You can make 250K a year and spend half of your take-home pay on rent, in fact that's pretty normal in HCOL areas. With the leftovers you have life, including Uber, groceries, dinner, etc. People love cities, but dense cities are massively expensive for doing day to day normal things.
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.
I cannot understand how someone can make that much money and be so irresponsible with it. Even in NYC with high income taxes, on a $250k salary you'd have to be spending well over $5000 on rent for it to constitute 50% of your take-home pay. And spend at least that much on top of that on other unnecessary luxuries every month to be "living paycheck to paycheck". That's beyond disconnected, and implying it's normal in HCOL areas... Maybe normal in circles of trust fund kids. Reading HN comments makes me feel like I'm poor when I'm making 6 figures, or 2-3x the median household income.
In NYC the median rent is like 4200. MetroCard, gas, electric, internet take you to 4600, that's before you've eaten anything. Cocktails cost 15 bucks, beers 9, appetizers 20 dollars and entrees 30-40. Coffee costs 6-7 plus tip, taxis anywhere cost a fortune now and Ubers as well. 250k with fed, state, city tax, 401k and health deductions leave you with 5500-5600 every two weeks.(edited)
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?
Not everyone is willing to ride the subway for 45 minutes to an hr to get back and forth to work
.. The median rent was for Manhattan, fair enough, but near-Manhattan Brooklyn neighborhoods like Downtown BK and Greenpoint are the same price.
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.
Does it really take a 1 hour commute to avoid $6,000 rent?
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.
No one has to live paycheck to paycheck on 250k. Many do, but only because they choose to. I guarantee they are living amongst people making 20% as much who are doing fine.
Well you are completely right, but now we moved from 'people have little income to survive or have a normal life' to typical spoiled 1st world kids problems 'I want latest Tesla just like that tiktoker and I am too poor for that'. Its damn hard to have much sympathies there, and 0 reasons to even try.
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.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to be taking away from your post.
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.
Even in a state with high state income taxes, you're taking home north of $12k a month with a $250k/year salary. There's maybe one city in the country where a young adult (someone with no dependents) is paying half of that, $6k/month, in rent.
No single person making that much money is living paycheck-to-paycheck unless they're doing something really wrong in terms of personal finances.
If you have take home pay of $120k per year, half of that going to rent would be $5k. Spending that much on rent would only be normal in SF if you were renting a 5 bedroom. Normally people renting a 5 bedroom would be housing a family of four - or more.
I posit that it is not normal for a young adult in SF to have a family of four.
You can make 250k a year, eat out every day, buy a starbucks coffee every morning, regularly have new clothes, etc. This is all expensive.
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).
In the places where a young adult makes $250k a year? In NYC $3600 a month gets you a small room. If you want to have the luxury of a dedicated, doored off bedroom, you will be paying significantly more than that. Sure hope your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend is also a FAANG superstar so you can afford to live together.
They're available in the bronx and staten. Most new yorkers have roommates though. It is not difficult to find a 2 bed (2 people get the luxury of a dedicated, doored off bedroom) for $2400 in any of the boroughs, although many neighborhoods are certainly out.
would love to know more about you and your background. I always drill into these threads because I find peoples' perspectives on basic living necessities fascinating
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.
I understand the point though. Living paycheck to paycheck making 250K is either a gross mismanagement of finances, or a dishonest view of them.
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.
250k in NYC or SF Bay Area is really 150k after taxes. After insurance and other usual expenses, 10k/month. Rents in these cities can be expensive and if you have dependents then 10k suddenly is not a lot of money. Its not paycheck to paycheck always, but can totally be.
Enough space for a family means something like $5k-7k/month rent. Even with 10k/mo the income rapidly vanishes. Housing and income reform is deeply needed nationwide.
Having resources you can draw on (an asset you can take a margin loan against is a resource you can draw on) is exactly what "paycheck to paycheck" doesn't mean.
If that's true of 36% of them then the definition of "paycheck to paycheck" is so broad as to be meaningless.
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?
And are very likely living in high CoL areas where a large chunk of that is swallowed by housing, transportation, etc. It's functionally similar to a much lower salary in a lower CoL area.
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.
This is an article nearly entirely built around a viral Tweet regarding "landlord" cause Vice writers live in a strange world where that is essentially a slur they want to use, and then found two edge cases to make it an "article".
It's not a slur, it's just distinguishing people between those that own property and those that don't. As such, it's offensive to large swathes of disadvantaged people.
I can't even begin to follow this line of thought. Is 'billionaire' offensive because it distinguishes those who own billions of dollars versus those who don't? How, by your logic, is 'property owner' not offensive?
"People who own property" and "people who don't own property" are very real and in many cases important groups to discuss. If the fact that I'm a property owner (not a landlord though) offends someone who isn't, well... tough. The correct response would be to tell these people to stop being so soft and getting offended over absolutely nothing.
