Living Wage Calculator
livingwage.mit.edu
livingwage.mit.edu
The childcare costs seem a little suspect too.
Still a cool idea.
Yes, that's "living", nothing more. A home. It even says in the technical documentation, "We assumed that a one adult family would rent a single occupancy unit (zero bedrooms) for an individual adult household"
I can't account for your thoughts on utilities, the site says the housing includes them, but perhaps there's room to improve the data.
Second, this is for the whole Seattle/Tacoma area. This isn’t living in central Seattle.
Finally, I found it to be generous from my personal experience. My partner and I were able to live in Seattle for considerably less than $60k per year this gives for two people. We had a perfectly happy, frugal, life at around $36k.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/42660
> Typical Expenses > > 1 Adult > > Housing > > $18,388
I'm talking about just the housing, it looks like the number you're talking about is total expenses.
> Second, this is for the whole Seattle/Tacoma area. This isn’t living in central Seattle.
Okay that makes more sense. You can definitely get studios for $1.5k with utilities in e.g. Renton or Kent.
$1.5k is actually really high. The median rent according to Zillow, for just Seattle, is $2.3k and that’s all sizes of apartments.
I’m suspicious of the claim here that this is minimal living costs, not closer to median cost.
$1.5k with $100-$200 of utilities, renters insurance, etc in Seattle proper gets a little more difficult to find. You could probably do it up north past greenwood, over in west seattle, or similar. If you know how to dodge the craigslist scams haha.
I guess ideologically I don’t think “living wage” corresponds to 40th percentile
This stuff is so general as to be basically worthless beyond a comparison between areas, not as a datapoint to use when calculating the cost of living somewhere.
There's a tendency for people to think that anyone not living in a house with a white picket fence in Queen Anne must be insufferable.
It seems like there's a large group of people that is simply miserable if they don't have as much as others - regardless of if that thing is going to actually bring them any joy or not.
It seems like half my friends are killing themselves to buy a boat - and they don't even go out boating more than a couple times a year. I'll never get it.
As a kid in the 80s we owned close to nothing. But nobody did and we just made the best of it. I never felt poor because this simply was the living standard of the time and our objective needs were met.
It seems since then we simply invented a whole lot of extra "needs", which really are "wants".
It depends on how similar your wife's income would be to the cost of childcare really, which also depends on how many kids you have, etc. Also, what happens when your kid's don't need childcare? There's some huge(maybe) opportunity costs to account for from putting her career on hold.
Working moms (parents) can do most of the other stuff with a job so it's not really "savings". My wife does anyways. Only extra we spend is a couple hundred a month for biweekly housekeeper so we don't have to do the deep/detail stuff. I take care of all the house stuff and finances and spend roughly the same on outsourcing lawncare. It's not worth my time and effort compared to the cost and never ending hassle (I'm in Texas and it's 110F outside and grass grows 9-10 months out of the year)
They are allocating $2000/month for housing (avg 1 bed in Manhattan is around $4000) and $12.50 for food per day (I guess possible if you’re eating rice-and-bean type meals).
This living wage is 4x povity wage, so I guess they’re expecting povity line to be finding places that rent for $500 and being able to budget for $4 for food each day.
Thankfully we voted in last years local election to have a true cost of living index for nyc calculated each year. http://truecostofliving.org/
For 2023 they estimate north Manhattan as $123,688 And south Manhattan as $151,723
Shocking how far off the calculations are given that I assume a resource like this is used for policy decisions.
In Atlanta GA, for 2 adults (both working) and 2 children you would need a combined annual income of $103,459 just to meet basic needs according to this data.
Correct. Things are alot more expensive than 4% inFLaTiOn i see going around. i have no idea how people with kids are affording to live in the city im in.
Most of that sounds like leisure to me. Their "other" category also includes:
> Expenditures for other necessities are based on 2021 data by household size from the 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey including: (1) Apparel and services, (2) Housekeeping supplies, (3) Personal care products and services, (4) Reading, and (5) Miscellaneous.
