41–50 of 195 posts
I really cannot sympathize. My father raised a family of 6 making ~$30k/yr at his peak. Yes we struggled at times. Public school. Knock off sneakers. Cheap cost cutter food and small simple meals. Crap car. Etc. When I started working in software I made way more money right out of school than my family ever made. And I developed a lot of bad spending habits as a result. After a few years I got my head on straight. Pa…
"The report, put out by Pew Charitable Trust, includes the results of surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015 to see how Americans were coping with what are referred to as financial shocks—those one-off expenses that crop up from time to time. Pew found that in large part, Americans’ ability to weather financial shocks is partially dependent on something that Americans still struggle to accumulate: savings." https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/savings...
I really cannot sympathize. My father raised a family of 6 making ~$30k/yr at his peak. Yes we struggled at times. Public school. Knock off sneakers. Cheap cost cutter food and small simple meals. Crap car. Etc. When I started working in software I made way more money right out of school than my family ever made. And I developed a lot of bad spending habits as a result. After a few years I got my head on straight. Pa…
> My father raised a family of 6 making ~$30k/yr at his peak. When your father was working and you were growing up, $30k was worth more (perhaps much more, depending on how old you are) than it is now. His job probably had benefits and protections modern jobs don't have. What used to work for people increasingly doesn't work, in large part because benefits are disappearing, government programs and subsidies are being…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he did that then he had government support out the wazoo and free meals in the school as a child and all sorts of benefits.
Yes we were on food stamps and WIC for several years when my two youngest siblings were born. Never on welfare. We got reduced lunch at school. It was about $0.50 if I remember correctly. What’s the point though? If anything there are more benefit programs today than were available then. At $100k/yr you really should not be eligible for much benefit when you consider how much better you are doing than average.
I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but it would be nice to hear what is eating into their income so much. My thought pattern here is that if you can't manage on $100,000 a year then you'll have the same problem at $200,000 a year, so on and so forth.
It started when an Austrian software engineer published his entire spending, and where every cent of his taxes goes, in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7h2idb/wha...
Other users, employed in all industries, quickly responded, some from Japan https://redd.it/7h99vj , Seattle https://redd.it/7h6bsr , Brisbane, Australia https://redd.it/7h9gpe , New York City https://redd.it/7has76 , rural TN https://redd.it/7hbhe9 , London, UK https://redd.it/7h9tjf , a Major in the US Air Force https://redd.it/7ha2q0 , and another one from Switzerland https://redd.it/7hbehc
There’s dozens more posts, I can’t link them all, you can find the rest at https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/ – but many of them show how people can live very successfully on low wages, and others yet struggle with much more money.
I really cannot sympathize. My father raised a family of 6 making ~$30k/yr at his peak. Yes we struggled at times. Public school. Knock off sneakers. Cheap cost cutter food and small simple meals. Crap car. Etc. When I started working in software I made way more money right out of school than my family ever made. And I developed a lot of bad spending habits as a result. After a few years I got my head on straight. Pa…
You’ll be downvoted for preaching frugality because many coastal-city HN software folk making six figure salaries are probably inimical to frugality: buying 3000 dollar bikes, luxury cars, eating at fancy restaurants, etc. in very anti-fragile way without saving with substantial cushion for rare adverse events.
Recently, the news media seems to have developed a weird fetish for the petit bourgeoisie. The U.S. is highly atypical in how we treat the upper middle class. In Germany, for example, a two-income couple making 84,000 Euro ($100,000) in Bavaria nets 57% of their income: https://www.icalculator.info/germany.html . In Maryland, a relatively high-tax state, they net 76% of their income. And that doesn't adjust for the a…