12 ms·

This is symptomatic of our society at large (actually many societies, maybe even modern 'global' society). The middle class is being squeezed by rising costs,

by Mikeb85 12y ago

This is symptomatic of our society at large (actually many societies, maybe even modern 'global' society). The middle class is being squeezed by rising costs, so your two options are to be perpetually poor (basically limiting you to a life of indentured servitude), or to out-compete your rivals and achieve an upper-middle class to upper class income, and all the perks that come with it. My wife and I struggle with this constantly - income and ability to acquire resources vs. quality of life. While I'm struggling through University while working full-time (and trying to find time for vacations, and time with the wife) and looking forward to a life of working 9-5 (more like 8-7 these days), we also think about the toll this takes on people. Not going to lie, we've been looking at various locations where the cost of living is low (actually, more like where you can get by and start a business with a more reasonable amount of capital), and we can basically live a simpler, higher-quality life. The 'grind' as it is in North America is gruelling, I know many people trying to plot their escape, though it's tough when its all you know... Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year...

hv23 12y ago
Curious, what would be stopping you from leaving the current system? (said without a hint of derision, genuinely curious!)
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Grew up here, family and friends are all here. Easier said than done...
malvosenior 12y ago
Great post and I definitely sympathize with your position. It's worth noting though that regardless of where you live, starting your own business can be pretty grueling as well. Often much more grueling than a regular "grindy" job. I wish you luck though and hope you can post some of your experiences here.
- pjmorris 12y ago
  To add an anecdote to the 'grueling' thought: I worked for myself for five years, but took an office job just before the financial crisis, to 'ride out the storm'. When I sat down to lunch at the office holiday party, I felt a relief and relaxation I hadn't felt since... the last time I worked for someone else. Some people can handle the marketing, sales, delivery, accounting, taxes, HR, etc, but I'm better off outsourcing that to an employer.
  - gesman 12y ago
    >> .. but I'm better off outsourcing that to an employer. That's REALLY well said!
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  > It's worth noting though that regardless of where you live, starting your own business can be pretty grueling as well. Often much more grueling than a regular "grindy" job. Very true. The security but lack of independence that comes with being an employee, vs. the independence and risk of being an entrepreneur (plus the capital requirement). And on the topic of weighing my options, it's not helped by the fact I'm 3 years into an economics degree, so my head is filled with cost-benefit analysis formulas and me applying it all to my own life (or maybe it's because finals are at hand). > I wish you luck though and hope you can post some of your experiences here. Thanks. I have been thinking of starting a blog, maybe it'll happen sometime soon. Just need something to write about (I may start a small-scale business this summer, could be fun).
onnoonno 12y ago
So you think we're driving each other crazy? Resonates with me. But I still don't know whether it is really the others or just oneself doing the driving.
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Maybe a bit of both? The idea of 'keeping up with the Joneses', if you will.
orbifold 12y ago
My advice would be to emigrate to Europe, it's not all roses and sunshine, but in Germany and most of the Northern Countries the standard of living is decent, you can receive an essentially free tertiary education, so you are debt free when starting to work, good health care, fairly decent working conditions.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I'm curious if you have a budget. Do you track all of your expenses and income in a package like Mint or Quicken?
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Yes we have a budget. When I refer to our 'struggle', it's not so much financial (we live within our means - modest vehicles and a small-ish apartment in the suburbs), but rather the mental and physical toll of working a full week, plus school and studying, cooking, cleaning, etc... We're actually better off financially than a lot of people, for instance we could start a modest small business, however to ensure a 'stable' future (ie. buy a house, raise a family, etc...) in the city were we currently live we'd need either more capital or more skills/education.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    That is awesome! You're way ahead of a number of folks just by tracking where your money is going. My experience was that my wife and I both worked just out of school (she at Xerox and me at Intel) where we both saved a bit and got equity sharing in our companies. After a few years (about 3 to be exact) we had enough money to squeak out a down payment on a house. (at 11% interest!) Lived in that while she went to Tandem and I went to Sun, and continued to save our pennies (our goal was to move out of the bay area, sell our house, and use the equity to make a bigger downpayment (smaller mortgage) on a house in a place where the cost of living was lower so one of us could stay home and raise the kids full time). As it turned out her Tandem stock and my Sun stock, combined with the equity in our first house allowed us to buy a larger house (with room for kids) and keep the same "size" mortgage. It took about 10 years from the time we left school until we felt we had breathing room.
Bahamut 12y ago
I sympathize greatly - I too have felt the squeeze, and if it weren't my good fortune landing in software engineering, I would be still depressed over the debt from undergrad + grad school, along with the immense credit card debt my parents left me to go with homelessness. I once wondered how I was going to pay back what likely will end up being $250k-300k - even still, I end up surrounded by many people here in the Valley who don't understand how fortunate they are in comparison.
- enupten 12y ago
  I didn't think children inherited their parents' debt ?
  - jacalata 12y ago
    They don't. He could be saying that his parents fraudulently opened credit cards in his name, or that their lack of support contributed to his running up credit card debt during school.
onewaystreet 12y ago
> Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year... What did you expect? (Genuine question.)
- tedks 12y ago
  Exactly. What has life ever offered but hard work with little chance of reward? Unless you're an oligarch you will probably have a shit life. There is no way this will ever change. Maturity is the process of getting used to this fact, moving on with your life, settling down, buying a house, having some kids (that better get into a top school or you'll die penniless), and repeat the process. If you think you will, or should, be "happy" while doing this, you're a product of a self-indulgent culture that flared up in one country for half a century, and you'll quickly learn otherwise.
  - z0r 12y ago
    I cant tell if your post is satire. Historically the life of the common working man has been one of varied conditions. People have worked more but also much less in the past. The conditions of society aren't fixed by any obvious universal constants
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    > There is no way this will ever change. Maturity is the process of getting used to this fact, moving on with your life, settling down, buying a house, having some kids (that better get into a top school or you'll die penniless), Why not kill yourself instead (or do something comparable, shut off yourself from society)? Why bear children into world like this?
