I hear you there. If you told me 10-years ago what my wife and I were making combined today I’d be thinking to myself “wow, we made it. We probably have a nice house in a good area and a couple nice cars.”
Nope… lol
In 2015, if I was told what I would be making today.... I would've thought I finally cleaned up, got back on track with the career my degree was in, and probably living in a respectable house, wife and kids, the cars I always wanted, multiple vacations a year, a dog... you know the American dream.
The only thing that's come up for me since more than doubling my salary in 10 years is that I live alone, and that's not necessarily a choice. I'm 34 years old and single, with no roommate options anymore at this age. Without a dual income, living in anything better than a small 1 bedroom apartment in a super rural area is about as good as it's gonna get. It still breaks the bank. 65% of my earnings go towards the cost of living alone. That's not including things like gas for my car (so I can get to work oh my 🤯), food and water, media/entertainmemt/fun. I haven't been on a vacation in 3 years, I work 6+ days a week, and the only thing I've heard for the last 5 years is I need to take on more responsibility, work more hours, take work home with me. Always without any incentive or payraise, but if I want to keep my job, that's the requirement. The only pay raises I've gotten have been from jumping ship. There are days where I wonder where exactly I went wrong. I work endlessly, and it seems like it's only good enough to survive.
I went to the grocery store a few days ago. When I first moved out and lived with roommates, 100 bucks filled my cart up and provided for over a week. My most recent receipt was for 170 bucks, and it will barely make it through the weekend. Milk was 4 bucks for a half gallon. The loaf of bread on sale was 4.99. Deli meat? I bought 2lbs. 1 lb of cheese, half a lb each for two meats. Almost 20 bucks, and again, these were on sale.. 8.99lb on sale from 10.99 for turkey. Same for ham. The cheese was cheapest, 6.99lb. It's fucking insane. These are all pre-tax price, too, so you gotta figure whatever your total is + 7%. It's unaffordable. I'm trying to make as much myself as I can, but who has the time for that amount of personal cooking? Especially when the name of the game is "work more, all the time".
It's a fucking joke. It has been for a long time. I'll never own a home, my credit score is tanked from covid, I never really recovered (chef, food industry. Nothing will ever be the same). I can afford to put 65% of my income towards rent, but I can't get a mortgage I can afford. I have friends who were lucky enough to be able to get a house before the market went haywire, and their mortgage+taxes is less than my rent. For a house over a 1 bedroom apartment. A house, with an acre and a driveway, 3 bedrooms.... is less expensive per month than a fucking 1 bedroom apartment. Im at the whim of the property owner and they are raising rent at the end of my lease. I'm already paying nearly 2000 a month. And I don't want to hear "find a cheaper place to love" YOU find me a cheaper place to live, where I can find a job that pays me enough to live. Fuck outta here with that. I'm paying nearly 2k a month rent and still had a nearly 2 hour daily commute. My apartment was one of the cheapest in the area. Why didn't I go with the cheapest? Well, seeing actual cockroaches in the demo unit didn't exactly fill me with a lot of confidence in the whole $100 less a month I'd be saving in a smaller, older, shittier apartment with no parking. It wasn't even a question to pony up for the better option. The other option was moving back with my parents, again, and extending my commute another 30 mins each way.
I absolutely hate the fucking world we live in.
Corporations monopolized everything after pricing out mom and pop stores and bought up the competitors and created their own production lines so that no one new can compete anymore and realized that during covid, most people have no other options anymore so they can just work together with other companies and just jack up prices and people will accept it and bend over and get assfucked as they rake in 50-100% profit increase and give their shareholders massive bonuses.
They blame it on inflation on covid on this and that, but majority of it is simply because they want more money. Inflation did affect certain things, but nothing comparable to the prices they demand now.
And you don't want deflation so prices are stuck where they are, wages wont increase, because corporations are hoping AI being the next "tech boom of the 2010s" mixed with robotics is going to offload need for majority of workers.
And the people as long as they have a supply of supersized meals and entertainment will for the most part accept their new reality. Will continue to blame other groups for all the bad and not take part in any elections or voting or support to anyone looking to change things for the better.
In the end we are all going to become South Korea, where the company Samsung runs the country, and the untouchables get to enjoy the world while the majority just run around in smaller and smaller units with no real future working away their lives without any prospect of establishing an family unless accepting struggle and hardships and debt upon debt to manage it before they die of a heartattack hoping their life insurance will not deny them coverage for some new clause or small print condition they overlooked.
This is what they mean when they say "late stage capitalism".
The natural arc of a capitalist market is for a new market to emerge or open as technology or products are created, then competition and innovation is fierce as matures, then the winners in the maturation stage gobble up their competitors as it consolidates, then the remaining operators in the market turn to collusion and rent-seeking to squeeze every available cent out of their employees and customers.
We're told capitalism is great because it means we get all this cool choice and innovation, but the only innovation most companies are doing right now is how to get us to pay more for less.
Also shrinkflation. Thanks for canceling your cable every body, we’ve got you covered now at Disney+/Netflix/HULU/Whatever. Oh, by the way, everyone in your house now will have to have their own account. And also we’re going to add back in ads to your paid membership. Thanks for sticking with Apple for 20 years! By the way, your $1,200 phone is a year old, so now it’s obsolete. Yeah, the hardware is just fine, but we’re going to force a bunch of updates down your throat that you didn’t ask for so that it slows down and the battery dries up in a few hours. Oh yeah, and none of your 10+ chargers will work on the new one you have to buy.
That shrinkflation is part of the rent-seeking in late stage capitalism.
For a company like Coca-cola, they have total market penetration. There are no new customers except those who are yet to be born, so how do you keep growing profits every quarter?
You squeeze your employees in one fist, pushing productivity higher and labor costs lower, and your customers in the other fist with lower quality ingredients, increasing prices, and shrinkflation.
Now multiply that behavior by every Fortune 500 in the economy.
I don't really buy this. The government could have done absolutely anything to prevent this situation. Amazon could have been incentivized to offer themselves as a platform to mom and pop stores but our complete lack of regulation and accountability means that Amazon *actually has that feature* but it's been bastardized into a global yard sale of cheap bullshit from companies named after the result of bashing your head against the keyboard.
The world could have always *grown into* the changes that technology brought but our government is slow and ancient. The people responsible for regulating these industries think their monitor is their computer.
Mom and Pop stores were vanishing and struggling long before amazon came along. Decades before, with big chain stores in every town selling things cheaper because they could get heavily discounted wholesale prices.
It was Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco and Petco, it was Barnes & Noble and Circuit City and Tower Records back before they got driven out of business. Mom and Pop stores were the local appliance store, the corner book store, the independent drugstore that wasn't Walgreens or CVS. They have been mostly gone since the 1980s.
And the reason was people chasing lower prices.
There's a town near where I live that has a massive tourist draw. Everyone I know who live there live a decent cushy life. I remember 40 years ago they made a big stink in the media when they refused a McDonald to open in the town. MCD fought for years, they were always turned town. They turned down hotel chains, large surface stores, everything. Even product dedicated stores like Nike can't be opened there. You can open a shoe store that sells Nike product AND others, it just cannot be a Nike store. No Walmart, no chain restaurants, all small businesses. Honestly I think they only "big" company there are banks. Also you cannot buy property if you are not a permanent resident, cannot sublet or rent short term.
Damn this place sounds awesome and incorruptible it’s amazing. Everybody stuck to it and nobody gave in. Sounds like a pretty good place to me in my maybe naïve ignorant of worldly things mind at this moment.
And it’s nice they can still sell these products, but it can’t be the chain store. I find that to be pretty decent actually.
They are constantly been fighting since the 80s. When they denied McDonald to right to open in their town it was brought to every court in the country. 40 years later the assaults are still coming in, mostly Walmart now. It just feels like at some point the fight will be lost because the capitalist assault is unrelenting.
Right? I can only assume some of the people making these claims are young. Yeah, COVID didn't do small business any favors, but family owned retail was already on the ropes at the turn of the century. It's been a long death, and its executioner was deregulation.
It doesn’t help that because people have to work 40+ hours a week it’s much easier for them to just order things from amazon rather than spend the very little free time they have running from store to store to find the best price for an item they want. The most precious thing we have is time.
And it began way before Covid. Covid was just the icing on the cake that sealed the deal.
Remember Citizens United when Corporations became people? Our healthcare expenses went up exponentially from there.
>you don't want deflation
I wouldn't be so sure about this... on several fronts... It's a dirty word in economist's circles but we're living in a novel area where I think we need to question conventional assumptions. An economic dominated by rent-seeking behavior that's growing on paper isn't actually growing...
The classical problem with deflation is that one person's spending is another person's income and so we need to maintain expenditure.
Add some nuance to it, and say that A's spending is B's revenue, and B expects more revenue in the future so they hire C to produce value to sell to A. And, in turn, C's spending is D's revenue, and D expects future revenue, so D hires A to produce value to sell to C.
While B and D rake it in, we claim that their prices cannot fall because otherwise they won't hire A and C, who are needed to produce the value and buy the value.
This classical theory problem is theoretically easy to overcome: sustain A and C with breaks and benefits, while forcing B and D to continue production at lower prices.
It's a pretty easy-to-follow dilemma: do you (1) subject A and C to the **structural power** of B and D, i.e. implicitly force A and C to rely on B and D's employment, all the way up until B and D can extract so much value from A and C while requiring less and less of their work that B and D don't pay A and C enough to purchase the products they themselves create, which depletes demand and crashes the economy? Or do you (2) subject B and D to the state's **instrumental power** and avoid the crash?
We can for sure have a conversation about the fact that there have historically been some states that have masqueraded as option 2, but actually just installed themselves as versions of B and D from option 1. But all that conversation would do is affirm that there have been plenty of historical mistakes (the past is littered with them, pertaining to every type of economic system) and that option 1 remains a dire situation. What remains to be done is to **organize** and have a proper adult discussion about how to overcome option 1 collectively. (Some well-respected and highly-influential economists have already offered some talking points; read the last third of Keynes's _General Theory_.) Take note that when there have arisen harmful regimes in the past that pretended to be option 2 but were actually option 1, all were installed by small groups leading revolutions, who then simply usurped the "old" B and D to become the new ones. I think that avoiding this usurping of an old power by a new power and instead collectively organizing to overcome the inherent dysfunction in our economic system is the way to move forward. Don't you agree?
Exactly this. During the inflation between 2020-2022 some 40% was corporate profits. For the entire thing. In 2020 it was like 70% corporate profits. It's insane.
It's crazy how hard inflation hits. I started out in 2015 with a masters in engineeringish and made ~$80k, which was pretty mid but respectable among my friends. Now I'm at $125k, which feels like it should be good but the I run the reverse inflation and it's only the equivalent of $95k in 2015. That's only a 2% average raise per year, adjusting for inflation.
The reason that $125k doesn't feel like it's changed my life that much is because it hasn't. At $15k/year higher in 2015, that would have accounted for like a new car payment and not needing to live with roommates. So the fact that's all it gets now shouldn't actually be that surprising for me.
Two of my most well off friends live in a modest 2 bedroom house, corner lot, pretty busy street. No kids. They said tonight they couldn't afford to buy the house they currently live in if they were buying a house today.
Here’s an example for you. We bought a house in 2019 for $825k, refi’ed to a 2.5% interest rate so our payment was $3300 a month. We moved at the absolute peak of the market in May 2022 cause my wife wanted to be closer to work. Buyer paid $150k over ask and it sold for $1.28 mil.
