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I have a wife and a son and we did fine on my salary of $21,000 last year.

There are a lot of parts of the country where that's a perfectly viable wage.

That seems nuts to me. I significantly more than that, and it still feels like we're scraping by. Our location doesn't have a particularly high cost of living, either.
one man's "barely scraping by" is another man's "I've got everything I need".

I've got a house, reliable transportation, health care, food, a great school for my kid, and lots of family nearby. My cost of living would go way up if I ate out more, bought all new furniture, or spent big money on activities for my son, and then it would seem like I needed a lot more money.

I think what he was saying though, which I'd agree with, is that in most places if we assume a minimum livable wage to be ~10$ (which is a generous statement, I think), one barely comes out at ~20k (napkin math) yearly. Yes, you may be able to cover the necessities, but you mentioned healthcare, if you had an unlucky year where you were responsible for the maximum of your copay, that would probably put you into savings? Or if there was an "act of god" that wasn't covered under, say, car insurance (to give an example that nailed me recently, a hailstorm), there's another few k.

As some sort of point to all this, the discussion on livable wage needs to encompass the fact that there are some big holes in our financial system that people can still fall through that will hamstring you for years to come, even if the base wage is technically livable.

Yeah, but if they just work two jobs for 40 hours a week each, then they can have an income of $45k. Heck, if you work 3 40 hour a week jobs, you're firmly in the middle class!