I make low six figures, definitely not in survival mode. I’m probably abnormal, as I grew up with money insecurity, and had to file bankruptcy in the early 2010s.
When my income started going up, after a certain point I just started living like it didn’t. I save 30-40% of my pay every month. I’m not cheap, but I’m frugal and willing to wait for sales on stuff if it’s not something I need right this moment.
I have well over a year of expenses in a HYSA.
I bought my last car in 2020 for 24k USD fora new previous year model that was still on the lot and paid 1/3rd cash up front with a zero interest deal financing to keep the monthly cost down.
Paid off all my debts, student loans, everything but the mortgage. And since I work remotely and am an introvert, my wife and I moved to the rurals and got a mortgage for half of what it would be in our previous city. I will likely have it paid off in 2-3 years, maybe 6-7 years into a 30 year mortgage.
Living on six figures had not been all that difficult. I don’t even really think about money anymore and it’s a weight off me. It’s living on six figures while keeping up with the Joneses, celebrity influencers, and advertisers, going into massive debt for sake of appearances and potentially invoking the envy of others to prove you’re somehow better or you’ve “made it” and “deserve it” … that’s hard.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
most of their consumption is impulsive and based on peer pressure. most common example is how many people buy cars that are like 50%+ of their salary. I knew so many people buy 40-50K cars on 60-70K salaries then constantly whining about how expensive their car was…
when i was making 60-70K… I bought a 20K car. but of course everyone made fun of me for being ‘cheap’ and driving a ‘shitbox’. etc. apparently I was supposed to buy a overpriced luxury car like a BMW/Mini or SUV?
I’ve had so many girlfriends… who just lost their shit at me for not spending my money on stupid expensive shit. Once I had one go through my bank statements, find out I had 50K in cash (was saving for a house), and demand I spend it on taking her on a trip to Africa. I said no and she flipped out and screamed at me, called me names, and we broke up. In her mind I was huge selfish asshole for ‘hoarding’ my money to buy a house and not spending it on taking her traveling.
I broke up with 3 different women too because when it came to living together talk, they basically refused to budget. and when I found out how much they were spending… well it was over. They were spending like 120% more than they made and just piling up debt year after year with credit cards and personal loans. And when you tried to explain to them that was not how you become financially secure, they just told you what a rich asshole you were and that you should be ‘generous’ and give them your money to ‘help’ them.
It helps, but there is no budget that makes U.S. minimum wage livable, unless you’re somehow getting free housing and don’t need a car. Even then, it’s barely enough.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
While I share some frustration on the matter, I’d also point out:
It’s not as if we’re taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that’s it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
We live in an environment where the risks aren’t, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don’t disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But…think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I went to a “good” school (non-public school, better education from elementary through high school) growing up and even then our home economics courses only taught us how to sew and make pillows and shit (I’m not entirely knocking it, I can stitch up and patch clothes). The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
It’s been like… 25 years now or something. Mr. Roland, bro, sir, if you’re still out there, thanks for the head start. I completely bombed financially in my 20s, but recovered in my 30s after bankruptcy, in part remembering and working on a lot of the stuff you taught, and I’m thriving now.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don’t disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But…think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
I mean, yeah. But… consumerism. It’s literally the problem. People need to work on their susceptibility to this. Just because something is sold to you does not mean you have to buy it. I don’t buy anything major without at least a few weeks to a month of research, and longer the more expensive it is. And I’ll commonly wishlist something if I feel an overwhelming sense of desire to buy it and can’t figure out why. Sometimes I legitimately want something, but other times it’s just social or advertising pressure, memetic desire. I figure if I come back later and still want it, it’s worth considering, but often it just gets removed from the list. The desire, the want is temporary. Marketing is very good at manipulating your base desires and making something seem like a need when it’s far from it.
People and businesses will always be selling, always manipulating.You have to learn to curb your impulses and tame the monkey brain. There is a level of personal responsibility required.