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    This is an interesting comment but I think your perspective is too narrow. "Settling down", "buying a house", and getting into a "top school" are all very, very modern inventions, certainly not the historical norm. Most of these problems were introduced with industrialization, meaning they're very new to the human race. It is true that people have always had to work, but work isn't necessarily debilitating or unsatisfactory, even if it's manual labor. Consider that a family that owns a farm does have to get up early and does have to work hard to keep their farm operating, but they're not stuck in a cubicle sitting in the same spot under artificial light for 8 hours a day, they can usually take a break as they desire within reasonable parameters, and their work is objective and task-based, not arbitrarily defined by a PHB slaving half of the company under his ego. Farm work connects the worker with the land, with the animals, and produces a tangible, necessary product, that each person needs. If you own a farm, you don't need anyone's permission to live; you have the land, you have the food sources, you have the structures, and you don't need to get continued dispersion from an employer to not lose all of it. Such persons are truly independent. While some may not want to work on a farm, industrial work is not objectively superior by any stretch. It is also true that maturity involves accepting the realities such as they are and doing what you can to improve the situation instead of belly-aching about it. Propagandists in the West have done a good job of making everyone feel that anyone who lives less-industrialized lifestyle is an unfortunate, backwards idiot, but I don't think that's accurate. Consider that humans have defaulted to a basic set of biologically-linked behaviors throughout their history: people didn't used to "go out on their own" and delete their parents' progress for the family, people lived in tribes and clans (which, generally speaking, were small groups of families that reached a size large enough to qualify for a larger designation) and shared the land and the fruits of labor among themselves. People didn't used to delay biological imperatives like child-bearing in order to collect certificates and approvals from governing bodies. Generations were bound together with a tangibility and mutual concern that we don't know here in the U.S. of A., where almost everyone is a stranger. The industrial oligarchs have set up a system that centers on debt. That's why the propaganda puts down inheritance and other arrangements that mitigate the need of anyone to pay interest. Industrialization has turned every American into its indentured servant, as it's very difficult to maintain a good standard of living without relying on high-interest loans for most of life's substantial necessities: it's presumed that you'll be taking out big loans to provide for shelter, transportation, and education and training, and then it's highly encouraged to do the same for anything and everything else. And that's just the private sector; the government taxes away a large amount of the personal wealth generated every year. Personally, I hope I can claw my way out of this pit and give lands and monies to my posterity such that they don't have to live their lives based on someone else's ability to collect interest. I want them to be truly independent and my goal is provide that to them, and raise them to be competent to manage it. I hope it stays in the family for many generations and saves large numbers of my posterity from indentured servitude. There is absolutely much that has been lost in modern society. I don't want to paint a rosy picture and pretend there was never revolt, discontent, or war before industrialization, because there certainly was, but most people then, as most people now, simply wanted to live their own lives in a reasonable degree of personal comfort and satisfaction (which includes providing useful labor to the community), and one could argue that their systems were more supportive of that than ours.
bsbechtel 12y ago
>>Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year... With all due respect, and I can tell from your other posts you are grateful for what you have, but this needs to be put in perspective. That 16+ years of studying your ass off is an investment someone else made in you, hoping you become a productive member of society that makes life a little bit better for someone else while earning a living for yourself along the way. There are roughly 3 billion people on this planet who are desperate to get any sort of education, let alone the education you were given, for free (before college). I get your complaints, but a 9-5 gig (or even an 8-7 one) would be considered a life of leisure and luxury for most of the world for pretty much all of history. In fact, the only time a life you are wishing you had has been common has been in the last 50 years or so in the developed world. I'd say we're pretty damn lucky. If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this?
- rquantz 12y ago
  If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this? This is a profound failure of imagination. The problem the GP is decrying is the late capitalist devaluation of humanity, and your solution is to suck it up and find a business model.
  - ChuckFrank 12y ago
    Thank you for calling this out. This is not only a profound failure of the imagination, but it's the terrible source of the problem that we find ourselves in. In many ways it is the box itself, just take another pull at the slot machines of casino capitalism, and remember nothing was every promised to you, not through your education, nor through the debt that you accumulated - it's all on you, and your inability to scale fro 10 to 1000, see where I'm going?
narrator 12y ago
This is why digital nomadism is so fascinating to me. People move to rural Thailand and make very low wages, for example $2k a month, from their online businesses and live like kings. $2k a month in the bay area is essentially poverty, but if people outsource themselves they can join the upper middle class, at least in another country using the so-called "micro multinational" strategy. This is what big business has been doing to the American worker forever. They've been doing production in countries where the cost of living is orders of magnitude cheaper and putting American workers out of a job because they can't work at the wages people do in other countries and still pay living expenses, especially when it comes to food, housing and health care. Health care is 1/10th the price in parts of South East Asia, for example.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  Fun fact: $2k / month is 200% of the US federal poverty line. Nearly half of all Americans make less than $2k / month. (This does not change that you can live like a king for $2k / month in some countries, but if you're making $2k+ / month, you're already doing above average for the USA.)
  - entrican 12y ago
    Where do you get those statistics? Wikipedia says median household income is 3.3-5K/month (45-60K/year). Average household is 2.5 people, so you're right if you're including children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
    - jacalata 12y ago
      Household income vs Personal income, probably. From wikipedia, 48% of Americans who had any income in 2010 earned less than $25k: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Income_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
    - saalweachter 12y ago
      Wikipedia, and technically I'm mixing numbers. ~$12k is the Federal poverty line for individuals, and half of all Americans live within 200% of the poverty line. Most of those people will live in multi-family households, but the household poverty line grows slower than the number of people in the household so I considered it a reasonable elision. I also said 'average' instead of 'median', but "you're doing better than median" sounds weird.
anthay 12y ago
For a more optimistic outlook may I suggest spending a little time reading http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/?

