The day I got signed on for 120k was the day all my financial anxieties went away. I’m not rich by any means. My rent is still stupid high. My bills never stop coming in. But I can finally afford furniture. I can finally afford to visit my family when I want to. I don’t worry about min-maxing at the grocery store. I’m not “happy” but it’s the closest I’ve ever been
Congratulations! I’m surviving but without furniture lol.
I’ve got a little bit of disposable income, but just had to go out of network for a surgery because my insurance is weak.
I don’t really have financial worries either though. What’s weird is I make just under $50k now, but the most I ever made was $110k, and at that time I had financial stress. Now is the first time I’ve ever gotten off the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.
But my financial success currently stops at furniture, so I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve got a futon, a 5x7 rug, a table, a dining chair, and an armchair. The futon and the rug are the only ones I paid for; the rest was free from craigslist. I carried that damn furniture for miles. Well I had a vehicle for the armchair.
Next thing, after my savings recovers from the surgery, is a 7x9 rug to fill the other half of my main living space, so I can cut down on the creaking boards. Then padding for under the rugs. Then finally another dining chair so I can invite someone over for dinner.
Being able to walk into a store and drop 50 dollars on something on rare occasion without having to have a panic attack and spend the day before doing in depth financial analysis and math, I cant imagine how much healthier my life would be without that stress.
120k what? Bananas per hour?
Dumb questions per fortnight
That is far too many bananas. You wouldn’t even be able to sell them fast enough.
Bananas are for eating my friend
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Hey you guys, how for away do you think that mirage is?
Yep. One’s lifestyle (almost) always expands to fit their means.
As soon as you make what feels “comfortable,” you’ll want another 10-20k.
Yep. It’s much better to focus on your quality of life right now, while keeping an eye on the back of your head for the future but I saw so many people just sacrificing everything to get that extra 20% salary, without realising inflation catches up to it faster than you get raises.
I want the salary that allows me to be independent, take care of my family and have time to spend with them, and that doesn’t involve crushing my soul. Living life as happy as possible right now is more important than whatever magical number you think will solve all your problems. Personally I’m trying to achieve that by being a freelance in a passion field.
It depends where you live but it was figured out to be about 110k a decade ago on average in the US. Where I live that sounds pretty close maybe 140. However, I am biased since I truly don’t want to own a house. Would rather rent.
I really hated renting, I would rather pay someone to manage my own house than put up with landlords again
the amount you need to make in order to afford the ever-fleeting american dream is about $140k right now. so I want 280k
I’m sorry but this can’t be correct. I live within 30 minutes of two minor cities with plenty to do and me and my wife combined make around 100k. We live comfortably and have 50k in the bank in addition to retirement. We also have one kid. This is highly dependent on where you live. I am not saying the cost of housing,etc is not a problem but some of these numbers need to be put in context.
When did you purchase your housing (rough year range) if you don’t mind?
That sounds awesome, but I live in low CoL area make more and feel like I’m just eaking by sometimes.
Genuinely curious, where does that number come from?
There was a questionable article written with that number not long ago. It’s completely bullshit though.
I’ll use my own experience as an example: I got approved for a mortgage of 125k (which is fairly low for my area, but there are still options) with the understanding that I’d be getting a house with a few issues that I can work on. My 30 year mortgage rate if I had managed to buy a house at that time would have been around 700 a month. If you double those numbers to 250k, 1400 a month and you earn 4x that amount your annual salary needs to be just under 70k.
Just for reference, there are a significant number of homes for sale for 250k or less, and I live in one of the top 10 most populated cities in the country.
$140k won’t buy you a house in almost any even remotely popular city or its suburbs.
$140k per year is enough to afford a mortgage on a $500k house. You’d have to make crazy money to buy a house outright on a year’s salary, so nobody evaluates it that way.
$500k houses don’t exist in popular cities.
That’s why I live way the hell out in the suburbs
Is 500k a house to raise a family in or just a place to stay in?
In Boston, where I live? $500k is an unheated garage.
San Diego checking in. $500k is a shack in someone’s backyard. Fuck I love it here but damn sometimes I really don’t.
ok ok I exaggerate a little. But everything is crazy expensive here. Nice weather and beaches though. Get to surf every week. Can’t complain.
1/3 median home price for area of employment.
I am fine with my current salary. None of the problems I have are due to having too little money. It is more that I have hardly any time to spend that money and live a fairly lonely life. None of that would be fixed by a higher salary, which is why I have little motivation to try to get promoted.