The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
I mean, we definitely didn’t even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver’s ed — an elective course — where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
People need to work on their susceptibility to this.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and that’s gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don’t get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn’t a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren’t doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I’m not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you’d kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I’d say that that’s relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it’s on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
This one doesn’t go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
Seriously, people are nuts about spending, cars and trucks especially. Some of these things cost more than my monthly mortgage, and nearly always financed with crap terms.
My last car before I got the new one in 2020 was an ‘07 Hyundai Accent hatchback and I beat it up for 14 years.
If I hadn’t moved out to the boonies and needed something that could handle at least light off-road, I’d still be driving it. I went for a 2020 KIA Sportage CUV with AWD I put some good all-terrain tires on it (Nitto Nomad Grapplers). It’s not fancy but it has an ICE engine and can handle hills, mud, etc. and goes where I need.
I get that people want fancy cars and shit, but I just can’t even. I got a decent direct drive racing wheel for my PC setup; if I wanna drive something fancy I’ll do it virtually, without the $800+ monthly payment.
Edit - yikes about the girlfriends. My wife is as frugal as I am, probably even more so. She’s very anti-materialism. Back when we were actually broke I spent a lot of time stressed and angry over financial stuff, especially over “big” purchases (like anything over $50 or $100, which is sad to think about now). Nowadays I encourage her to get stuff she wants. She rarely wants things, and when she does, it should be quality, no point in skimping. We have it and we’re talking like hundreds sometimes, neither of us is springing for huge purchases without consulting each other.
I also make a point to donate to our local food bank monthly and buy food for the holiday food drives in the area because I get I have it better than most these days and feel like I should be doing what I can to help.
I get that people want fancy cars and shit, but I just can’t even.
I drive a Z3 that I bought eight years ago for $8K. It is by far the cheapest car I’ve ever owned on an annual cost basis, and it still only has 120K miles on it. Even some fancy cars can be had for next to nothing.
marketing works. most people are convinced that buying a expensive car is a reflection of their personality and that if you buy a cheap car you’re a cheap shitty person. hence why so many people buy awful, expensive, objectively shitty vehicles like Jeeps, because it means they are ‘tough and adventurous’.
same applies to clothing, electronics, travel, blah blah. travel is cheap if you go to places that aren’t popular.
awful, expensive, objectively shitty vehicles like Jeeps
Jeeps are the most hilarious brand out there. Absolute pieces of shit and insanely overpriced. If you buy a jeep Jeep, like the real Jeep thing with the canvas top and the doors that come off, I can at least understand the appeal of that basic form factor. The truly mind-boggling thing is when people buy Jeep-branded cars and SUVs that aren’t even real jeeps. Paying a huge premium just to own a pointlessly gilded piece of poo.
Wow! I cannot fathom women acting like that. I’ve have 50 lovers in life, most of which were relationships or tentative relationships. Not one woman has ever chastised me for not making enough or not spending enough on them. I’d be horrified, kick 'em to the dirt instantly!
I’ve been stone broke, made good money and thrown it at them, everything inbetween (but mostly broke). For reference, I’m short and scrawny. LOL, I’d so love to talk IRL and see what’s up with that. Bet we could learn a thing or two from one another! (Or maybe I’m just coasting on my gargantuan penis. 🤷🏻😂)
I make just under six—because I choose to work ten months instead of all twelve. I save about the same amount every month as you mention. Phone/rent (high as most people’s mortgage tbh), groceries and insurance for bills. If I want something I buy it, but idk. I could have a bigger place but I’m not trying to impress anyone so …why bother?
I’m with you. I’m around $120-125k depending on bonuses. I could in theory make more, but I work remotely, have plenty of PTO, the job’s pretty cushy for several months the year and only rarely super busy and stressful, and I’m already saving aggressively. I haven’t capped off and could make more (heck, I’m not even senior where I am), but it would likely come with work life balance issues and a side helping of misery. No thanks.
Having enough money to live and thrive is important, but knowing when it’s enough and enjoying your life outside of it is just as important.
