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Comment by ipsento606 | Hacker News Reader

> living paycheck to paycheck.

This phrase is used so often, but I don't know how meaningful it is supposed to be

A family might make $300,000 a year and be living "paycheck-to-paycheck" while also maxing out 401k contributions, paying a mortgage on a $2 million home, and paying $80,000 a year in private school tuition.

Are we supposed to think that such a family is in worse financial shape than a family making $40,000 a year but with minimal expenses and a few months of living costs in a savings account?

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It's somewhat of a mindset question and somewhat of a wealth question.

Mr $300k may have zero months in an emergency account, but be stable in his job as a doctor and not worry about finding work - and may actually "feel poor" because he barely has any "fun money" to waste and feels he can't buy coffee in the morning.

Mr $40k a year may have 6 months of expenses in the bank, saving half his income to FIRE, and know that anytime he wants to he can buy that coffee - and sometimes he does.

Net worth likely says Mr $300k is worth more than Mr $40k - but that may not be true forever, and Mr $40k may be "retired" at 50 while Mr $300k is perpetually working until death.

Who is rich, who has wealth, and who is happy? There are no clear answers.

You're missing the third question which is of definitions. There's an other person Mr $65k who after all their necessary expenses has $1k left over each paycheck that they spend on dinners out, concert tickets, vacations, etc so that at the end of the month they are left with no additional savings. Are they living paycheck to paycheck?

Maybe?

I mean, should we live in a world where the only way to create savings is by denying yourself any fun? You've picked a number, $1k, because it sounds good to support your argument, but maybe after paying for the essentials, a family has $200 left per month. Should we expect that family to never go to the movie theater, never go out to a restaurant, never splurge on a nice piece of clothing or jewelry, never do anything fun at all? Do we think it's ok for people to have to live like that?

So sure, maybe if they spend that $200 on fun stuff, it's not "living paycheck to paycheck". But maybe that's just a bad metric, or just too poorly-defined to be a reasonable way to measure anything.

Correct. We are meant to be wage slaves. That is why there is such a malaise these days. Everyone has sort of realized that we are meant to wage slave until we are dead, and our "productive" years are spent providing retirement income to the older generations.

Idk if people thought differently about this in the past, or just didn't care, or just weren't able to see the myriad ways that people get to live (social media) when they are not wage slaves. But something is wrong.

I think about this guy occasionally:

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/how-candice-m...

Happiness for him was somewhere between having zero dollars and being $33 million in debt. His influencer wife seems to have no humility, has moved to Miami where she can continue her partying lifestyle and going to yoga classes.

Its' both maddening and saddening. To what point does the ostentatious display of wealth serve if it leads to suicide? A few years of looking rich at the cost of the rest of life? We have no choice but to assume he was willing to make that trade-off. So it's angering to think a person would believe that.

On the other hand, suicide is the ultimatum when a man thinks his pleas are unanswered. Being surrounded by old-money socialites, I can imagine the feeling of having to leave the club being a fate worse than death. But how can an average guy have any sympathy for that, much less this guy's own feelings of himself.

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