"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire at something resembling a typical retirement age. If so, it's very easy to under-cut it and still be apparently doing fine, until age 70 when you have to keep working, through illness and pain, as a Wal-Mart greeter.
This also means responsible savers have to compete with borrowing-against-their-future types with no retirement savings, for things like housing or (relatedly) various scarce benefits for their kids. IMO it's a pretty strong argument against "freer" personal retirement account systems being the main mechanism of retirement savings, and for mandatory, strong public pension schemes.
Doesn't seem to be.
>[The living wage model] does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g., provisions for retirement or home purchases).
https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...
Must be childcare costs & housing making it so high, then. I gather childcare costs vary quite a bit from city to city, and in my cheaper location those are easily the two biggest expenses, with childcare eclipsing housing by a fair margin, for 1-parent and 2-parents-both-working categories on the calculator, with 3 kids.
FWIW only the "management" category's average income is (barely) above the "living wage" for a single-adult household, for three kids, here. Since that's pre-tax income, yeah, I'd say that's about right. Kids are crazy-expensive.
yeah if you check the hourly earning chart, the hourly wage required for a dual earner household with 2 adults and 3 kids is only $32.29/hr.
No single job that earns enough, I think is what you found; this doesn't preclude that dual-income families can afford to have three kids, with average or above-average income jobs.
I can imagine it would be very difficult to make ends meet in this situation as a single parent with 3 or more kids. (I suppose you would either need an exceptionally high paying job, or another major source of income besides that job.)