Might be worth a job change to get better hours and similar or slightly lower income.
Money buys time friend
Not if it’s a salary
What?
I would suggest volunteering at animal shelters on your days off might help with the fairly lonely life. The one by me let’s you check out dogs to go to the beach with and return.
A question like this could be an intro to a shady MLM pitch. Break the ice, get the conversation going and gain a sense of the range of numbers to make up for earnings examples.
I earn enough, I’d rather just halve my hours.
And, did that work out for you?
None, what I need is UBI.
What if UBI was your salary for living under a system of laws
I get your point, but I disagree, because otherwise it wouldn’t be universal.
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90% of the US is emptiness and small towns/villages where you would have no need for 150k/year…
Yeah but you don’t need 150k/year to be comfortable in 90% of the US when the people living there are making half of that as a couple.
No amount will make me happy.
Once your basic needs are met, the equation becomes: Salary = Expenses + Savings. So, the questions becomes, how much savings makes you happy?
If you are happy to work in your job until “retirement age”, a small savings rate will do, in theory; that is if the salary is adjusted for cost-of-living and tax.
Are you happy working this job for the rest of your life? Full time (whatever that means in your work culture)?
Yes, I’m lucky enough to have a good salary, but I can tell people there is no top limit. Once you have your needs met then you’re exactly right, it’s about retirement planning and savings, and there could always be more. The fact is that the only true money amount that will make someone happy is the amount that allows them not to work anymore
Salary? No. Stipend, yes. Give me enough to comfortably live on and pursue interests and hobbies with no requirement for work. That’s the closest money would get to making me happy.
DING DING DING DING
ah no stress, no costs… perfect to increase the population and put more strain on the system.
I’ll wait for you to solve the overpopulation crisis while giving us all a first-class work free experience.
I mean not really no. Even without any artificial limits, as people gain education and move out of poverty, birth rates naturally go down.
In fact birth rates in some places are decreasing as we speak.
Allowing everyone access to education and a UBI would cut birth rates. Going below 1.5 or so would actually be undesirable.
That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.
The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.
Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?
Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox. sauce
In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.
Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.
I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.
We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.
The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.
Does that make sense?
Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?
If we’re gonna go to sci Fi then you could solve overpopulation with FTL travel, terraforming, and farming, and we’d just spread out across the galaxy and then galaxies until the universe experiences heat death, I assume that solves it.
We’ll all be long dead by the time interstellar travel is here for a handful of individuals, and we may even be dead before we find another planet that could be habitable in a million years time.
You’re realistically targeting ultra-long-term solutions, all of which ignore the fact that we’re trashing this one pristine planet right now by filling it with billions and billions of souls more than it can sustainably support.
Indeed, I’m just having fun, that’ll never happen
The real solution is right under our noses. We need to shrink humanity.
Any hard science fiction clings to the fact that taking people off the earth is a luxury only afforded to the most influential and powerful, unless you have critical skills to do a job that they can’t find with space residents.
Imagine what would be needed to ferry a million people off the earth in one year. Then imagine that there are 20-50 billion souls eager to have that luxury off-planet destination life. The math never adds up.
Imagine what it would have taken in 1800 to build an iphone. Now imagine there are hundreds of millions of people wanting that same luxury. The math doesn’t work out.
Not the same scale. If we had the same technology back then it would probably be possible, but the population has exploded since. If we still had 1/8th the people we might get that, but there’s no way we can produce a billion iphones every time an upgrade comes along, let alone 8 billion.
Standards have to drop for real even equity compared to what we are used to in the west. This would be true even if we took everything from the top 10% (which globally seems to include nearly all of the US, even us middle class working peons.)
Oh, I just mean in the instance that the entire earth is completely full to comfortable capacity and the government is not totally evil, so when necessary people get shuttled to a different planet for comfortable spread. In my head this wouldnt be up to the individual, but the government would be looking out for and monitoring comfortable living space.
Totally unrealistic, but y’know
“This transporter will help us solve overpopulation”
“How’s that work?”
“Stand right here”
People with the lowest income have the highest birth rate.
Seems to me like lots of wealth is the solution to the population crisis.
Also with Star Trek technology we can let people live in the holodeck.
I’m happy with my salary.
I actually like my job, and the salary is enough for me and the rest of my household to live off of while making down-payments on the house and the car. Now, if only I was a happy person…
Hey this sounds like me
$150k/year. Enough to afford the house I’m in and still have enough left to not have to worry about being short on any recurring bills. Note: I’m in California. Most other states and id be fine at 90-100k.