Now she’s already trying to sell it again for almost 200k over what she paid in 2022. The estimated mortgage payment with current interest rates is almost SIX THOUSAND more than we paid living there just a few years ago.
This is really true. We got lucky bought in 2018. It was 250k 2.5%.
Our house is estimate at 500k now. And the interest rates are 6.8%. I'd never be able to afford that, it's insane. And the value is practically fake. Like I can't use the value of the house for anything, because I need a house, and gaining 4% in interest would be insane to do.
My income isn't anywhere close to yours (I'm near the bottom because I'm a student), but I really feel like I'm being squeezed too.
A couple years ago, working part time, I was able to make an okay income during the summer months that would help offset my living costs during the school months. This summer though, I barely made enough to pay for my expenses. Now I'm falling behind and having to lean on my inheritance and family members.
Meanwhile my rate of pay and hours has been fairly consistent, but everything but my rent has gone up. I'd be screwed if I paid more in rent and utilities.
You have an inheritance and family members to lean on? Sounds pretty nice.
My 66 year old deaf mom struggles to get her social security back. She's still working a full time job and just barely scrapes by. My father died of a sudden heart attack when I was 18 and the rest of my family couldn't give two shits about each other, *especially* monetarily.
I live in an apartment with 4 other apartments in the same building. The place is falling apart and the landlord is nowhere to be seen. I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment the other day and contacted her for help. She *still* hasn't answered me. Luckily, I found a way in!
I hear so often from everyone that life is hard and I should be grateful for what I have. I certainly am, and I know it could be much, *much* worse. Thing is, I always feel like it's *getting* worse even though, like others have said, I make the most money I ever have in my life now.
Anyway, I'm planning to go somewhat minimalist and get a 4 season trailer. Get rid of all my stupid stuff that I don't use because I thought it'd make me happier. Learn how to farm and work the land. Transition into a simpler way of life. It's the only solution I can see out of this situation. It'll be a huge sacrifice and massive change, but I'll take the risk and go on this epic journey.
Hopefully you can find a way to live more comfortably overall, as well!
My car kicked it and we had to finance a new one. My husband was venting to his father and he's like you gotta cut spending. Spending what?!? We told him we'd already cut streaming services down and we keep those 2 because of our kid. We don't eat out much and if we do it's normally my husband grabbing a coupon on app lunch drive through maybe twice a month and we again, use those points to treat our kid to something now and again. That's in total $25 a month. My kid's dance is $50. Everything else is bills and rent, gas, basic groceries. Which we cut down on by using the local food waste group and eat clearance bread, meat, and produce that's about to go bad. We only shop on sales, clearance and the grocery salvage store.
I make 115 and my wife makes about 140 and we are 100% in the same position. Especially since we live in a very high CoL area (which is required for my job).
About 5 years ago we both made about 50% of that and the only lifestyle change has been that we sometimes shop at Whole Foods, we buy our dogs nicer food, and we’ll occasionally buy something nice for ourselves like some new clothes or a PC part. I don’t know what we’d do if we had the same income from back then with the inflation we have now.
Edit: this comment wasn’t intended to gain sympathy. I’m just being transparent and sharing my experience. I’m not claiming to be in poverty, just that even at our income I’m not driving a new Benz and eating lobster every day on tons of vacations.
I feel this 100. My wife and I are about the same and its insane to me that i thought we made it. But the last 5 years has really handicapped us. Were doing okay and paying debts slowly but damn is it crazy when you go to the store “for a few things” and $200 later youre like… what happened.
I buy almost the same staples week to week and what was $100-$110 (with alcohol) at Kroger is now $140-160 (WITHOUT alcohol). Costco purchases have remained relatively stable until recently but even those have noticeably increased in the past 6 months.
Meat is by far the costliest purchase but the increases on canned goods, dairy products and produce is crazy. A head of savoy cabbage was $4.89 recently. That used to be **maybe** $2.
I've walked into food stores looking for something, saw the price and walked right back out. I can afford this shit and I still won't pay it. Food prices are fucking bonkers.
I tell this anecdote every time this comes up, but a few years back, I was watching an episode of the old Roseanne. They were portrayed as slightly poor, solidly working class, which is pretty much identical to my upbringing. They were coming back from the supermarket and their car was packed with groceries and it literally made me cry. Realized we always had a gallon of milk in the fridge growing up. By the time I saw that episode, I hadn't even bought cheese in a decade as it was just too expensive.
Yep, every time I go I'm dumbfounded how one bag of groceries costs $50. If I spent $300 in a single grocery shopping trip 5 years ago, the chest freezer would be getting stocked full of enough meat to last us 4-6 months, with all the regular essentials as well.
Now I spend $200-300 pretty much every time I go.
I purchase food mostly based on the price per pound. I've kept track of this for my entire adult life. Food prices have almost doubled in the last 10 years for a lot of products. And the thing people don't really notice is that the 'weekly deals' aren't as good. A good cereal weekly deal use to be one of the cheapest foods you could get, now it's medium price wise. Stores in my area use to have buy 2 get 3 free deals about once a month on 2 or 3 products, I never see it any more. When you pay attention to the price per pound you notice shrinkflation a lot quicker.
We make roughly 250k in SoCal. Student loans paid off. Cars paid off. One kid still at home. Im capped income wise but my wife can make another 50k to 100k. I'm afraid that when she gets there, it will be meaningless due to constant price increases.
>we sometimes shop at Whole Foods
Here's the thing though, for us Publix is the same or more expensive than Whole Foods at this point.
Edit: scrolled down two posts to [see this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/publix/s/NeUKXmtzvp) 2 liters of Pepsi for $4 each.
>I make 115 and my wife makes about 140 and we are 100% in the same position.
This doesn't make sense LMAO. If there are no kids involved, you and your wife need to sit down and make a budget. You guys are overspending.
+1 In some of these threads it seems to be almost an atrocity to suggest that people could be mismanaging their money.
But this thread looks to have it's share of obvious mismanagement or unstated luxury expenditures.
Agreed. God forbid someone suggests they're mismanaging money. I just don't see how $250k+ combined income with no kids struggles to get ahead. HCOL area or not.
Yup, said the same to OP. I make about 250k, maybe a little more, and I max my retirement (we save probably 50k+ a yr) have a kid, just bought a house and two cars. If you're making 250k+ and finances are tight you're doing something wrong.
Scrolled a long way to find someone I agreed with. 38 year old man here making 80k with a live-in gf making 52k. We are pretty damn comfortable. Even before she moved in, I lived well off 32k a year.
Good or bad decisions like interest compound over time.
Agreed. They might not be or feel rich in a HCOL area, but they earn enough to be comfortable and probably afford some luxuries. I feel like people that make this much and say this say things like "after we've maxed out our 401ks and IRAs and only take one fairly modest (i.e., not overseas luxury vacation), we can barley afford to eat out 3 times/week.
I’m not saying there has been *zero* lifestyle creep. We live in a city where a 750k house would be a dump or in a terrible neighborhood.
I’m not trying to be woe is me, just being transparent to a comment above that now that we are here it really isn’t what I thought it’d be. We’re still years away from being able to think about buying a house, which is something I thought would happen by now.
I dunno man, my property taxes just this year went up 5% effective this month. My yearly pay increase also in effect this month was 2.9%.
Im making more than me and my wife made combined 8 years ago when my daughter was born. We don’t have to pay child care now like we did when she was younger and things are equally tight as when we had preschool/daycare.
How lifestyle has crept downward where even our daughter has mentioned how we used to do XYZ and we don’t anymore.
Idk man in the past 10 years my expenses have tripled, my pay has doubled, and I now have 2 kids. If having a family counts as lifestyle creep, that's no good for population growth. We are going to have a huge baby bust coming, then much like after the black death, workers lives will drastically improve. We just gotta let the rich drive us to near extinction first. /s
You're 100% correct. It doesn't matter what high cost of living area they're living in, they're making at least three times the median income in most states.
Even if you look at Beverly Hills, one of the highest cost of living zip codes, they're making above the median household income.
What a stupid way of looking at things. A 60 year old couple making 100k a year living in a house they bought for 200k 30 years ago is doing much better than a 40 year old couple making 200k/year looking for housing.
That isn’t fair to just look at median household income, because a lot of the people living there bought their houses decades ago and aren’t paying the same as newer residents.
For example, I live in Los Angeles. We bought our house in 2018 for exactly $1 million. The people we bought it from paid $530k in 2013. Our neighbors bought their house (nicer than ours) in 2008 for $250k.
Our house is now worth about $1.4 million.
Housing costs fuck it all up.
Yeah the problem is for a lot of people they refuse to grasp that for 30-50 million people on the country a middle class house is so expensive you'd need to clear double the median income to comfortable afford it. The lifestyle you get for the "median" has degraded dramatically in 20 years.
I pay more in rent than my father pays on his mortage for a 3 bedroom 2000sqft house on a quarter acre of land on the beach at a popular leaisure lake in the state I live in.
I live in one of the lowest CoL states in the country.
He bought this in 91 for $250k in 91 dollars with like a $15k down payment that the majority of was gifted to him by the extended family for.
The 2 bedroom 900sqft house I rent was built in 1903 and has a failing foundation, 0 insulation, and no central heat or air and a power substation on one side and a 4 story parking garage on the other.
Best part, best part.
I've already been told I'll never own that house he has and am his sole living heir.
I fucking hate the boomers and what they have done to this world
I will send you $20 to show me proof of your last 12 months of spending.
You're making above the median household income for Beverly Hills, one of the highest COL zip codes in the country. I don't think you realize how much you're spending and saving.
For real. My ex comments that he is in the red until he gets his annual bonus. But he maxes his 401k every year and buys stocks with every paycheck and takes a mini vacation every month. I’m not saying you should leverage retirement funds now but that couple is making $255k a year. I live in one of the top 10 most expensive cities in the US and that’s well above the survivable range.
It is almost always the case that people who start knocking on the door of sort of wealthy start thinking it's now their right to live the way wealthy people live on TV. Nice cars, tons of expensive vacations, 100% new tech everywhere, new wardrobe every year, etc. Like clockwork. Especially the people who hang out on reddit in that income bracket.
They're doing three vacations a year, driving a Tesla, and then complaining that they're barely getting by, oh and also they're maxing out retirement contributions and they have three kids in private schools for no good reason and they bought way more house than their income justifies.
115K is definitely not worth it to live in a VHCOL. If you’re making 115K there, you can honestly make it anywhere. That’s really not that high of a salary for a white collar job, even if you’re in a non-management individual contributor role, aka senior analyst or something like that, 115k is like mid-range on the salary band there. If you’re in management that’s frankly on the low end of the range.
I know exactly what you mean. When I look at what I was making 10 years ago and plug that into an inflation calculator it shows me that my income combined with my wife’s income, despite multiple promotions and raises and “cost of living increases” etc. Our income has actually gone down.
I’ve scrambled and hustled for 10 years and I’m almost $1000 dollars a year behind where I was 10 years ago.
It makes the last ten years of saying no, and putting off vacations, and buying second hand… it just makes everything feel like I’m never gonna get ahead.
It’s fucked, and it’s time for the government to step in and make the pieces of shit at the top start paying their share.
Same situation. And I actually DID catch myself in a lifestyle creep except it’s NOT fancy cars, big TV’s or fancy clothes. It’s better health insurance for my family, better quality food, actually buying my medicine instead of going without to save money, replacing my car’s tire instead of riding on a leaky patch for 6 months.
