It is cool for young people to doom over money and spend all day looking at much richer people on on social media. Main character syndrome.
Sure, you could live one hour away from work to save money, you can stop drinking, you can only cook at home, you could ride a bike, you could buy used clothing, etc etc. But life is short if that stuff annoys you.
But god forbid you do anything in life but eat and pay rent. Most people buy clothes, furniture and go on vacation.
I'm sorry you feel poor. There's recent Bloomberg article titled, why 300k feels like 100k, outlining the insane cost of living of cities like NY and SF.
No need for 'trust fund kid' attacks, which by the way are based on incorrect information. Do you live in NYC?
I lived there until last year, paid $1600 for rent in an unattractive area, coffee around the block cost maybe $2.50 but I mostly brewed my own, and I ate out for maybe $30-40 per meal on average, when I ate out. I did plenty with less than half of that money and saved about half of my take-home during that period.
I didn't mean to label you specifically as a "trust fund kid", but I truly cannot believe that anyone who doesn't come from money (and thus hasn't developed a sense of financial responsibility as a child) would be capable of wasting that much money, even in NYC. In what world is it normal to spend hundreds of dollars a week eating out every single day?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/homes/manhattan-rentals-march...
Also your lifestyle depends on your age and relationship status. A 25 yr-old who eats out once a week and lives in Bushwick or the Bronx is a different category than a middle aged person who's in a relationship and works long hours.
There's of course lots of room to argue about what the likely take home pay on $250k is, but many of the arguments involve choices that sort of undermine the claim that someone is living paycheck to paycheck.
Basically there is no end in how much you can expect others will ease your life if you keep paying them to do stuff for you. And sorry but paying half of your net income just to rent some space is pretty big financial mistake, in Switzerland they wouldn't even consider you to rent such a place (normal limit is cca 1/3rd but if you wan to save a lot its better to keep it in 15-20% category and no it doesn't come with 1+ hour of commute).
Back in the real world, so something around 99% of mankind, real financial problems look very different.
There's been an insane lifestyle inflation amongst Millenials and Gen Zs. If people model their day-to-day after some social media influencers and that causes them to be financially irresponsible, then why is this news?
Financial literacy isn't hard if you are actually inclined to learn it. All the information and budgeting apps is out there, free, just a few keystrokes away.
250K is higher than average (and median) income in every single area of this country, including places like LA/SV and Manhattan. It's ok to not feel sorry for these people. They'll do just fine, regardless of what they answer in some survey.
No single person making that much money is living paycheck-to-paycheck unless they're doing something really wrong in terms of personal finances.
I posit that it is not normal for a young adult in SF to have a family of four.
Consider the cost different with cooking your own meals and eating out for every meal. Lifestyle choices make a big difference in living paycheck to paycheck for many (not all).
do you live in a major city, or have any experience living in one?
it took me about five seconds to find a $2300 2bedroom apartment for rent in brooklyn. it's more optimal to rent this and roomate with a friend for split rent, but if you absolutely have to live alone you can probably get down to $1800 for a studio.
Yes, I agree with your sentiment that its "different" than being "poor" but that's the media for ya.
The guy making 250K a year isn’t worried about not being able to put food on the table. But maybe he has a monthly car payment that is more than the person making 28k a year pays per month in rent.
But that’s only because I’m automatically investing 70% of my paycheck so I never have more than a few weeks of expenses in cash.
I can imagine getting very biased results depending on how to survey is worded.
In my case, an unexpected expense just means I take a short term margin loan against my portfolio (at an insane interest rate) until my next paycheck.
The point of my comment was that wording of survey questions can result in biased results.
I don't think you're grokking the common definition of "paycheck-to-paycheck", or are willfully ignoring it to make a point (and doing so poorly).
The point I’m trying to make is bias in surveys
Woe is me, after paying for my eight children's horse riding lessons, getting an opera house named after me, and paying for the handmade rigging that my yacht's crew say urgently needs to be replaced, I'm barely making ends meet! Why won't Biden do something about the outrageous increases in the cost of helicopter fuel?
Am I living paycheck to paycheck?
That said even if someone in a low CoL area is pulling 250k, it's not "horseriding lessons eight kids and a yacht" money, not unless the individual/couple in question is drowning in debt.
Don't get me wrong, $250k isn't a "struggling" salary anywhere but it's also not past the threshold where one can stop being responsible with money and blow it on wealthy people things on the regular, especially if that's joint income from a couple with kids.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-average-salary-by-age-in...
No, it's not $70-80k. Median in that age range is $52k (numbers are from 2022 Q3).