by Mikeb85 12y ago

hv23 12y ago

Curious, what would be stopping you from leaving the current system? (said without a hint of derision, genuinely curious!)

Mikeb85 12y ago
Grew up here, family and friends are all here. Easier said than done...

malvosenior 12y ago

Great post and I definitely sympathize with your position. It's worth noting though that regardless of where you live, starting your own business can be pretty grueling as well. Often much more grueling than a regular "grindy" job. I wish you luck though and hope you can post some of your experiences here.

pjmorris 12y ago
To add an anecdote to the 'grueling' thought: I worked for myself for five years, but took an office job just before the financial crisis, to 'ride out the storm'. When I sat down to lunch at the office holiday party, I felt a relief and relaxation I hadn't felt since... the last time I worked for someone else. Some people can handle the marketing, sales, delivery, accounting, taxes, HR, etc, but I'm better off outsourcing that to an employer.
- gesman 12y ago
  >> .. but I'm better off outsourcing that to an employer. That's REALLY well said!
Mikeb85 12y ago
> It's worth noting though that regardless of where you live, starting your own business can be pretty grueling as well. Often much more grueling than a regular "grindy" job. Very true. The security but lack of independence that comes with being an employee, vs. the independence and risk of being an entrepreneur (plus the capital requirement). And on the topic of weighing my options, it's not helped by the fact I'm 3 years into an economics degree, so my head is filled with cost-benefit analysis formulas and me applying it all to my own life (or maybe it's because finals are at hand). > I wish you luck though and hope you can post some of your experiences here. Thanks. I have been thinking of starting a blog, maybe it'll happen sometime soon. Just need something to write about (I may start a small-scale business this summer, could be fun).

onnoonno 12y ago

So you think we're driving each other crazy? Resonates with me. But I still don't know whether it is really the others or just oneself doing the driving.