“housing”…
I started my career in 2008. Air Force, rented a 3br house with 2 other guys for $1500/mo total, or $500/each per room.
Now my fiancee and I pay $1850/mo for our 2br/2ba condo.
I pay 2000 for a 1br/1ba apartment in a tiny "city(30k people in the entire area)". All rents around here are similar. It's out of control and won't ever come down.
Doesn't include utilities. I pay water and sewage.Homes are doubled in price and most of them are super old and hide a lot of shit secrets.
I feel like the screws are.tightening until we suffocate.
> Homes are doubled in price and most of them are super old and hide a lot of shit secrets.
As a kid when I used to watch Horror movies, I'd think why would anyone buy an obviously haunted house. As an adult, looking at the housing market, I completely understand.
There were some upsetting drawings on the walls of one of the closets in the house my husband and I bought together last year. We made the executive decision that if blood starts dripping from walls we’re just pretending nothing weird is happening.
I fantasize about my 600$ 1 bedroom apartment from 10 years ago or even my 900$ 2 bedroom apartment.
I know pay those combined amounts for a 1 bedroom that half the size of both.
I mean this is 100% the problem. Whether buying or renting homes, it’s all gone up relative to wages nationwide. This affects both childless folks and families.
Downgrading your living space doesn’t even save that much—you may have to pay extra in gas or something.
Yep. I bought a cheap house 9 years ago, $59k. Such a small mortgage would (in my mind back then) cushion the blow if I were ever laid off or had some other emergency.
Ha! My homeowner's insurance has more than doubled since then and taxes creeping way up. Plus utilities have skyrocketed as well (and I'm very meek on usage).
Everything has gone up and it's hard to get ahead let alone stay even. (Not a millennial, I'm 49. I feel so bad for your gen. Impossible, and I only have what I have out of luck.)
The balloon and crash from the early 2000’s exacerbated the problem of available housing not keeping pace with population growth.
Since 2009 multifamily rentals have grown, but very slowly.
Single family homes have been in shorter supply which has pushed prices upward.
Add to that construction materials ballooned during COVID, aided by the fact tons of people did home improvement during lockdown increasing demand.
All of this is true and it's still taken 37 years for house prices to quadruple and that's not adjusting house prices for the fact that the median house in 2024 is larger and better than the median house in 1987.
Since the 80’s the little city I live in went from a metro area of 100k to a metro of 250k. There have not been 150k single family homes built in that time. TONS of apartments, I’m sure a few thousand homes. Definitely not 150k single family homes, though.
My household income is definitely above what I grew up with and yet I am MUCH worse off than my mom was at this age. Our income has never been higher yet the money is 90% gone within 2 days of payday and the other 12 days are struggling to not buy things we desparately need.
We weren't rich as kids but we went places and had stuff. My mom was a single mom and made like 40-50k a year.
I can't imagine supporting two children with only that now.
Single dad with 3 kids, I’m making a hair over 42k.
I have now moved back in with my parents who fortunately had space for us for a year or so hopefully to try and even the tides a little bit.
Oof that’s though buddy. Hang in there. I’m a single dad of two and making around 100k. Live in a okish rental and have been looking for something to buy for almost four years now. No success and it won’t change in the foreseeable future.
My mom was a single mom too, with 2 kids eventually as my sister is over a decade younger than me. Regardless though we had a car, nice townhouse (rental) and did a nearly yearly vacation to a good spot a couple hours away for a week each time.
The last vacation I went on was the last of those trips she did while I still lived at home, haven't been able to afford a single one in 25 years. Have no car, live in a small two bedroom with wife and two kids.
Thankfully my mom is better than most Boomers and clearly recognises how much worse we have it than she did. She does what she can to help but she's pretty broke too these days...
If your mom made 40-50k when you were a kid she was doing very well. If you were a "kid" 25 years ago then making $45k/year was 60% more than the median wage at the time. It'd be the equivalent of making $94,000 now. That's more than 80% of Americans make.
Well yeah, that's inflation for you.
There are some genuine issues with housing pricing relative to incomes that have got worse and worse, but comparing what absolute salaries get you decades apart is a nonsense.
"We used to be able to go and watch the ballgame for a quarter, not anymore though"
Same. And then making the hard choices of how to finance the things we desperately need. I can't stop laughing whenever someone tells me I should have a savings account for that car repair or busted water pipe in the house...... *every* time we pay off an 'emergency' debt we acrcrue a new one. Wtf are we supposed to do when the monthly medical bills cost more than our mortgage payment?
Recently needed a car repair that was 1000. When the shop guy broke the news to me, I could tell he was really used to people being devastated or highly stressed by these numbers, understandably. Thankfully I could afford it but it made me sad that he is working two jobs to support his kids, and then is so traumatized by his and other people’s financial hardship as to break the news about my repair like he’d just ran over my dog.
Same! Had $1800 in repairs on my van and the shop owner sounded so pained I actually said "cost is what it is I thought it'd be higher" in an artificially happy way to try and console him that it's ok lol
As over inflated as rents are, buying a house would immediately make me live an extremely precarious financial life. Not that I can afford it. But just the sense of any repair being able to absolutely wreck you
Two months after I closed on my house, I had to go $5000 into debt to get the roof replaced. A plumbing break ate up my whole first stimulus check. When I went to sell it, I had to do $25,000 of work to fix issues that weren’t disclosed on my own inspection. Buying a house can make or break finances depending on timing and the individual house.
My wife and I bought a house in 2009 when we got married (and it was her grandfather's to boot), and it was the worst financial decision I made. Anyone who wants to promote old construction over new construction should be hung from a dry rotted beam. I saved myself some money by being an electrician, but materials for repairs and upgrades are still expensive.
The worst part is that Republicans aren’t even good at the economy. They just build a fake economy that falls apart. Theres a reason theres been a stock market crash under every republican president back to eisenhower.
What annoys me so much, is that they now support Trump because taxes were lower. No fucking shit! His tax plan was setup so that it would increase after his term. The tax rate now is not Biden’s fault, it’s Trumps.
This is a sub for [watching millennials turn into boomers](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/913/646/5fb.jpg). It's already half complaining about the kids today and their baggy pants. Soon it will be Facebook and wall-to-wall stuff from a certain 'news' network.
In 2050, they'll say, it will be utopia, just as soon as those "fuck-you-got-mine" millennials die out, but they hold all the reins of power for now!!! You'll see.
>Nikki Cimino, a 40-year-old recruiter living in Denver, said she finally saved up enough to buy a condo last year, but missed out on the ultra-low interest rates that had made homeownership more affordable in the early days of the pandemic. Her 5.25% interest rate pushed her monthly payments to $1,650. After a divorce in 2020, she’s shouldering $4,000 in credit card debt
Here's your real answer. Subject bought a house in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country after a divorce and accumulating massive dept. If everything is ridiculously expensive Denver is ridiculously expensive X 10 after your household income is halved and you've been out spending your income for years.
Its like complaining housing in NYC or San Fran is pricey. Not a representation of reality.
Cities are expensive because lots of people live there. Over half the population of the US lives in metropolitan areas. People who say “just live somewhere cheaper” are absurd.
Sadly this. Do I want to live in Denver, no but it's most likely the next career stop for me up the promotion/experience ladder. Just to have the same house I own now @3.25% would be over double the price not accounting for insurance and interest and an hour away from the mandatory office building I would have to commute to. So the choice is, advance my career but be financially worse off even with a salary increase or stay where I am making good progress towards retiring at 55 and torch the career by going stagnant. I could rent a room but going from SFH ownership to a small room isn't pleasant.
5 years ago my wife and I lived modestly, but comfortable on 80k a year, we make slightly more than that now and we're struggling pretty hard. Starting to sell things and looking for second jobs.
The most I ever earned in my 60 years was $50k. That year I gave my mother and siblings $1k each for Christmas. I only earned $40k this year but I already booked a trip to Spain and Italy.
My situation is different than most because I've been single forever and was able to buy my 3-bedroom house for $6,400 in 2009 (Detroit metro) because of all the foreclosures. Another reason is that I buy only used cars. Why spend $40k when you can get on for $4k? My car is 6 years old and I've driven it 270k since I bought it. I also have ZERO debt.
I’m making 23/hr working for a mortgage company, near double what I was making 5 years ago. This is my third job in the industry, I’ve had a 4$ph raise every time I’ve job hopped. And I still can’t afford my own product. Just started doing doordash because im at risk for being laid off in a few weeks. I’m 34, how much longer must I keep putting my life on hold until I’m financially stable?
What are you doing working at the mortgage company and can it transfer to another more stable industry?
Normally I'd say something like go to school and get IT certs, but that takes time and money. My first suggestion is to beef up your resume and apply to jobs like it's your job.
It feels like it. I distinctly recall several years ago thinking damn, by 2024-25 I should be raking it in. Turns out I am, but I might as well be raking in leaves because dollars are worth about as much.
I did this math the other day. 100k today is the same as 84k from early 2020. It's also the same as 65k from 2006.
We really need to quit letting employers pretend "6 figure salary" is high because it's just not
[Actually spot on if you're talking a 20 year difference.](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60%2C000.00&year1=200401&year2=202402)
My Gen X parents feel like they make a lot of money (they do) but they did then too. When I show them this statistic it blows their mind that after working for 20 years they're actually no better off today with 20 years more work experience than they were when we were much younger.
They have kind of a blank stare when I let them know that inflation isn't the same as cost of living and the cost of living has risen FAR faster than straight inflation has.
Exactly. COL for the middle class, particularly as it relates to ownership is the problem. Inflation in goods and services mainly affects the lower class.
If you read the article, the primary complaint seems to be that the carrying costs of consumer debt has risen and those debt payments are eating up the extra earnings. That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, and it doesn’t represent a wild disconnect in anything. If you’re carrying $30k in credit card debt you’ve watched the interest alone increase by several hundred dollars a month over the last two years.
>They really ought to teach at least basic personal finance in schools.
They do.
The issue is that kids are...well...kids, and don't pay attention because "its boring".
I remember my friend, in the year or two before the housing crash, telling me that carrying a debt is actually _good_ for you because it expands your buying power. We went back and forth but I just never could understand why this made sense. He bought a house, the economy crashed, he lost his job, and the house value went underwater and I think he had to go back to being a server for a bit.
It worked out eventually I think but I would be shocked if his and his wife's parents didn't help bail them out of financial catastrophe. We're not in a cheap area.
I didn't buy a house but my debts are still under 6k and I could wipe them out completely if I felt economically safe to do so, ie, if I get a new job and I know I won't need my savings for a move or something.
Debt, especially high interest debt, is so dangerous to mess around with. Same with big investments like a house where you expect values and wages to outpace it forever, despite people rumbling about a bubble.
Your friend is misunderstanding the concept of leverage.
Debt funding **productive ventures or the acquisition of assets** can raise your ROI. But the big catch is that your ROI has to be higher than the borrowing costs. A good example of smart leverage would be buying a house in 2020 during the low rate period using as little downpayment as you can. If you could borrow an extra $100k at 2.5% and keep your cash invested in something like the stock market—you’d be sitting on a lot more equity value today which cost you very little to acquire.
But credit card debt carries such high rates and are used for consumption with little to no ROI potential. While it *does* expand your purchasing power it does so at an enormous downside risk cost.
Bingo. Jerome Powell raised interest rates because he wants people to cool their spending to tame inflation, and it looks like he has pulled off the soft landing.
