~$30 dollars an hour is, across the whole country broadly, just shy of a basic, liveable wage.
I do not live in a LCOL area (I’m close enough to NYC that a significant number of people around me commute there for their job), and at my last job, I was making ~$27/hr, and I was saving over $1000 on average every single month. That’s after bills AND discretionary spending.
The definition of “livable” (which never gets concretely defined, by the way) that results in $30/hr being “just shy” of it is frankly absurd.
By the way, it doesn’t fit the narrative, but the fact is that most people who live “paycheck to paycheck” aren’t people who barely earn enough to make ends meet, even though the desired implication is that that’s 100% of that demographic; in reality, in the majority of cases, they are people are able to save but CHOOSE not to. Reminder that 1 in 4 households earning over $100k a year live “paycheck to paycheck” in the US.
I do not live in a LCOL area (I’m close enough to NYC that a significant number of people around me commute there for their job), and at my last job, I was making ~$27/hr, and I was saving over $1000 on average every single month. That’s after bills AND discretionary spending.
The definition of “livable” (which never gets concretely defined, by the way) that results in $30/hr being “just shy” of it is frankly absurd.
By the way, it doesn’t fit the narrative, but the fact is that most people who live “paycheck to paycheck” aren’t people who barely earn enough to make ends meet, even though the desired implication is that that’s 100% of that demographic; in reality, in the majority of cases, they are people are able to save but CHOOSE not to. Reminder that 1 in 4 households earning over $100k a year live “paycheck to paycheck” in the US.