And that’s if you can save 100% of your money, which we all know is impossible. Of that $50,000 you might get to keep about $36,000 of it. Then add in your costs to get back and forth to work, AKA wear and tear on a vehicle, etc. I spend $120 a week going back and forth to work. If I drive in 5 days then thats $480 a month just in gas, that’s $5760 a year. So you are already roughly at $30,000 and you haven’t even bought anything. We will say $400 a month for groceries for an average family and that’s cheap, really depends on where you are. So now you are at roughly $25,000. Still haven’t really bought anything. Let’s say you have a average size house with an average electric bill, we will call it $150 a month or $1800 a year which is probably pretty damn cheap for a lot of people. I know my summer months bills are north of $400 a month. So now you at $23,000 and still haven’t bought anything. Average cable and internet bill, we will call $200 a month. So now you are down to $20,600 and still haven’t bought anything. Now let’s say you got a car note and say the average car note is $400 a month. Oh shit. Now you down to roughly $15,000 and you still just in basics survival mode. We will say auto insurance for that ride is $100 a month. Now you down to $13,800. Cell phone Bill probably $100 a month. Now you down to $12,600 and we still haven’t even got to the main heavy hitter yet. Ok so now water/garbage Bill. This will vary widely depending on where you live but let’s say $80 a month. Now we down to roughly $11,600.
Now we get to the big one, since you say you would be saving for a house in this hypothetical then we are going to assume you are renting and that the rent is purely on the dwelling. Avg cost to rent varies greatly from state to state but we will look at the cheapest state for giggles. According to rentals.com, the cheapest place in America to rent is Greenville, TN with the avg rent being $763 a month. That’s $9,919 a year. That drops you down to having $1681 to save per year. And this is assuming you do literally nothing else and I’m probably leaving something out that might be a basic necessity. The median house price in America now is $416,000. So in this scenario, no other income, no side hustles, no lotto winnings, it would take you literally over 247 years to save enough to buy that house. And that’s just bare minimum basic society living these days. That also assumes you have nothing come up, ever. Simply put it’s not doable. You would either have to live out of a cabin in the woods with no amenities and feed off scraps from throw outs, hunt or live off the land, while working with zero bills for it to even be feasible. And let me remind you, not even the illegals do that.
Now you could do like the illegals do and rent an apartment and live 10 up in there rotating shifts and sleep schedules so you got a bed when the other dudes are at work and so on and then split the rent and bills 10 ways. That would buy you a lot of extra umph and is how they used to do it before the handouts, but most americans ain’t gonna do that. So no, in reality $50,000 is not IMO a reasonable living wage.
Sure you could drive an old car and save on the car payment and so some other things to maybe get that savings up to $12000 a year but it would still take you 35 years to save the ouch scrap to afford the $416,000 house. And by then I suspect the avg house costs would be double that so you still wouldn’t be able to do it. Your best hope would be to buy a cheap house, pay the payments, live in it 10-15 years and build up some equity in it while saving as much as you can. By then you might have some savings and enough to have a decent down payment on the avg median house in America. This is the way most people do it. And again, this isnt assuming a lot of variables that could change over the years, like you getting raises and so forth. Needless to say, I still don’t think $50,000 is really a livable wage. Shit I d on t even really think $70k-$80k is good. It’s doable but that’s like minimum. I don’t know how anyone makin for under $50k makes it, without any help or working multiple jobs. So we have a conundrum. People screaming the minimum wage isn’t a livable wage is correct. It’s not. Not even close. But you aren’t meant to stay there. On the other hand, we can’t just pay everyone $28/hr either.
Ideally people would be working to get to a better place while gov is simultaneously working to better the economic conditions for their fellow man, AKA bringing in new companies and tech and so on. But they aren’t. And we also have companies keeping people in certain classes by not sharing their wealth either with better pay or bonuses or training so they can move up. It’s crazy town out there. $50,000 in our parents generation was good money. $100k like my dad made was ridiculously good back then. And a millionaire was considered super wealthy. Nowadays claiming a millionaire status ain’t really a big deal because it’s no longer a lot of money. I’d say our buying power is literally half or less of what they had for the same amount of dinero. Why in the hell i just spent 20 minutes typing up what all of us already know is beyond me.