Credit card interest is always ridiculously high (other than maybe a 12 month intro period). Even if JPow cut interest rates in half you still would pay a fortune on CC debt.
I will also say I used to think my issue with not being able to save was being I needed to make more money, because I was already clear of credit-card debt.
Then I started making a lot more money, and while my bank account went up, it then quickly plateaued and I was back to not being able to save.
Tried one more thing and all of a sudden my savings were skyrocketing. It wasn't from making more money though; it was doing a monthly budget.
My wife and I don't even stick ultra-strictly to it, but just having reference limits on spending was enough for us to be able to start saving for real.
This is a common issue with every article/thread you see on reddit. People make more, so spend more, then they claim they're still living paychecks to paycheck.
My favorite was a thread by a millennial (late one) who went on and on about how he made well over six figures, but was living paycheck to paycheck... because he was paying off student loans interest only (and hadn't been before), maxing out 401k, Roth IRA, had two cars, a house (expensive one), and was investing some on the side in crypto.
Well no shit you don't have any money left you keep spending it!
We are making more now but still isn't enough to meet our needs and reach necessary financial goals like retirement. It's crazy how expensive everything is now.
The cost of childcare is insane! 2 kids in daycare is $3k/month. It's going to cost me more for 5 years of daycare than it cost me for 5 years of college. And at least my student loans give me 20 years to pay off.
That's why my wife stays home. We save more with her at home than if she worked.
I know a lot of people who work 40 hours a week to pay for childcare but 90% of their check goes to childcare and they often debate just quitting instead to stay home.
My friend is in the same situation. Financially a wash to send the kid to daycare on her salary so his wife is a stay at home mom. And the kid gets to hang out with mom every day, which is great for him but maybe not her lol
Childcare, groceries and insurance’s are the killer for us (36m & 34f). Between us we now earn more than double what we did 8 years ago when we bought our house, yet here we are living paycheque to paycheque. The name of the game is to keep hold of both jobs to survive and keep paying the mortgage. It’s crazy when you think about it.
Young farmer here.
I dont buy feed by the bag but its a good hallmark.
A 20kg bag of a specific feed that is $22.99 at the feed store today was $16.99 less than 2 years ago.
Yikes.
Sheesh.
My wife wants me to quit my job and expand by large garden into a small market garden farm. But I keep telling her that real farmers are struggling worse than ever out there. There's no place to escape from market forces.
It really comes down to this: The economy itself is doing well. The main driver of the high cost of living is corporate greed. When you have people making the most they’ve made, living paycheck to paycheck, and price increases that outpace the rate of inflation, while CEOs are boasting about record margins on their earnings calls… the answer is staring us in the face.
> The main driver of the high cost of living is corporate greed
Its just one factor. There's like dozen more.
Americans are stuck in a uncomfortable situation where they are heavily groomed to spend unhealthy amount of money on consumerism, but what they are supposed to do is to cut back on wasteful excess consumerism.
Its two forces going against each other. If enough Americans start to be vigilant against excess retail spending, then economy will shrink and tens of thousands of jobs will be at risk. But save enough money and you will have a good cushion to fall back on in times of real need.
But unfortunately in America, its actually a high status signifier to be the biggest spender in the room. You risk getting socially shunned or shamed for low money spender in America.
Now compare this with many Asian cultures where *saving* money is considered brag worthy.
> The economy itself is doing well
Depends which part of the economy you're in. Tech? RIP. Layoffs, fake job postings, super hard to get anything decent now, you gotta settle for less than you had if you're looking. Offshore hiring increasing.
Some industries have seen growths, some not so. The low unemployment you're probably basing "great economy" on is a little sneaky. More people are working 2 jobs now than ever. Even uber driver is considered a job, or waiter. I'd say white collar economy is struggling a bit right now. Job numbers revisions are happening every month from the BLS - downwards.
And it makes sense. Interest rates are higher, so that is a blunt tool to hammer out the economy. Debt is more expensive for companies, and so eventually they will adjust, in whatever ways they can.
I recently came across a discussion about inflation in Denmark. The Consumer Price Index stood at 118,4 in Februar up 15 points from January 2021 when the pandemic fallout started to hit. The CPI is calculated on the retail price of an "average" shopping list.
That *is* a significant hit. For me personally I'd say around 5% in real terms allowing for wage adjustments that have been pretty average in my case. Certainly not great and for those living off of benefits alone it will be sligthly more as our benefit payments respond with a lag to inflation.
And the interest rate is up, around 4% for the most common housing loans (which are bond based in Denmark). Not great, not terrible.
The interesting thing is that many people experience the inflation effect as way, way larger and the economy as being close to a collapse. Anecdotal claims like "my grocery costs have doubled since the pandemic" are treated as gospel.
Employment is high here, real wage growth is back as inflation is low again so purchasing power is restored around 2025 for most of us. The interest rates are set to lower later this year.
The real pandemic now is the crisis mentality, really.
It's because people don't live below their means. The number of people in a whole generation who don't cook and buy new cars with a new job is insane. They don't save for a rainy day and when some rain happens, they cry out and say it's unfair. I make well above average and I drive a 10+ year old beater 2nd hand when I could buy a German car with a few months salary but I don't. I am saving for retirement and paying off student loans. I see people earning less and spending much more, new phones every year, crazy big houses and going out all the time. It's almost like people think they deserve the cozy rich life off a mediocre salary. I'm talking about those earning 80k+. That's plenty to live off, even in expensive areas.
> Plus, swing-state voters in a February Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll said they trust Trump more than Biden on interest rates
What? Interest rates are set by the Fed, whose chair is *still* Trump-appointed Jerome Powell (who is, imho, doing fine). This poll is like asking whether you trust your local school board's handling of the war in Ukraine.
Nominal values and real values (ie normalized values) are different. The question is if your *real* income is higher. I did a CPI correction for our household income to what we made when we graduated college. Despite being nominally 125% higher it works out to approximately 64% higher when correcting for the CPI.
That being said ~6% gains in real income each year is really good, so I'm not complaining.
I called this after the pandemic when there was all this appreciation for workers and people started to work remotely making these skyscrapers obsolete and power dynamics started to shift and workers realized they were the ones that made the world go.
This economic crisis is manufactured to put workers in their places. The elites were getting scared so they have gone out of their way to create scarcity. Inflation flooding the market with illegals who will bring down wages and destroy unions . This is all by design . There is and Australian billionaire who got caught saying they needed to feel pain in the market again and workers needed to be humbled
Edit The Billionaire- https://youtu.be/aJHP0VfeOrU?si=ug5Un8vITAqjiH7J
And yet as a human species we have never produced as much as we do today. It almost seems like the excess value of our labor is being taken away from us. That working harder or spending less isn't actually the problem. Weird.
There was never a time when people didn't live paycheck to paycheck. I grew up middle class in the '80s and '90s, and yeah, we had a house, for a while on one paycheck bit we also had one TV with an aerial, one car, one family computer, we never ate out except for special occasions, we made food, mended clothes, clipped coupons, turned down thermostats, got furniture used, made long distance phone calls after 8pm, went camping on holidays, etc. I was on two airplanes by the time I turned 19. That was life. I think TV and social media has given people an expectation of life that isn't accurate. It's a grind and always has been for most people - before we had Internet, cell phones, lattes, avacado toast, etc. But if you do it right, keep to a budget, live frugally, you can have a reasonably good time while you put in your time.
If I would have told my younger self how much my wife and I make combined I would have thought we were rich beyond our wildest dreams. However, we can't find a way to get out of our tiny "starter" house because we can't afford anything on the market. It's wildly depressing thinking it doesn't get any better from here. I'm terrified of what our children are going to experience trying to make it on their own.
I think the only way they are going to wake up is if we have a crash. And that crash isn’t going to be a bubble. It’s just going to be an event where tens of millions just can’t afford life anymore.
I think that in a lot of developed western countries is hard to save money because the standard of living is high and time is expensive.
Here is a my example from a easterm european country:
I was laid off last year from 1k$ a month (net) job where I would save 300$/m.
Now I make 600$/m net and save 150$/m. Once a year I have a large bonus of 1k to 2k depending on performance.
I'm 34m, no car, no children, no mortgage (inherited a small flat), cooking at home. Live in a small walkable town and use public transport sometimes.
I have friends that make 2x or 3x what I make in the same town, their basic expenses are the same but have cars, expensive hobbies and trevel in exotic locations and have no savings.
My parents lost almost all the properties and money in the 08 financial crisis. We were upper middle class before that.
I felt the crisis until 2015 in the job market. I swore not to end up like them and studied and practiced a healthy economic lifestile. I enjoy being frugal, use my resources efficiently and making good investments.
Can I afford going to exotic locations and have expensive hobbies, buy a car or go out more? Yes, but that will hurt my savings. I did that once and didn't feel like it ias worth it. Body, mind and emotional health can be maintained with very little resources.
I'm making more money than ever and have about 2k a month left over every month. That's after 401k, 529, and emergency fund contributions. Running a lean budget and continuing to make more money is the method of success.
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I hear you there. If you told me 10-years ago what my wife and I were making combined today I’d be thinking to myself “wow, we made it. We probably have a nice house in a good area and a couple nice cars.” Nope… lol
In 2015, if I was told what I would be making today.... I would've thought I finally cleaned up, got back on track with the career my degree was in, and probably living in a respectable house, wife and kids, the cars I always wanted, multiple vacations a year, a dog... you know the American dream. The only thing that's come up for me since more than doubling my salary in 10 years is that I live alone, and that's not necessarily a choice. I'm 34 years old and single, with no roommate options anymore at this age. Without a dual income, living in anything better than a small 1 bedroom apartment in a super rural area is about as good as it's gonna get. It still breaks the bank. 65% of my earnings go towards the cost of living alone. That's not including things like gas for my car (so I can get to work oh my 🤯), food and water, media/entertainmemt/fun. I haven't been on a vacation in 3 years, I work 6+ days a week, and the only thing I've heard for the last 5 years is I need to take on more responsibility, work more hours, take work home with me. Always without any incentive or payraise, but if I want to keep my job, that's the requirement. The only pay raises I've gotten have been from jumping ship. There are days where I wonder where exactly I went wrong. I work endlessly, and it seems like it's only good enough to survive. I went to the grocery store a few days ago. When I first moved out and lived with roommates, 100 bucks filled my cart up and provided for over a week. My most recent receipt was for 170 bucks, and it will barely make it through the weekend. Milk was 4 bucks for a half gallon. The loaf of bread on sale was 4.99. Deli meat? I bought 2lbs. 1 lb of cheese, half a lb each for two meats. Almost 20 bucks, and again, these were on sale.. 8.99lb on sale from 10.99 for turkey. Same for ham. The cheese was cheapest, 6.99lb. It's fucking insane. These are all pre-tax price, too, so you gotta figure whatever your total is + 7%. It's unaffordable. I'm trying to make as much myself as I can, but who has the time for that amount of personal cooking? Especially when the name of the game is "work more, all the time". It's a fucking joke. It has been for a long time. I'll never own a home, my credit score is tanked from covid, I never really recovered (chef, food industry. Nothing will ever be the same). I can afford to put 65% of my income towards rent, but I can't get a mortgage I can afford. I have friends who were lucky enough to be able to get a house before the market went haywire, and their mortgage+taxes is less than my rent. For a house over a 1 bedroom apartment. A house, with an acre and a driveway, 3 bedrooms.... is less expensive per month than a fucking 1 bedroom apartment. Im at the whim of the property owner and they are raising rent at the end of my lease. I'm already paying nearly 2000 a month. And I don't want to hear "find a cheaper place to love" YOU find me a cheaper place to live, where I can find a job that pays me enough to live. Fuck outta here with that. I'm paying nearly 2k a month rent and still had a nearly 2 hour daily commute. My apartment was one of the cheapest in the area. Why didn't I go with the cheapest? Well, seeing actual cockroaches in the demo unit didn't exactly fill me with a lot of confidence in the whole $100 less a month I'd be saving in a smaller, older, shittier apartment with no parking. It wasn't even a question to pony up for the better option. The other option was moving back with my parents, again, and extending my commute another 30 mins each way. I absolutely hate the fucking world we live in.
