If you're paying down a $1.7 million mortgage like mentioned in the article, it may feel like you have nothing left at the end of the month, but a lot of that money goes into an asset that is almost guaranteed to appreciate over the 30-year period.

So clearly these home-owning Americans making $250k/year are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck in the usual meaning, since they're going to be multimillionaires in a few decades. Maybe the main problem here is that too much of their net worth is tied into a single asset.