I make low six figures, definitely not in survival mode. I’m probably abnormal, as I grew up with money insecurity, and had to file bankruptcy in the early 2010s.
When my income started going up, after a certain point I just started living like it didn’t. I save 30-40% of my pay every month. I’m not cheap, but I’m frugal and willing to wait for sales on stuff if it’s not something I need right this moment.
I have well over a year of expenses in a HYSA.
I bought my last car in 2020 for 24k USD fora new previous year model that was still on the lot and paid 1/3rd cash up front with a zero interest deal financing to keep the monthly cost down.
Paid off all my debts, student loans, everything but the mortgage. And since I work remotely and am an introvert, my wife and I moved to the rurals and got a mortgage for half of what it would be in our previous city. I will likely have it paid off in 2-3 years, maybe 6-7 years into a 30 year mortgage.
Living on six figures had not been all that difficult. I don’t even really think about money anymore and it’s a weight off me. It’s living on six figures while keeping up with the Joneses, celebrity influencers, and advertisers, going into massive debt for sake of appearances and potentially invoking the envy of others to prove you’re somehow better or you’ve “made it” and “deserve it” … that’s hard.
life is easy if you live on a budget.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
most of their consumption is impulsive and based on peer pressure. most common example is how many people buy cars that are like 50%+ of their salary. I knew so many people buy 40-50K cars on 60-70K salaries then constantly whining about how expensive their car was…
when i was making 60-70K… I bought a 20K car. but of course everyone made fun of me for being ‘cheap’ and driving a ‘shitbox’. etc. apparently I was supposed to buy a overpriced luxury car like a BMW/Mini or SUV?
I’ve had so many girlfriends… who just lost their shit at me for not spending my money on stupid expensive shit. Once I had one go through my bank statements, find out I had 50K in cash (was saving for a house), and demand I spend it on taking her on a trip to Africa. I said no and she flipped out and screamed at me, called me names, and we broke up. In her mind I was huge selfish asshole for ‘hoarding’ my money to buy a house and not spending it on taking her traveling.
I broke up with 3 different women too because when it came to living together talk, they basically refused to budget. and when I found out how much they were spending… well it was over. They were spending like 120% more than they made and just piling up debt year after year with credit cards and personal loans. And when you tried to explain to them that was not how you become financially secure, they just told you what a rich asshole you were and that you should be ‘generous’ and give them your money to ‘help’ them.
It helps, but there is no budget that makes U.S. minimum wage livable, unless you’re somehow getting free housing and don’t need a car. Even then, it’s barely enough.
While I share some frustration on the matter, I’d also point out:
It’s not as if we’re taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that’s it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
We live in an environment where the risks aren’t, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don’t disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But…think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
“We’ll do anything but think”
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I went to a “good” school (non-public school, better education from elementary through high school) growing up and even then our home economics courses only taught us how to sew and make pillows and shit (I’m not entirely knocking it, I can stitch up and patch clothes). The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
It’s been like… 25 years now or something. Mr. Roland, bro, sir, if you’re still out there, thanks for the head start. I completely bombed financially in my 20s, but recovered in my 30s after bankruptcy, in part remembering and working on a lot of the stuff you taught, and I’m thriving now.
I mean, yeah. But… consumerism. It’s literally the problem. People need to work on their susceptibility to this. Just because something is sold to you does not mean you have to buy it. I don’t buy anything major without at least a few weeks to a month of research, and longer the more expensive it is. And I’ll commonly wishlist something if I feel an overwhelming sense of desire to buy it and can’t figure out why. Sometimes I legitimately want something, but other times it’s just social or advertising pressure, memetic desire. I figure if I come back later and still want it, it’s worth considering, but often it just gets removed from the list. The desire, the want is temporary. Marketing is very good at manipulating your base desires and making something seem like a need when it’s far from it.
People and businesses will always be selling, always manipulating.You have to learn to curb your impulses and tame the monkey brain. There is a level of personal responsibility required.