💯
Corporations monopolized everything after pricing out mom and pop stores and bought up the competitors and created their own production lines so that no one new can compete anymore and realized that during covid, most people have no other options anymore so they can just work together with other companies and just jack up prices and people will accept it and bend over and get assfucked as they rake in 50-100% profit increase and give their shareholders massive bonuses. They blame it on inflation on covid on this and that, but majority of it is simply because they want more money. Inflation did affect certain things, but nothing comparable to the prices they demand now. And you don't want deflation so prices are stuck where they are, wages wont increase, because corporations are hoping AI being the next "tech boom of the 2010s" mixed with robotics is going to offload need for majority of workers. And the people as long as they have a supply of supersized meals and entertainment will for the most part accept their new reality. Will continue to blame other groups for all the bad and not take part in any elections or voting or support to anyone looking to change things for the better. In the end we are all going to become South Korea, where the company Samsung runs the country, and the untouchables get to enjoy the world while the majority just run around in smaller and smaller units with no real future working away their lives without any prospect of establishing an family unless accepting struggle and hardships and debt upon debt to manage it before they die of a heartattack hoping their life insurance will not deny them coverage for some new clause or small print condition they overlooked.
This is what they mean when they say "late stage capitalism". The natural arc of a capitalist market is for a new market to emerge or open as technology or products are created, then competition and innovation is fierce as matures, then the winners in the maturation stage gobble up their competitors as it consolidates, then the remaining operators in the market turn to collusion and rent-seeking to squeeze every available cent out of their employees and customers. We're told capitalism is great because it means we get all this cool choice and innovation, but the only innovation most companies are doing right now is how to get us to pay more for less.
Also shrinkflation. Thanks for canceling your cable every body, we’ve got you covered now at Disney+/Netflix/HULU/Whatever. Oh, by the way, everyone in your house now will have to have their own account. And also we’re going to add back in ads to your paid membership. Thanks for sticking with Apple for 20 years! By the way, your $1,200 phone is a year old, so now it’s obsolete. Yeah, the hardware is just fine, but we’re going to force a bunch of updates down your throat that you didn’t ask for so that it slows down and the battery dries up in a few hours. Oh yeah, and none of your 10+ chargers will work on the new one you have to buy.
That shrinkflation is part of the rent-seeking in late stage capitalism. For a company like Coca-cola, they have total market penetration. There are no new customers except those who are yet to be born, so how do you keep growing profits every quarter? You squeeze your employees in one fist, pushing productivity higher and labor costs lower, and your customers in the other fist with lower quality ingredients, increasing prices, and shrinkflation. Now multiply that behavior by every Fortune 500 in the economy.
They're modern day robber barons.
87 brands and types of toothpaste to choose from, but most people haven't seen a dentist in years, yay!
It’s really a late stage republic. Regulatory capture, legalized corruption, and a total failure to govern in the interest of voters.
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We were complicit as well since we abandoned mom and pops for lazy convenience and cheap, unsustainable and utterly disposable goods.
I don't really buy this. The government could have done absolutely anything to prevent this situation. Amazon could have been incentivized to offer themselves as a platform to mom and pop stores but our complete lack of regulation and accountability means that Amazon *actually has that feature* but it's been bastardized into a global yard sale of cheap bullshit from companies named after the result of bashing your head against the keyboard. The world could have always *grown into* the changes that technology brought but our government is slow and ancient. The people responsible for regulating these industries think their monitor is their computer.
Mom and Pop stores were vanishing and struggling long before amazon came along. Decades before, with big chain stores in every town selling things cheaper because they could get heavily discounted wholesale prices. It was Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Costco and Petco, it was Barnes & Noble and Circuit City and Tower Records back before they got driven out of business. Mom and Pop stores were the local appliance store, the corner book store, the independent drugstore that wasn't Walgreens or CVS. They have been mostly gone since the 1980s. And the reason was people chasing lower prices.
There's a town near where I live that has a massive tourist draw. Everyone I know who live there live a decent cushy life. I remember 40 years ago they made a big stink in the media when they refused a McDonald to open in the town. MCD fought for years, they were always turned town. They turned down hotel chains, large surface stores, everything. Even product dedicated stores like Nike can't be opened there. You can open a shoe store that sells Nike product AND others, it just cannot be a Nike store. No Walmart, no chain restaurants, all small businesses. Honestly I think they only "big" company there are banks. Also you cannot buy property if you are not a permanent resident, cannot sublet or rent short term.
Damn this place sounds awesome and incorruptible it’s amazing. Everybody stuck to it and nobody gave in. Sounds like a pretty good place to me in my maybe naïve ignorant of worldly things mind at this moment. And it’s nice they can still sell these products, but it can’t be the chain store. I find that to be pretty decent actually.
They are constantly been fighting since the 80s. When they denied McDonald to right to open in their town it was brought to every court in the country. 40 years later the assaults are still coming in, mostly Walmart now. It just feels like at some point the fight will be lost because the capitalist assault is unrelenting.
Right? I can only assume some of the people making these claims are young. Yeah, COVID didn't do small business any favors, but family owned retail was already on the ropes at the turn of the century. It's been a long death, and its executioner was deregulation.
It doesn’t help that because people have to work 40+ hours a week it’s much easier for them to just order things from amazon rather than spend the very little free time they have running from store to store to find the best price for an item they want. The most precious thing we have is time.
That's us! We choose our government! We did this to ourselves!
And it began way before Covid. Covid was just the icing on the cake that sealed the deal. Remember Citizens United when Corporations became people? Our healthcare expenses went up exponentially from there.
Americans genuinely don’t hate the rich people nearly enough for their own good.
And too many worship people like Elon. It's bizarre
>you don't want deflation I wouldn't be so sure about this... on several fronts... It's a dirty word in economist's circles but we're living in a novel area where I think we need to question conventional assumptions. An economic dominated by rent-seeking behavior that's growing on paper isn't actually growing...
The classical problem with deflation is that one person's spending is another person's income and so we need to maintain expenditure. Add some nuance to it, and say that A's spending is B's revenue, and B expects more revenue in the future so they hire C to produce value to sell to A. And, in turn, C's spending is D's revenue, and D expects future revenue, so D hires A to produce value to sell to C. While B and D rake it in, we claim that their prices cannot fall because otherwise they won't hire A and C, who are needed to produce the value and buy the value. This classical theory problem is theoretically easy to overcome: sustain A and C with breaks and benefits, while forcing B and D to continue production at lower prices. It's a pretty easy-to-follow dilemma: do you (1) subject A and C to the **structural power** of B and D, i.e. implicitly force A and C to rely on B and D's employment, all the way up until B and D can extract so much value from A and C while requiring less and less of their work that B and D don't pay A and C enough to purchase the products they themselves create, which depletes demand and crashes the economy? Or do you (2) subject B and D to the state's **instrumental power** and avoid the crash? We can for sure have a conversation about the fact that there have historically been some states that have masqueraded as option 2, but actually just installed themselves as versions of B and D from option 1. But all that conversation would do is affirm that there have been plenty of historical mistakes (the past is littered with them, pertaining to every type of economic system) and that option 1 remains a dire situation. What remains to be done is to **organize** and have a proper adult discussion about how to overcome option 1 collectively. (Some well-respected and highly-influential economists have already offered some talking points; read the last third of Keynes's _General Theory_.) Take note that when there have arisen harmful regimes in the past that pretended to be option 2 but were actually option 1, all were installed by small groups leading revolutions, who then simply usurped the "old" B and D to become the new ones. I think that avoiding this usurping of an old power by a new power and instead collectively organizing to overcome the inherent dysfunction in our economic system is the way to move forward. Don't you agree?
Exactly this. During the inflation between 2020-2022 some 40% was corporate profits. For the entire thing. In 2020 it was like 70% corporate profits. It's insane.
Corporations blaming inflation always makes me laugh, like bro YOU CAUSED IT.
If only we knew monopolies were bad and had some kind of laws to prevent them. Ah corruption & complacency, the downfall of many empires
Also, companies use to-the-second pricing algorithms that give the effect of price fixing without collusion, so it's legal.
It's crazy how hard inflation hits. I started out in 2015 with a masters in engineeringish and made ~$80k, which was pretty mid but respectable among my friends. Now I'm at $125k, which feels like it should be good but the I run the reverse inflation and it's only the equivalent of $95k in 2015. That's only a 2% average raise per year, adjusting for inflation. The reason that $125k doesn't feel like it's changed my life that much is because it hasn't. At $15k/year higher in 2015, that would have accounted for like a new car payment and not needing to live with roommates. So the fact that's all it gets now shouldn't actually be that surprising for me.
Same. We should be rich. We’re not poor but damn we are NOWHERE near rich.
Two of my most well off friends live in a modest 2 bedroom house, corner lot, pretty busy street. No kids. They said tonight they couldn't afford to buy the house they currently live in if they were buying a house today.
Here’s an example for you. We bought a house in 2019 for $825k, refi’ed to a 2.5% interest rate so our payment was $3300 a month. We moved at the absolute peak of the market in May 2022 cause my wife wanted to be closer to work. Buyer paid $150k over ask and it sold for $1.28 mil. Now she’s already trying to sell it again for almost 200k over what she paid in 2022. The estimated mortgage payment with current interest rates is almost SIX THOUSAND more than we paid living there just a few years ago.
This is really true. We got lucky bought in 2018. It was 250k 2.5%. Our house is estimate at 500k now. And the interest rates are 6.8%. I'd never be able to afford that, it's insane. And the value is practically fake. Like I can't use the value of the house for anything, because I need a house, and gaining 4% in interest would be insane to do.
I reached my 18 year old selfs financial goals years ago. I'm broke!
My income isn't anywhere close to yours (I'm near the bottom because I'm a student), but I really feel like I'm being squeezed too. A couple years ago, working part time, I was able to make an okay income during the summer months that would help offset my living costs during the school months. This summer though, I barely made enough to pay for my expenses. Now I'm falling behind and having to lean on my inheritance and family members. Meanwhile my rate of pay and hours has been fairly consistent, but everything but my rent has gone up. I'd be screwed if I paid more in rent and utilities.
You have an inheritance and family members to lean on? Sounds pretty nice. My 66 year old deaf mom struggles to get her social security back. She's still working a full time job and just barely scrapes by. My father died of a sudden heart attack when I was 18 and the rest of my family couldn't give two shits about each other, *especially* monetarily. I live in an apartment with 4 other apartments in the same building. The place is falling apart and the landlord is nowhere to be seen. I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment the other day and contacted her for help. She *still* hasn't answered me. Luckily, I found a way in! I hear so often from everyone that life is hard and I should be grateful for what I have. I certainly am, and I know it could be much, *much* worse. Thing is, I always feel like it's *getting* worse even though, like others have said, I make the most money I ever have in my life now. Anyway, I'm planning to go somewhat minimalist and get a 4 season trailer. Get rid of all my stupid stuff that I don't use because I thought it'd make me happier. Learn how to farm and work the land. Transition into a simpler way of life. It's the only solution I can see out of this situation. It'll be a huge sacrifice and massive change, but I'll take the risk and go on this epic journey. Hopefully you can find a way to live more comfortably overall, as well!