Which I suspect has a lot of unnecessary expenses baked in (if I understand correctly, they're using average spending). For my situation/location, those two categories account for 27% of the before-tax cost of living they come up with. Looking at my last 12 months of expenses, we're slightly above what they give as the cost-of-living in my area, and I feel like we're living pretty well. Certainly not at bare minimum.
I’m assuming there’s a pretty big margin of error here, especially given so many other factors on top of fluctuation in the dollar.
I wouldn’t expect estimates for cost of living to be accurate within more than 10-15% (or more).
Best regards,
Europe
I got one but had to buy it myself using a summer/weekend job. I paid all gas, maintenance, though my parents put it on their insurance.
If both parents are working, they can't do after-school activities or extracurriculars. Some can make it work by catching rides, but it's remarkably difficult.
I know this is insane, but that's the world we've got.
These were, of course, complete gas guzzling shitboxes that required repair before they could function well. It wasn't until I went away to college that I had something halfway reliable, and that as at 18, and that car had a blown head gasket and needed a valvejob in order to run. It served me well though, ran for another 5 years before I traded it in.
Understand of course, a car in america is freedom and potential. It doesn't just represent that, it is that. America is very, very big and very very spread out compared to europe. That makes public transit an untenable option almost everywhere.
So they covered their assumptions in their technical documentation that is linked at the top of the page. The increase in housing costs seems reasonable to me personally but as with all assumptions not everyone will agree.
Lots of people take care of more than just children.
Would be nice to include that if you are poor, odds are you have kin that are poor too. And odds are you help when you can.
okay
For example, a Boston single mother of two at the “living wage” line is definitely not going to net $25,768 worth of taxes!
Either that, or food costs really are similar within a region if you cook your own food and shop frugally.
that seems several multiples off
The copy introducing the tool overall says:
> We developed the Living Wage Calculator to help individuals, communities, employers, and others estimate the local wage rate that a full-time worker requires to cover the costs of their family’s basic needs where they live.
And viewing specific results for a county in my state I see this copy:
> The state minimum wage is the same for all individuals, regardless of how many dependents they may have.
This doesn't explicitly say, but seems to suggest that something is is wrong if an employee isn't paid enough to cover the living expenses of them and their non-working family.
At an abstract level, sure it sounds reasonable that we would want a person's wages to cover their 'basic' cost of living. But e.g. for a single person with 3 kids in Alameda County, CA, the living wage is given as $86.40, whereas for a single person with no kids, the living wage if $22.35, and for an adult in a household with 2 working adults, the living wage is only $17.15. It seems like there's a huge fairness issue if people are paid more for having dependents and for being single.
Suppose you had two workers doing the same job, equally well, but A is a single parent 3 kids and B is a single person living alone. Should A be paid nearly 4x as much as B? Suppose A gets married and their kids now have a step-parent; should A's compensation be cut nearly in half? Suppose B moves in with their significant other who initially works, should their compensation drop further? If B's cohabitating significant other quits their job, should B's compensation really be doubled? What conditions is the the "2 adults (1 working)" x "0 children" meant to cover -- should it depend upon the other adult's _ability_ to work?
While perhaps one might think that an employer was being noble by trying to use this to ensure employees had a floor on their ability to house and feed themselves, if you were a person with no dependents, I think this would really sound like discrimination.
Speaking only for myself, I have several coworkers who make the same salary as me, but have zero children. I sometimes envy their lifestyle, but I don't begrudge the fact that they made a more financially advantageous decision than me.
It is true that some employers will preferentially mete out promotions and vacation based on family status (having a family is famously a career advantage for men, but not for women, although spending time with said family is universally a career disadvantage), and this is discrimination.
The best raiser of minimums isn't laws. It's other companies. Making it easy to compete is the best way to raise salaries.