I mean, we definitely didn’t even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver’s ed — an elective course — where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and that’s gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don’t get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn’t a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren’t doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I’m not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you’d kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I’d say that that’s relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it’s on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
EDIT2:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
This one doesn’t go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
EDIT4: One more fun chart:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/
EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses
I’m at about $160k and I still drive a 2012 base model manual Kia Soul haha.
GM at my local Lowe’s is probably near that. Drives a POS pickup older than my 2004 F150. :)
Seriously, people are nuts about spending, cars and trucks especially. Some of these things cost more than my monthly mortgage, and nearly always financed with crap terms.
My last car before I got the new one in 2020 was an ‘07 Hyundai Accent hatchback and I beat it up for 14 years.
If I hadn’t moved out to the boonies and needed something that could handle at least light off-road, I’d still be driving it. I went for a 2020 KIA Sportage CUV with AWD I put some good all-terrain tires on it (Nitto Nomad Grapplers). It’s not fancy but it has an ICE engine and can handle hills, mud, etc. and goes where I need.
I get that people want fancy cars and shit, but I just can’t even. I got a decent direct drive racing wheel for my PC setup; if I wanna drive something fancy I’ll do it virtually, without the $800+ monthly payment.
Edit - yikes about the girlfriends. My wife is as frugal as I am, probably even more so. She’s very anti-materialism. Back when we were actually broke I spent a lot of time stressed and angry over financial stuff, especially over “big” purchases (like anything over $50 or $100, which is sad to think about now). Nowadays I encourage her to get stuff she wants. She rarely wants things, and when she does, it should be quality, no point in skimping. We have it and we’re talking like hundreds sometimes, neither of us is springing for huge purchases without consulting each other.
I also make a point to donate to our local food bank monthly and buy food for the holiday food drives in the area because I get I have it better than most these days and feel like I should be doing what I can to help.
I drive a Z3 that I bought eight years ago for $8K. It is by far the cheapest car I’ve ever owned on an annual cost basis, and it still only has 120K miles on it. Even some fancy cars can be had for next to nothing.
marketing works. most people are convinced that buying a expensive car is a reflection of their personality and that if you buy a cheap car you’re a cheap shitty person. hence why so many people buy awful, expensive, objectively shitty vehicles like Jeeps, because it means they are ‘tough and adventurous’.
same applies to clothing, electronics, travel, blah blah. travel is cheap if you go to places that aren’t popular.
Jeeps are the most hilarious brand out there. Absolute pieces of shit and insanely overpriced. If you buy a jeep Jeep, like the real Jeep thing with the canvas top and the doors that come off, I can at least understand the appeal of that basic form factor. The truly mind-boggling thing is when people buy Jeep-branded cars and SUVs that aren’t even real jeeps. Paying a huge premium just to own a pointlessly gilded piece of poo.
Wow! I cannot fathom women acting like that. I’ve have 50 lovers in life, most of which were relationships or tentative relationships. Not one woman has ever chastised me for not making enough or not spending enough on them. I’d be horrified, kick 'em to the dirt instantly!
I’ve been stone broke, made good money and thrown it at them, everything inbetween (but mostly broke). For reference, I’m short and scrawny. LOL, I’d so love to talk IRL and see what’s up with that. Bet we could learn a thing or two from one another! (Or maybe I’m just coasting on my gargantuan penis. 🤷🏻😂)
I make just under six—because I choose to work ten months instead of all twelve. I save about the same amount every month as you mention. Phone/rent (high as most people’s mortgage tbh), groceries and insurance for bills. If I want something I buy it, but idk. I could have a bigger place but I’m not trying to impress anyone so …why bother?
I’m with you. I’m around $120-125k depending on bonuses. I could in theory make more, but I work remotely, have plenty of PTO, the job’s pretty cushy for several months the year and only rarely super busy and stressful, and I’m already saving aggressively. I haven’t capped off and could make more (heck, I’m not even senior where I am), but it would likely come with work life balance issues and a side helping of misery. No thanks.
Having enough money to live and thrive is important, but knowing when it’s enough and enjoying your life outside of it is just as important.