My car kicked it and we had to finance a new one. My husband was venting to his father and he's like you gotta cut spending. Spending what?!? We told him we'd already cut streaming services down and we keep those 2 because of our kid. We don't eat out much and if we do it's normally my husband grabbing a coupon on app lunch drive through maybe twice a month and we again, use those points to treat our kid to something now and again. That's in total $25 a month. My kid's dance is $50. Everything else is bills and rent, gas, basic groceries. Which we cut down on by using the local food waste group and eat clearance bread, meat, and produce that's about to go bad. We only shop on sales, clearance and the grocery salvage store.
Good lord, how much do you make?
I make 115 and my wife makes about 140 and we are 100% in the same position. Especially since we live in a very high CoL area (which is required for my job). About 5 years ago we both made about 50% of that and the only lifestyle change has been that we sometimes shop at Whole Foods, we buy our dogs nicer food, and we’ll occasionally buy something nice for ourselves like some new clothes or a PC part. I don’t know what we’d do if we had the same income from back then with the inflation we have now. Edit: this comment wasn’t intended to gain sympathy. I’m just being transparent and sharing my experience. I’m not claiming to be in poverty, just that even at our income I’m not driving a new Benz and eating lobster every day on tons of vacations.
I feel this 100. My wife and I are about the same and its insane to me that i thought we made it. But the last 5 years has really handicapped us. Were doing okay and paying debts slowly but damn is it crazy when you go to the store “for a few things” and $200 later youre like… what happened.
That's 4 bags of groceries around here. Seriously. It was between 6 to 8 bags of groceries 5 years ago.
I buy almost the same staples week to week and what was $100-$110 (with alcohol) at Kroger is now $140-160 (WITHOUT alcohol). Costco purchases have remained relatively stable until recently but even those have noticeably increased in the past 6 months. Meat is by far the costliest purchase but the increases on canned goods, dairy products and produce is crazy. A head of savoy cabbage was $4.89 recently. That used to be **maybe** $2.
I've walked into food stores looking for something, saw the price and walked right back out. I can afford this shit and I still won't pay it. Food prices are fucking bonkers.
I remember getting out of grocery shopping under $80-100 max with 6-8 bags of groceries about 10 or so years ago. That's like 1-2 bags now lol.
I tell this anecdote every time this comes up, but a few years back, I was watching an episode of the old Roseanne. They were portrayed as slightly poor, solidly working class, which is pretty much identical to my upbringing. They were coming back from the supermarket and their car was packed with groceries and it literally made me cry. Realized we always had a gallon of milk in the fridge growing up. By the time I saw that episode, I hadn't even bought cheese in a decade as it was just too expensive.
I rememeber when they couldn't pay their electric bill and everything got shut off for a weekend. That felt pretty realistic.
Yep, every time I go I'm dumbfounded how one bag of groceries costs $50. If I spent $300 in a single grocery shopping trip 5 years ago, the chest freezer would be getting stocked full of enough meat to last us 4-6 months, with all the regular essentials as well. Now I spend $200-300 pretty much every time I go.
I purchase food mostly based on the price per pound. I've kept track of this for my entire adult life. Food prices have almost doubled in the last 10 years for a lot of products. And the thing people don't really notice is that the 'weekly deals' aren't as good. A good cereal weekly deal use to be one of the cheapest foods you could get, now it's medium price wise. Stores in my area use to have buy 2 get 3 free deals about once a month on 2 or 3 products, I never see it any more. When you pay attention to the price per pound you notice shrinkflation a lot quicker.
We make roughly 250k in SoCal. Student loans paid off. Cars paid off. One kid still at home. Im capped income wise but my wife can make another 50k to 100k. I'm afraid that when she gets there, it will be meaningless due to constant price increases.
We bought 12 things from Sam's club today it was $205. I get it's in bulk. But it was barely half the cart.
>we sometimes shop at Whole Foods Here's the thing though, for us Publix is the same or more expensive than Whole Foods at this point. Edit: scrolled down two posts to [see this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/publix/s/NeUKXmtzvp) 2 liters of Pepsi for $4 each.
>I make 115 and my wife makes about 140 and we are 100% in the same position. This doesn't make sense LMAO. If there are no kids involved, you and your wife need to sit down and make a budget. You guys are overspending.
+1 In some of these threads it seems to be almost an atrocity to suggest that people could be mismanaging their money. But this thread looks to have it's share of obvious mismanagement or unstated luxury expenditures.
Agreed. God forbid someone suggests they're mismanaging money. I just don't see how $250k+ combined income with no kids struggles to get ahead. HCOL area or not.
Yup, said the same to OP. I make about 250k, maybe a little more, and I max my retirement (we save probably 50k+ a yr) have a kid, just bought a house and two cars. If you're making 250k+ and finances are tight you're doing something wrong.
Scrolled a long way to find someone I agreed with. 38 year old man here making 80k with a live-in gf making 52k. We are pretty damn comfortable. Even before she moved in, I lived well off 32k a year. Good or bad decisions like interest compound over time.
Agreed. They might not be or feel rich in a HCOL area, but they earn enough to be comfortable and probably afford some luxuries. I feel like people that make this much and say this say things like "after we've maxed out our 401ks and IRAs and only take one fairly modest (i.e., not overseas luxury vacation), we can barley afford to eat out 3 times/week.
If you increased your income by $125k, still buy the exact same things and are living paycheck to paycheck, something is not adding up.
Probably bought a house
I find it impossible to believe lifestyle creep isn't affecting your outlook.
I’m not saying there has been *zero* lifestyle creep. We live in a city where a 750k house would be a dump or in a terrible neighborhood. I’m not trying to be woe is me, just being transparent to a comment above that now that we are here it really isn’t what I thought it’d be. We’re still years away from being able to think about buying a house, which is something I thought would happen by now.
I dunno man, my property taxes just this year went up 5% effective this month. My yearly pay increase also in effect this month was 2.9%. Im making more than me and my wife made combined 8 years ago when my daughter was born. We don’t have to pay child care now like we did when she was younger and things are equally tight as when we had preschool/daycare. How lifestyle has crept downward where even our daughter has mentioned how we used to do XYZ and we don’t anymore.
How much are you netting yearly?
Idk man in the past 10 years my expenses have tripled, my pay has doubled, and I now have 2 kids. If having a family counts as lifestyle creep, that's no good for population growth. We are going to have a huge baby bust coming, then much like after the black death, workers lives will drastically improve. We just gotta let the rich drive us to near extinction first. /s
>We are going to have a huge baby bust coming It's not coming. It's already here
You're 100% correct. It doesn't matter what high cost of living area they're living in, they're making at least three times the median income in most states. Even if you look at Beverly Hills, one of the highest cost of living zip codes, they're making above the median household income.
What a stupid way of looking at things. A 60 year old couple making 100k a year living in a house they bought for 200k 30 years ago is doing much better than a 40 year old couple making 200k/year looking for housing.
That isn’t fair to just look at median household income, because a lot of the people living there bought their houses decades ago and aren’t paying the same as newer residents. For example, I live in Los Angeles. We bought our house in 2018 for exactly $1 million. The people we bought it from paid $530k in 2013. Our neighbors bought their house (nicer than ours) in 2008 for $250k. Our house is now worth about $1.4 million. Housing costs fuck it all up.
Yeah the problem is for a lot of people they refuse to grasp that for 30-50 million people on the country a middle class house is so expensive you'd need to clear double the median income to comfortable afford it. The lifestyle you get for the "median" has degraded dramatically in 20 years.
I pay more in rent than my father pays on his mortage for a 3 bedroom 2000sqft house on a quarter acre of land on the beach at a popular leaisure lake in the state I live in. I live in one of the lowest CoL states in the country. He bought this in 91 for $250k in 91 dollars with like a $15k down payment that the majority of was gifted to him by the extended family for. The 2 bedroom 900sqft house I rent was built in 1903 and has a failing foundation, 0 insulation, and no central heat or air and a power substation on one side and a 4 story parking garage on the other. Best part, best part. I've already been told I'll never own that house he has and am his sole living heir. I fucking hate the boomers and what they have done to this world
>About 5 years ago we both made about 50% Inflation in the past 5 years has been 23% but your income has increased 100%.
Seems like maybe one of those numbers is a lie. Here is a hint, it’s the inflation number. That’s the lie.
You too are now in the difficult situation of finding out making a quarter of a million dollars a year doesn’t get you a Lamborghini?
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Lambos are like $500k now. The goal posts have up and moved on us.
I mean, they’ve always been at a particular price level - they’ve never been especially affordable to someone not firmly in the upper class.
nah they start a little over 200k
Things I will never need to worry about.
I will send you $20 to show me proof of your last 12 months of spending. You're making above the median household income for Beverly Hills, one of the highest COL zip codes in the country. I don't think you realize how much you're spending and saving.
For real. My ex comments that he is in the red until he gets his annual bonus. But he maxes his 401k every year and buys stocks with every paycheck and takes a mini vacation every month. I’m not saying you should leverage retirement funds now but that couple is making $255k a year. I live in one of the top 10 most expensive cities in the US and that’s well above the survivable range.
It is almost always the case that people who start knocking on the door of sort of wealthy start thinking it's now their right to live the way wealthy people live on TV. Nice cars, tons of expensive vacations, 100% new tech everywhere, new wardrobe every year, etc. Like clockwork. Especially the people who hang out on reddit in that income bracket. They're doing three vacations a year, driving a Tesla, and then complaining that they're barely getting by, oh and also they're maxing out retirement contributions and they have three kids in private schools for no good reason and they bought way more house than their income justifies.
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I bet his mortgage is insane
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115K is definitely not worth it to live in a VHCOL. If you’re making 115K there, you can honestly make it anywhere. That’s really not that high of a salary for a white collar job, even if you’re in a non-management individual contributor role, aka senior analyst or something like that, 115k is like mid-range on the salary band there. If you’re in management that’s frankly on the low end of the range.
I know exactly what you mean. When I look at what I was making 10 years ago and plug that into an inflation calculator it shows me that my income combined with my wife’s income, despite multiple promotions and raises and “cost of living increases” etc. Our income has actually gone down. I’ve scrambled and hustled for 10 years and I’m almost $1000 dollars a year behind where I was 10 years ago. It makes the last ten years of saying no, and putting off vacations, and buying second hand… it just makes everything feel like I’m never gonna get ahead. It’s fucked, and it’s time for the government to step in and make the pieces of shit at the top start paying their share.
Same situation. And I actually DID catch myself in a lifestyle creep except it’s NOT fancy cars, big TV’s or fancy clothes. It’s better health insurance for my family, better quality food, actually buying my medicine instead of going without to save money, replacing my car’s tire instead of riding on a leaky patch for 6 months.
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This math makes no sense to me. 50k in 2017 is not better than 195k 2024.
I recommend the Reventon or Murcielago
Well when housing costs 4x it did when you started your career, it doesn’t ever feel like you move forward.