Mikeb85 12y ago
Maybe a bit of both? The idea of 'keeping up with the Joneses', if you will.

orbifold 12y ago

My advice would be to emigrate to Europe, it's not all roses and sunshine, but in Germany and most of the Northern Countries the standard of living is decent, you can receive an essentially free tertiary education, so you are debt free when starting to work, good health care, fairly decent working conditions.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I'm curious if you have a budget. Do you track all of your expenses and income in a package like Mint or Quicken?

Mikeb85 12y ago
Yes we have a budget. When I refer to our 'struggle', it's not so much financial (we live within our means - modest vehicles and a small-ish apartment in the suburbs), but rather the mental and physical toll of working a full week, plus school and studying, cooking, cleaning, etc... We're actually better off financially than a lot of people, for instance we could start a modest small business, however to ensure a 'stable' future (ie. buy a house, raise a family, etc...) in the city were we currently live we'd need either more capital or more skills/education.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  That is awesome! You're way ahead of a number of folks just by tracking where your money is going. My experience was that my wife and I both worked just out of school (she at Xerox and me at Intel) where we both saved a bit and got equity sharing in our companies. After a few years (about 3 to be exact) we had enough money to squeak out a down payment on a house. (at 11% interest!) Lived in that while she went to Tandem and I went to Sun, and continued to save our pennies (our goal was to move out of the bay area, sell our house, and use the equity to make a bigger downpayment (smaller mortgage) on a house in a place where the cost of living was lower so one of us could stay home and raise the kids full time). As it turned out her Tandem stock and my Sun stock, combined with the equity in our first house allowed us to buy a larger house (with room for kids) and keep the same "size" mortgage. It took about 10 years from the time we left school until we felt we had breathing room.

Bahamut 12y ago

I sympathize greatly - I too have felt the squeeze, and if it weren't my good fortune landing in software engineering, I would be still depressed over the debt from undergrad + grad school, along with the immense credit card debt my parents left me to go with homelessness. I once wondered how I was going to pay back what likely will end up being $250k-300k - even still, I end up surrounded by many people here in the Valley who don't understand how fortunate they are in comparison.

enupten 12y ago
I didn't think children inherited their parents' debt ?
- jacalata 12y ago
  They don't. He could be saying that his parents fraudulently opened credit cards in his name, or that their lack of support contributed to his running up credit card debt during school.

onewaystreet 12y ago

> Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year... What did you expect? (Genuine question.)

tedks 12y ago
Exactly. What has life ever offered but hard work with little chance of reward? Unless you're an oligarch you will probably have a shit life. There is no way this will ever change. Maturity is the process of getting used to this fact, moving on with your life, settling down, buying a house, having some kids (that better get into a top school or you'll die penniless), and repeat the process. If you think you will, or should, be "happy" while doing this, you're a product of a self-indulgent culture that flared up in one country for half a century, and you'll quickly learn otherwise.
- z0r 12y ago
  I cant tell if your post is satire. Historically the life of the common working man has been one of varied conditions. People have worked more but also much less in the past. The conditions of society aren't fixed by any obvious universal constants
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  > There is no way this will ever change. Maturity is the process of getting used to this fact, moving on with your life, settling down, buying a house, having some kids (that better get into a top school or you'll die penniless), Why not kill yourself instead (or do something comparable, shut off yourself from society)? Why bear children into world like this?
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  This is an interesting comment but I think your perspective is too narrow. "Settling down", "buying a house", and getting into a "top school" are all very, very modern inventions, certainly not the historical norm. Most of these problems were introduced with industrialization, meaning they're very new to the human race. It is true that people have always had to work, but work isn't necessarily debilitating or unsatisfactory, even if it's manual labor. Consider that a family that owns a farm does have to get up early and does have to work hard to keep their farm operating, but they're not stuck in a cubicle sitting in the same spot under artificial light for 8 hours a day, they can usually take a break as they desire within reasonable parameters, and their work is objective and task-based, not arbitrarily defined by a PHB slaving half of the company under his ego. Farm work connects the worker with the land, with the animals, and produces a tangible, necessary product, that each person needs. If you own a farm, you don't need anyone's permission to live; you have the land, you have the food sources, you have the structures, and you don't need to get continued dispersion from an employer to not lose all of it. Such persons are truly independent. While some may not want to work on a farm, industrial work is not objectively superior by any stretch. It is also true that maturity involves accepting the realities such as they are and doing what you can to improve the situation instead of belly-aching about it. Propagandists in the West have done a good job of making everyone feel that anyone who lives less-industrialized lifestyle is an unfortunate, backwards idiot, but I don't think that's accurate. Consider that humans have defaulted to a basic set of biologically-linked behaviors throughout their history: people didn't used to "go out on their own" and delete their parents' progress for the family, people lived in tribes and clans (which, generally speaking, were small groups of families that reached a size large enough to qualify for a larger designation) and shared the land and the fruits of labor among themselves. People didn't used to delay biological imperatives like child-bearing in order to collect certificates and approvals from governing bodies. Generations were bound together with a tangibility and mutual concern that we don't know here in the U.S. of A., where almost everyone is a stranger. The industrial oligarchs have set up a system that centers on debt. That's why the propaganda puts down inheritance and other arrangements that mitigate the need of anyone to pay interest. Industrialization has turned every American into its indentured servant, as it's very difficult to maintain a good standard of living without relying on high-interest loans for most of life's substantial necessities: it's presumed that you'll be taking out big loans to provide for shelter, transportation, and education and training, and then it's highly encouraged to do the same for anything and everything else. And that's just the private sector; the government taxes away a large amount of the personal wealth generated every year. Personally, I hope I can claw my way out of this pit and give lands and monies to my posterity such that they don't have to live their lives based on someone else's ability to collect interest. I want them to be truly independent and my goal is provide that to them, and raise them to be competent to manage it. I hope it stays in the family for many generations and saves large numbers of my posterity from indentured servitude. There is absolutely much that has been lost in modern society. I don't want to paint a rosy picture and pretend there was never revolt, discontent, or war before industrialization, because there certainly was, but most people then, as most people now, simply wanted to live their own lives in a reasonable degree of personal comfort and satisfaction (which includes providing useful labor to the community), and one could argue that their systems were more supportive of that than ours.

