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Speaking anecdotally, I've always heard "living paycheck-to-paycheck" to mean having insufficient savings to cover a missed paycheck

I.e. if you don't get an expected paycheck then you cannot pay your monthly debts/utilities/rent and still have enough money to feed.yourself and your dependents

(provided we scale back retirement savings).

But it would affect you, just longer-term than shorter-term. You don't know what things will be like when you're old, which is why most people who can do put the max amount in their IRAs, 401Ks, and HSAs. That doesn't mean they're bad people or misspending their money or not living paycheck-to-paycheck.

If you suffer in your old age because you had to cut back on retirement, that's a huge impact on your life. It's way easier to live paycheck-to-paycheck when you still can work than it is when you literally cannot and are relying on Society Security or retirement investments. I think that matters.

I'm poor as fuck, but I don't feel like I need to judge people who barely make more money than me in the context of fucking billionaires.

Also, do you have kids, because that's a huge impact on the bottom-line of people who make a decent salary.

Rent in NYC where I live is insane. My partner and I recently toured a place where they broke up the basement of a building into 4 apartments, none of which had a real bedroom, and were asking for $3k each

Try making $150k in a "reasonably priced area." It can be done, but is not the norm. The problem is that to make a good salary, you have to be in a place that pays those wages. Obviously, this attracts more people, so real estate is more expensive.

The trick is to make $150k in some kind of sweet spot where housing does not compensate. But it's always a moving target and is extremely difficult. Then in you lose your job? Start all over again.

Go look at a mortgage or even rent in any major city.

Hmmm you're not going to be making 150k a year in a shit fly over state.

I moved from the Bay Area to the East side of Washington near Seattle, folks here don't make as much as I do for sure, at least not on average. We both have good salaries so we can afford a lot of things. We essentially got to keep most of our bay area salaries.

But even then if we need a big repair we still have to sit down and plan out the money.

I can't even imagine what it's like for folks around here.

In California, a new mortgage payment is 8-15k/month. Rent on an apartment is 3-4k/month. $150k salary isn’t enough for the mortgage and will struggle to cover that cost of rent.

Terrible assumption

150k for me would be a dream right now. I have a dog, a gf, and I rent. But if you're making 150k and you have two kids and a spouse for example, suddenly that 150k doesn't go very far at all.

Yep, my mother used to manage pays for engineers making up to 300k and for some of them it was a disaster if a mistake lead to 200$ being missing from their cheque and they would be in her office first thing in the morning in full panic mode...

My combined household income is more than 150k per year and I have not changed my spending habits since I was in college.... caveat being I own a house but my mortgage may only be twice what I was paying in rent. Also I now have healthcare.

Still living paycheck to paycheck. I guess I'd be ok if I missed one or both my wife and I missed one. Though, my marriage would start to be in jeopardy after 2 or 3 I'd guess. Not that she would leave me because I'm not making enough but the added stress would quickly become unmanageable.

If you are living in an area with a high cost of living, $150k won't feel like $150k.

From Bungalow, 10 Mist Expensive Cities in the US,

1. San Francisco, CA The cost of living in San Francisco is the highest in the country. Jobs in the City by the Bay pay well, with average annual incomes of over $100,000. In 2019, the city had an unemployment rate as low as 1.8%. But a good chunk of each check goes toward the nation’s highest housing costs. As of January 2020, the average rent for an apartment in San Francisco was $3,700, and the median home purchase price was $1.35 million. Prices are sky-high because of limited housing stock and lack of new construction.

If you are making $100k and renting at the average rental price of $3,700, in one year the cost your housing is $44,400 which is almost 45% of your income. The goal is to spend 30% of your income on housing. If people with would be normally considered to have a good income are struggling then the poor are completely fucked.

There is a small group of people who are making money off this system and ain't us.

This is out of touch. There is a huge number of factors that dictate what amount of money is enough to live a fulfilled live. A bachelor can live a fulfilled life on 30k a year and still save money, but a family of 5 can definitely be living paycheck to paycheck on 150k, especially if they live in an expensive area.

I think location definitely plays into this. 150k in some places is nothing.

I'm almost there.

I also live in the Bay Area. My rent is locally cheap but nationally very high. My wife has a chronic illness and an unrelated acute issue that recently required surgery. She can barely work. Until this most recent surgery I was keeping ahead, but expenses are up and income is down and that's not true anymore.

I have good health insurance but there's a lot more to medical costs than just doctors, and to partially manage her daily quality of life it's not weird to cook her three different dinners and she can only stomach one. This explodes our meal budget.

We're childfree but one of our dogs recently also got diagnosed with chronic illness. They are our kids, full stop.

Shit happens. Don't be a dick about it.

We came close with COVID, but literally the businesses of the world fucking rejoiced that we avoided a Black Plague scenario where enough people died that workers were able to demand better wages. They were so happy it mostly affected old people, because that meant they could just pile those old non-money-makers into wood chippers while they would lean on the able bodied workers dwindling health's.

You can see it in how it went from "essential workers are heroes!" back to "you should be happy to have a job, I could replace you with anybody in an instant!" pretty much overnight in early 2023.

As fucked up as it is, if more young, able bodied people would have died, the people that were left would have been in a better bargaining position.

On the plus side, millennials aren't having fucking babies so we're killing this fucking sick system one way or another by showing how it's a fucking pyramid scheme that benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

When they won't have enough workers to keep pushing exponential "growth" each year, this whole fucking kit and caboodle will fall apart. Especially when the workers start actually demanding to have their real human lives back.

Even worse, climate change will probably kick all of our asses far before that's even possible.

As sad as it is, the last thing that could change things will be the thing that changes them so far for the worse that forward movement will be nearly impossible and society as we know it will likely fail.

Edit: before folks reply with a comment about people being worse off, I know. I agree. This is just a scenario description.

It is very easy to be strapped with a modest sized house or apartment in the "right" zip code.

As in a 1.2mil mortgage on a 3 bedroom house that's never been renovated since the 70s. That mortgage could be 5k / month.

150000 a year is 8.7k a month, after taxes. If you have student loans, any medical debt, kids, that remaining 3.7k is pretty critical. You aren't swimming in liquid chocolate every night and wiping with singles.

If you own a home things can happen out of nowhere. I personally just had to replace my sewer line last month. 17k for the work and 1.5k for new concrete. Not covered by my home insurance because I didn't opt for the rider on my account. My fault there... My finances are a bit different than the above description but if you were the 150 + paycheck to paycheck situation, you'd be in hot water.

This isn't a "woe to the 150 crowd" comment. I'm well aware folks are way, way worse off, but when a 150 household talks about being paycheck to paycheck, it's totally possible.

Bay area

A lot of, if not most, folks in that income bracket vote democrat and hate republicans. These are tech folks who voted for Bernie. It isn't until you add another couple of zeros that you find the people funding the Republican party. 150k isn't elite, it's literally just barely middle class in any major city.