while still being self-sufficient.
There are eight basic needs – food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation, civic engagement, broadband, and other necessities – that make up the cost components of the living wage, with an additional cost associated with income and payroll taxes.
EDIT: It looks like the SmartAsset report used their 50/30/20 rule to estimate their “comfortable” living wage. 50% needs, 30% wants, and 20% paying down debts. The MIT calculator bundles some needs and wants together, so it appears that SmartAsset teased out the expenses they categorize as “needs,” e.g., food, housing, and transportation, and then they doubled it.
Living a decent life alone in America. The costs go up if you want a family.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
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