Living paycheck to payckeck with a new phone every 2 years, a new car lease upgrade every 5, a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house, and eating out 4 times a week, and 1000 TV channels is hardly what someone would consider 'poor.' It's just sustainably stressful and largely optional. This is why I feel the paycheck-to-paycheck metric/rhetoric is obnoxious, on 100k a year I can live paycheck-to-paycheck if I so desire, on 20k a year I can live at 75% of my means and save 400$+ as well. People's personal choices are not a comment on the economy, they're a comment on the fiscal education system. I personally save about 33% of my paycheck on 32k per year in one of the top 10 most expensive global cities.