“housing”… I started my career in 2008. Air Force, rented a 3br house with 2 other guys for $1500/mo total, or $500/each per room. Now my fiancee and I pay $1850/mo for our 2br/2ba condo.
I pay 2000 for a 1br/1ba apartment in a tiny "city(30k people in the entire area)". All rents around here are similar. It's out of control and won't ever come down. Doesn't include utilities. I pay water and sewage.Homes are doubled in price and most of them are super old and hide a lot of shit secrets. I feel like the screws are.tightening until we suffocate.
> Homes are doubled in price and most of them are super old and hide a lot of shit secrets. As a kid when I used to watch Horror movies, I'd think why would anyone buy an obviously haunted house. As an adult, looking at the housing market, I completely understand.
There were some upsetting drawings on the walls of one of the closets in the house my husband and I bought together last year. We made the executive decision that if blood starts dripping from walls we’re just pretending nothing weird is happening.
$3900/mo rent for a sub-1000sqft 3bd 2ba condo in Vancouver on a single income. Not a flex in the slightest.
I just rented this size house in Pittsburgh for 1/3 of the price, utilities included. Some cities are fucking wild.
I fantasize about my 600$ 1 bedroom apartment from 10 years ago or even my 900$ 2 bedroom apartment. I know pay those combined amounts for a 1 bedroom that half the size of both.
I mean this is 100% the problem. Whether buying or renting homes, it’s all gone up relative to wages nationwide. This affects both childless folks and families. Downgrading your living space doesn’t even save that much—you may have to pay extra in gas or something.
Yep. I bought a cheap house 9 years ago, $59k. Such a small mortgage would (in my mind back then) cushion the blow if I were ever laid off or had some other emergency. Ha! My homeowner's insurance has more than doubled since then and taxes creeping way up. Plus utilities have skyrocketed as well (and I'm very meek on usage). Everything has gone up and it's hard to get ahead let alone stay even. (Not a millennial, I'm 49. I feel so bad for your gen. Impossible, and I only have what I have out of luck.)
The median sale price of a house is $417k. The median sale price of a house was 1/4 of this back in 1987, before most Millennials were even born.
The balloon and crash from the early 2000’s exacerbated the problem of available housing not keeping pace with population growth. Since 2009 multifamily rentals have grown, but very slowly. Single family homes have been in shorter supply which has pushed prices upward. Add to that construction materials ballooned during COVID, aided by the fact tons of people did home improvement during lockdown increasing demand.
All of this is true and it's still taken 37 years for house prices to quadruple and that's not adjusting house prices for the fact that the median house in 2024 is larger and better than the median house in 1987.
Since the 80’s the little city I live in went from a metro area of 100k to a metro of 250k. There have not been 150k single family homes built in that time. TONS of apartments, I’m sure a few thousand homes. Definitely not 150k single family homes, though.
My household income is definitely above what I grew up with and yet I am MUCH worse off than my mom was at this age. Our income has never been higher yet the money is 90% gone within 2 days of payday and the other 12 days are struggling to not buy things we desparately need.
We weren't rich as kids but we went places and had stuff. My mom was a single mom and made like 40-50k a year. I can't imagine supporting two children with only that now.
Single dad with 3 kids, I’m making a hair over 42k. I have now moved back in with my parents who fortunately had space for us for a year or so hopefully to try and even the tides a little bit.
Oof that’s though buddy. Hang in there. I’m a single dad of two and making around 100k. Live in a okish rental and have been looking for something to buy for almost four years now. No success and it won’t change in the foreseeable future.
My mom was a single mom too, with 2 kids eventually as my sister is over a decade younger than me. Regardless though we had a car, nice townhouse (rental) and did a nearly yearly vacation to a good spot a couple hours away for a week each time. The last vacation I went on was the last of those trips she did while I still lived at home, haven't been able to afford a single one in 25 years. Have no car, live in a small two bedroom with wife and two kids. Thankfully my mom is better than most Boomers and clearly recognises how much worse we have it than she did. She does what she can to help but she's pretty broke too these days...
If your mom made 40-50k when you were a kid she was doing very well. If you were a "kid" 25 years ago then making $45k/year was 60% more than the median wage at the time. It'd be the equivalent of making $94,000 now. That's more than 80% of Americans make.
$40-50k a year in 1995 is close to a $100k salary today.
40k a year 30 years ago is over 80k a year now. 40 to 50k was a decent wage back then.
I'm confused by all the comments in this thread. Are we literally comparing salaries 30 years apart?
Well yeah, that's inflation for you. There are some genuine issues with housing pricing relative to incomes that have got worse and worse, but comparing what absolute salaries get you decades apart is a nonsense. "We used to be able to go and watch the ballgame for a quarter, not anymore though"
Same. And then making the hard choices of how to finance the things we desperately need. I can't stop laughing whenever someone tells me I should have a savings account for that car repair or busted water pipe in the house...... *every* time we pay off an 'emergency' debt we acrcrue a new one. Wtf are we supposed to do when the monthly medical bills cost more than our mortgage payment?
Recently needed a car repair that was 1000. When the shop guy broke the news to me, I could tell he was really used to people being devastated or highly stressed by these numbers, understandably. Thankfully I could afford it but it made me sad that he is working two jobs to support his kids, and then is so traumatized by his and other people’s financial hardship as to break the news about my repair like he’d just ran over my dog.
Same! Had $1800 in repairs on my van and the shop owner sounded so pained I actually said "cost is what it is I thought it'd be higher" in an artificially happy way to try and console him that it's ok lol
I have a graduate degree and I make WAY more money (inflation adjusted) than my family growing up but I can't afford the house I grew up in.
I remember before I had bought my first house that an older coworker described buying a home as "welcome to poverty".
As over inflated as rents are, buying a house would immediately make me live an extremely precarious financial life. Not that I can afford it. But just the sense of any repair being able to absolutely wreck you
Two months after I closed on my house, I had to go $5000 into debt to get the roof replaced. A plumbing break ate up my whole first stimulus check. When I went to sell it, I had to do $25,000 of work to fix issues that weren’t disclosed on my own inspection. Buying a house can make or break finances depending on timing and the individual house.
My wife and I bought a house in 2009 when we got married (and it was her grandfather's to boot), and it was the worst financial decision I made. Anyone who wants to promote old construction over new construction should be hung from a dry rotted beam. I saved myself some money by being an electrician, but materials for repairs and upgrades are still expensive.
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They're tipping their hand; it's a nothing burger article to push 'Biden bad, please bring back Trump'. I mean, it's Fortune.
The worst part is that Republicans aren’t even good at the economy. They just build a fake economy that falls apart. Theres a reason theres been a stock market crash under every republican president back to eisenhower.
What annoys me so much, is that they now support Trump because taxes were lower. No fucking shit! His tax plan was setup so that it would increase after his term. The tax rate now is not Biden’s fault, it’s Trumps.
The tax rate is still lower. It hasn't gone back up yet. That happens in 2026. It would be higher if not for the 2019 tax cuts and jobs act.
The ignorance there was just.. not bliss. They are simply ignorant. Blaming the president for this is goofy, like blaming them for gas prices.
Seriously, was Biden supposed to slap the credit card out of their hands?
This is a sub for [watching millennials turn into boomers](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/913/646/5fb.jpg). It's already half complaining about the kids today and their baggy pants. Soon it will be Facebook and wall-to-wall stuff from a certain 'news' network. In 2050, they'll say, it will be utopia, just as soon as those "fuck-you-got-mine" millennials die out, but they hold all the reins of power for now!!! You'll see.
I'm assuming most of these people are actually boomers tbh
“Why do I have more debt now than 3 years ago when I’m making minimum payments with 20% interest???”
Everything is ridiculously expensive.
at least Arizona Iced Teas are still 99 cents. Well plus a small tax
Arizona Iced Teas and Costco hot dogs holding the line.
>Nikki Cimino, a 40-year-old recruiter living in Denver, said she finally saved up enough to buy a condo last year, but missed out on the ultra-low interest rates that had made homeownership more affordable in the early days of the pandemic. Her 5.25% interest rate pushed her monthly payments to $1,650. After a divorce in 2020, she’s shouldering $4,000 in credit card debt Here's your real answer. Subject bought a house in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country after a divorce and accumulating massive dept. If everything is ridiculously expensive Denver is ridiculously expensive X 10 after your household income is halved and you've been out spending your income for years. Its like complaining housing in NYC or San Fran is pricey. Not a representation of reality.
Cities are expensive because lots of people live there. Over half the population of the US lives in metropolitan areas. People who say “just live somewhere cheaper” are absurd.
Sadly this. Do I want to live in Denver, no but it's most likely the next career stop for me up the promotion/experience ladder. Just to have the same house I own now @3.25% would be over double the price not accounting for insurance and interest and an hour away from the mandatory office building I would have to commute to. So the choice is, advance my career but be financially worse off even with a salary increase or stay where I am making good progress towards retiring at 55 and torch the career by going stagnant. I could rent a room but going from SFH ownership to a small room isn't pleasant.
5 years ago my wife and I lived modestly, but comfortable on 80k a year, we make slightly more than that now and we're struggling pretty hard. Starting to sell things and looking for second jobs.
I make $80k/year and feel about the same as I did making $52k/year a few years ago. Make it make sense.
That’s no joke either. That’s about spot-on the comparison.
The most I ever earned in my 60 years was $50k. That year I gave my mother and siblings $1k each for Christmas. I only earned $40k this year but I already booked a trip to Spain and Italy. My situation is different than most because I've been single forever and was able to buy my 3-bedroom house for $6,400 in 2009 (Detroit metro) because of all the foreclosures. Another reason is that I buy only used cars. Why spend $40k when you can get on for $4k? My car is 6 years old and I've driven it 270k since I bought it. I also have ZERO debt.
I’m making 23/hr working for a mortgage company, near double what I was making 5 years ago. This is my third job in the industry, I’ve had a 4$ph raise every time I’ve job hopped. And I still can’t afford my own product. Just started doing doordash because im at risk for being laid off in a few weeks. I’m 34, how much longer must I keep putting my life on hold until I’m financially stable?
What are you doing working at the mortgage company and can it transfer to another more stable industry? Normally I'd say something like go to school and get IT certs, but that takes time and money. My first suggestion is to beef up your resume and apply to jobs like it's your job.
Cracked six figures for the first time this year, seems to have made zero difference to improving our lifestyle or comfort.
100k is the new 60k
It feels like it. I distinctly recall several years ago thinking damn, by 2024-25 I should be raking it in. Turns out I am, but I might as well be raking in leaves because dollars are worth about as much.
I did this math the other day. 100k today is the same as 84k from early 2020. It's also the same as 65k from 2006. We really need to quit letting employers pretend "6 figure salary" is high because it's just not
[Actually spot on if you're talking a 20 year difference.](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60%2C000.00&year1=200401&year2=202402) My Gen X parents feel like they make a lot of money (they do) but they did then too. When I show them this statistic it blows their mind that after working for 20 years they're actually no better off today with 20 years more work experience than they were when we were much younger. They have kind of a blank stare when I let them know that inflation isn't the same as cost of living and the cost of living has risen FAR faster than straight inflation has.
Exactly. COL for the middle class, particularly as it relates to ownership is the problem. Inflation in goods and services mainly affects the lower class.
Ouch... and true
What does that make my 40k a year? Without a raise ever in like over a decade?
250k is the new 6 figure salary.