bsbechtel 12y ago

>>Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year... With all due respect, and I can tell from your other posts you are grateful for what you have, but this needs to be put in perspective. That 16+ years of studying your ass off is an investment someone else made in you, hoping you become a productive member of society that makes life a little bit better for someone else while earning a living for yourself along the way. There are roughly 3 billion people on this planet who are desperate to get any sort of education, let alone the education you were given, for free (before college). I get your complaints, but a 9-5 gig (or even an 8-7 one) would be considered a life of leisure and luxury for most of the world for pretty much all of history. In fact, the only time a life you are wishing you had has been common has been in the last 50 years or so in the developed world. I'd say we're pretty damn lucky. If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this?

rquantz 12y ago
If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this? This is a profound failure of imagination. The problem the GP is decrying is the late capitalist devaluation of humanity, and your solution is to suck it up and find a business model.
- ChuckFrank 12y ago
  Thank you for calling this out. This is not only a profound failure of the imagination, but it's the terrible source of the problem that we find ourselves in. In many ways it is the box itself, just take another pull at the slot machines of casino capitalism, and remember nothing was every promised to you, not through your education, nor through the debt that you accumulated - it's all on you, and your inability to scale fro 10 to 1000, see where I'm going?

narrator 12y ago

This is why digital nomadism is so fascinating to me. People move to rural Thailand and make very low wages, for example $2k a month, from their online businesses and live like kings. $2k a month in the bay area is essentially poverty, but if people outsource themselves they can join the upper middle class, at least in another country using the so-called "micro multinational" strategy. This is what big business has been doing to the American worker forever. They've been doing production in countries where the cost of living is orders of magnitude cheaper and putting American workers out of a job because they can't work at the wages people do in other countries and still pay living expenses, especially when it comes to food, housing and health care. Health care is 1/10th the price in parts of South East Asia, for example.

saalweachter 12y ago
Fun fact: $2k / month is 200% of the US federal poverty line. Nearly half of all Americans make less than $2k / month. (This does not change that you can live like a king for $2k / month in some countries, but if you're making $2k+ / month, you're already doing above average for the USA.)
- entrican 12y ago
  Where do you get those statistics? Wikipedia says median household income is 3.3-5K/month (45-60K/year). Average household is 2.5 people, so you're right if you're including children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
  - jacalata 12y ago
    Household income vs Personal income, probably. From wikipedia, 48% of Americans who had any income in 2010 earned less than $25k: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Income_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    Wikipedia, and technically I'm mixing numbers. ~$12k is the Federal poverty line for individuals, and half of all Americans live within 200% of the poverty line. Most of those people will live in multi-family households, but the household poverty line grows slower than the number of people in the household so I considered it a reasonable elision. I also said 'average' instead of 'median', but "you're doing better than median" sounds weird.

anthay 12y ago

For a more optimistic outlook may I suggest spending a little time reading http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/?