I object to "articles" that are essentially just popular tweets puffed up. Don't think that is good journalism and don't think it needs much more detail.
I mean, I'm confused why you think the vice authors live in a world where landlord is a slur. It's not. It's a commonly used term and a small number of progressive individuals have manipulated the media and their followers into thinking it's terrible. But it isn't. Hence, my request as to why you think the Vice authors "wanted to use a slur", since it isn't.
Cause I have worked in NYC media and know that Vice writers use "landlord" as an insult?
The impetus for this piece was someone wrote a tweet that got very popular implying Google is somehow trying to cover for "landlords" by calling them "property owners". Vice writers are upset about that and would prefer to use "landlord" cause in their culture it has a negative connotation.
1a : an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo
And to the point, in NYC media circles, it is nearly the equivalent of an actual slur which is why I called it that. Just one writers want to use as opposed to one they think it is inappropriate to use.
This is where the weird negativity around billionaires taking loans is odd, even as someone who doesn't particularly like Musk. Sure, if their stock holdings keeps increasing in value, they can handle the loans easily and come out ahead on the deal. But that isn't a given, so what is the issue?
Reed Hastings would currently being losing a lot under this scheme.
Personally, my issue is that taking loans against equity is the reason billionaires don't pay any income tax. Sure, they should be able to take loans in order to keep their voting share, but not as a tax loophole.
For a long time this always felt awkward to me but I was never able to pin-point exactly what was wrong. Then I found georgism, with its claims of not needing any income and capital gains taxes, and it was even harder to quantify.
But I think now I've been able to work it out. There's actually two different types of loans but we treat them equally. The first is the nice type, the 'I built a factory, used that factory to pay back the loan with interest', that loan is a positive sum loan, the company wins, the bank wins, and the community wins. The second are loans for land, loans for stock, and other similar loans - these are zero-sum loans. The company can win, the bank can win, but someone is losing, and as is the community.
And so the real problem with this if you track how the money flows - a possible scenario is that a company might take out a bond, use the money for that bond to buy its own stock. The people who sold that stock and got that money might then go out and buy a house, the people who sold that house - you betcha, put that stock into an index fund, which includes a larger and larger share of the companies buying their own shares. Now that their share price is raised, they have more equity, and can once again take out another bond to do it again. It's a positive feedback loop. Each cycle is inflating the bubble. Valuations end up not being based on actual productivity, but on assumptions as to how money will flow through the markets.
We're at a stage now that the stock market flows of funds is only positive because of the stock buybacks. Companies that aren't buying back their stocks are going out of business. The Russel 5000 is getting punished despite the s&p recovering. We're at a stage now where north of 40% of all money is being held behind passive flows. We're now seeing the consequences of that with things like Netflix - when the stock does drop, it drops quickly and massively. Average volatility might be down considerably, but peak volatility is up massively.
The issue is that loans are ways of realizing gains on investments that aren’t taxed.
A proposal to correct this is to require that when you use an asset as collateral for a loan you have to reassess its value and pay capital gains taxes on the increased basis between when you acquired it and took out the loan.
Basically there needs to be friction and taxation with equity transactions like these loans.
This piece is mostly a response to how people here thought the author was too paranoid about being honest in an exit interview. And the answer is unionization?
I 100% agree you should be a mercenary at work. Look out for number 1, HR isn't your friend, etc. But being so paranoid you can't even speak your mind in a nearly zero stakes situation of talking to your company before you leave speaks to a very negative outlook on work that seems honestly exhausting.
And more to point, if you are a good mercenary, unionization only harms you.
Buzzfeed's purpose was to make money. Buzzfeed News was a semi-successful attempt to take money from advertisers who preferred high minded NYT/WSJ type audiences by gaining the reputation of "no, no, you see Buzzfeed News is the serious part, it actually does good stuff!".
It didn't work because the financial cards are stacked against print media, there is basically NYT and then tech billionaire charity cases like The Post and The Atlantic.
Wait, I just played the NYT version and that word was one of my guesses, and it was accepted as a valid guess, but not the right answer. The right answer was an unrelated word with letters in common.
They won't have my appreciation or respect until they let me permanently filter out paid or adware apps and keep them filtered out until I choose to see them again.
It would be so easy to implement, it seems scornful not to. When I want a needle, they hand me a haystack and say "we etched 'this is a needle' into the needles for you so you'll know when you find one. Good luck."
I admit I haven't used android for three or four years so maybe they have this capability now, would love to be corrected if so.
Note: this will significantly reduce the life of your oven. The self-cleaning cycle is torture for the oven components. They are not really built to withstand the heat.
This reminds me of the Key and Peele robber sketch when the heist plan is to get a job at the bank, work there 30 years, and get a regular paycheck so the bank is giving you the loot without ever suspecting it.
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.