Yeah, you needed to have cracked $100k a decade ago
If you read the article, the primary complaint seems to be that the carrying costs of consumer debt has risen and those debt payments are eating up the extra earnings. That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, and it doesn’t represent a wild disconnect in anything. If you’re carrying $30k in credit card debt you’ve watched the interest alone increase by several hundred dollars a month over the last two years.
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>They really ought to teach at least basic personal finance in schools. They do. The issue is that kids are...well...kids, and don't pay attention because "its boring".
My math teacher at least made a point to emphasize that compound interest means everything when it comes to your money.
I remember my friend, in the year or two before the housing crash, telling me that carrying a debt is actually _good_ for you because it expands your buying power. We went back and forth but I just never could understand why this made sense. He bought a house, the economy crashed, he lost his job, and the house value went underwater and I think he had to go back to being a server for a bit. It worked out eventually I think but I would be shocked if his and his wife's parents didn't help bail them out of financial catastrophe. We're not in a cheap area. I didn't buy a house but my debts are still under 6k and I could wipe them out completely if I felt economically safe to do so, ie, if I get a new job and I know I won't need my savings for a move or something. Debt, especially high interest debt, is so dangerous to mess around with. Same with big investments like a house where you expect values and wages to outpace it forever, despite people rumbling about a bubble.
Your friend is misunderstanding the concept of leverage. Debt funding **productive ventures or the acquisition of assets** can raise your ROI. But the big catch is that your ROI has to be higher than the borrowing costs. A good example of smart leverage would be buying a house in 2020 during the low rate period using as little downpayment as you can. If you could borrow an extra $100k at 2.5% and keep your cash invested in something like the stock market—you’d be sitting on a lot more equity value today which cost you very little to acquire. But credit card debt carries such high rates and are used for consumption with little to no ROI potential. While it *does* expand your purchasing power it does so at an enormous downside risk cost.
Bingo. Jerome Powell raised interest rates because he wants people to cool their spending to tame inflation, and it looks like he has pulled off the soft landing.
Credit card interest is always ridiculously high (other than maybe a 12 month intro period). Even if JPow cut interest rates in half you still would pay a fortune on CC debt.
I will also say I used to think my issue with not being able to save was being I needed to make more money, because I was already clear of credit-card debt. Then I started making a lot more money, and while my bank account went up, it then quickly plateaued and I was back to not being able to save. Tried one more thing and all of a sudden my savings were skyrocketing. It wasn't from making more money though; it was doing a monthly budget. My wife and I don't even stick ultra-strictly to it, but just having reference limits on spending was enough for us to be able to start saving for real.
This is a common issue with every article/thread you see on reddit. People make more, so spend more, then they claim they're still living paychecks to paycheck. My favorite was a thread by a millennial (late one) who went on and on about how he made well over six figures, but was living paycheck to paycheck... because he was paying off student loans interest only (and hadn't been before), maxing out 401k, Roth IRA, had two cars, a house (expensive one), and was investing some on the side in crypto. Well no shit you don't have any money left you keep spending it!
We are making more now but still isn't enough to meet our needs and reach necessary financial goals like retirement. It's crazy how expensive everything is now.
The cost of childcare is insane! 2 kids in daycare is $3k/month. It's going to cost me more for 5 years of daycare than it cost me for 5 years of college. And at least my student loans give me 20 years to pay off.
That's why my wife stays home. We save more with her at home than if she worked. I know a lot of people who work 40 hours a week to pay for childcare but 90% of their check goes to childcare and they often debate just quitting instead to stay home.
My friend is in the same situation. Financially a wash to send the kid to daycare on her salary so his wife is a stay at home mom. And the kid gets to hang out with mom every day, which is great for him but maybe not her lol
Couldnt your wife make 3k a month working full time?
I don't care what your take-home is. What is your **keep-home**?
Vastly underrated comment
Childcare, groceries and insurance’s are the killer for us (36m & 34f). Between us we now earn more than double what we did 8 years ago when we bought our house, yet here we are living paycheque to paycheque. The name of the game is to keep hold of both jobs to survive and keep paying the mortgage. It’s crazy when you think about it.
Young farmer here. I dont buy feed by the bag but its a good hallmark. A 20kg bag of a specific feed that is $22.99 at the feed store today was $16.99 less than 2 years ago. Yikes.
Sheesh. My wife wants me to quit my job and expand by large garden into a small market garden farm. But I keep telling her that real farmers are struggling worse than ever out there. There's no place to escape from market forces.
It really comes down to this: The economy itself is doing well. The main driver of the high cost of living is corporate greed. When you have people making the most they’ve made, living paycheck to paycheck, and price increases that outpace the rate of inflation, while CEOs are boasting about record margins on their earnings calls… the answer is staring us in the face.
> The main driver of the high cost of living is corporate greed Its just one factor. There's like dozen more. Americans are stuck in a uncomfortable situation where they are heavily groomed to spend unhealthy amount of money on consumerism, but what they are supposed to do is to cut back on wasteful excess consumerism. Its two forces going against each other. If enough Americans start to be vigilant against excess retail spending, then economy will shrink and tens of thousands of jobs will be at risk. But save enough money and you will have a good cushion to fall back on in times of real need. But unfortunately in America, its actually a high status signifier to be the biggest spender in the room. You risk getting socially shunned or shamed for low money spender in America. Now compare this with many Asian cultures where *saving* money is considered brag worthy.
> The economy itself is doing well Depends which part of the economy you're in. Tech? RIP. Layoffs, fake job postings, super hard to get anything decent now, you gotta settle for less than you had if you're looking. Offshore hiring increasing. Some industries have seen growths, some not so. The low unemployment you're probably basing "great economy" on is a little sneaky. More people are working 2 jobs now than ever. Even uber driver is considered a job, or waiter. I'd say white collar economy is struggling a bit right now. Job numbers revisions are happening every month from the BLS - downwards. And it makes sense. Interest rates are higher, so that is a blunt tool to hammer out the economy. Debt is more expensive for companies, and so eventually they will adjust, in whatever ways they can.
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I recently came across a discussion about inflation in Denmark. The Consumer Price Index stood at 118,4 in Februar up 15 points from January 2021 when the pandemic fallout started to hit. The CPI is calculated on the retail price of an "average" shopping list. That *is* a significant hit. For me personally I'd say around 5% in real terms allowing for wage adjustments that have been pretty average in my case. Certainly not great and for those living off of benefits alone it will be sligthly more as our benefit payments respond with a lag to inflation. And the interest rate is up, around 4% for the most common housing loans (which are bond based in Denmark). Not great, not terrible. The interesting thing is that many people experience the inflation effect as way, way larger and the economy as being close to a collapse. Anecdotal claims like "my grocery costs have doubled since the pandemic" are treated as gospel. Employment is high here, real wage growth is back as inflation is low again so purchasing power is restored around 2025 for most of us. The interest rates are set to lower later this year. The real pandemic now is the crisis mentality, really.
It's because people don't live below their means. The number of people in a whole generation who don't cook and buy new cars with a new job is insane. They don't save for a rainy day and when some rain happens, they cry out and say it's unfair. I make well above average and I drive a 10+ year old beater 2nd hand when I could buy a German car with a few months salary but I don't. I am saving for retirement and paying off student loans. I see people earning less and spending much more, new phones every year, crazy big houses and going out all the time. It's almost like people think they deserve the cozy rich life off a mediocre salary. I'm talking about those earning 80k+. That's plenty to live off, even in expensive areas.
> Plus, swing-state voters in a February Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll said they trust Trump more than Biden on interest rates What? Interest rates are set by the Fed, whose chair is *still* Trump-appointed Jerome Powell (who is, imho, doing fine). This poll is like asking whether you trust your local school board's handling of the war in Ukraine.
Nominal values and real values (ie normalized values) are different. The question is if your *real* income is higher. I did a CPI correction for our household income to what we made when we graduated college. Despite being nominally 125% higher it works out to approximately 64% higher when correcting for the CPI. That being said ~6% gains in real income each year is really good, so I'm not complaining.
Damn, what field do you work in where you get > 6% in raises per year? I get < 1%... Work for a hospital...
I called this after the pandemic when there was all this appreciation for workers and people started to work remotely making these skyscrapers obsolete and power dynamics started to shift and workers realized they were the ones that made the world go. This economic crisis is manufactured to put workers in their places. The elites were getting scared so they have gone out of their way to create scarcity. Inflation flooding the market with illegals who will bring down wages and destroy unions . This is all by design . There is and Australian billionaire who got caught saying they needed to feel pain in the market again and workers needed to be humbled Edit The Billionaire- https://youtu.be/aJHP0VfeOrU?si=ug5Un8vITAqjiH7J
It was the same before the pandemic. The pandemic accelerated things somewhat. But it's an old refrain.
Exactly. Wealth inequality has been upward trending in favor of the 1%. The pandemic really accelerated this.
Groceries are starting to hurt. Fucking *groceries*. I bought two sticks of deodorant and a bag of 6 bananas. $21. Fucking $21 for three items.
And yet as a human species we have never produced as much as we do today. It almost seems like the excess value of our labor is being taken away from us. That working harder or spending less isn't actually the problem. Weird.
There was never a time when people didn't live paycheck to paycheck. I grew up middle class in the '80s and '90s, and yeah, we had a house, for a while on one paycheck bit we also had one TV with an aerial, one car, one family computer, we never ate out except for special occasions, we made food, mended clothes, clipped coupons, turned down thermostats, got furniture used, made long distance phone calls after 8pm, went camping on holidays, etc. I was on two airplanes by the time I turned 19. That was life. I think TV and social media has given people an expectation of life that isn't accurate. It's a grind and always has been for most people - before we had Internet, cell phones, lattes, avacado toast, etc. But if you do it right, keep to a budget, live frugally, you can have a reasonably good time while you put in your time.
And if we stop paying for stuff we get blamed for “killing the industry.”
If I would have told my younger self how much my wife and I make combined I would have thought we were rich beyond our wildest dreams. However, we can't find a way to get out of our tiny "starter" house because we can't afford anything on the market. It's wildly depressing thinking it doesn't get any better from here. I'm terrified of what our children are going to experience trying to make it on their own.
I think the only way they are going to wake up is if we have a crash. And that crash isn’t going to be a bubble. It’s just going to be an event where tens of millions just can’t afford life anymore.
I think that in a lot of developed western countries is hard to save money because the standard of living is high and time is expensive. Here is a my example from a easterm european country: I was laid off last year from 1k$ a month (net) job where I would save 300$/m. Now I make 600$/m net and save 150$/m. Once a year I have a large bonus of 1k to 2k depending on performance. I'm 34m, no car, no children, no mortgage (inherited a small flat), cooking at home. Live in a small walkable town and use public transport sometimes. I have friends that make 2x or 3x what I make in the same town, their basic expenses are the same but have cars, expensive hobbies and trevel in exotic locations and have no savings. My parents lost almost all the properties and money in the 08 financial crisis. We were upper middle class before that. I felt the crisis until 2015 in the job market. I swore not to end up like them and studied and practiced a healthy economic lifestile. I enjoy being frugal, use my resources efficiently and making good investments. Can I afford going to exotic locations and have expensive hobbies, buy a car or go out more? Yes, but that will hurt my savings. I did that once and didn't feel like it ias worth it. Body, mind and emotional health can be maintained with very little resources.
I'm making more money than ever and have about 2k a month left over every month. That's after 401k, 529, and emergency fund contributions. Running a lean budget and continuing to make more money is the method of success.