Breaking news: in one of the most productive countries / economies in the entire history of humanity, the majority of people creating that productivity do not get to enjoy the rewards of that productivity.
same as it ever was.
Breaking news: in one of the most productive countries / economies in the entire history of humanity, the majority of people creating that productivity do not get to enjoy the rewards of that productivity.
same as it ever was.
If only we were back in the good Ole days of 2019 with the economy roaring and 78% of people reporting living paycheck to paycheck according to CareerBuilder.
It’s PROBABLY a measurement problem, not an actual number with insight on how people are living. People self report incorrectly to a lot of things, and paycheck-to-paycheck can mean a lot of things. We think of it as someone who might be homeless without their paycheck but someone who would have to sell some stocks or stop retirement contributions might also think of themselves as “paycheck to paycheck.”
If you are working, your paycheck is probably a big part of your budget. That makes this survey question a bit meaningless.
You’re spot on here. Plenty of people count maxing out their 401k and IRA as “living paycheck to paycheck”, because their budgets would go upside if they missed a paycheck and did literally nothing to cover it.
Combine that with the general bias all people have to view themselves as generally normal and you get a pretty meaningless metric.
Oh, like I had to do when I moved to another apartment? I had to wipe out my (tiny) Roth IRA just to pay the deposit. My wife had to wipe hers out just to pay the movers and all the other BS fees. We now have no retirement savings and haven’t since we moved six months ago. We both had to stop contributing to our IRAs in order to continue paying the bills. We’re not even paycheck to paycheck at this point, we’re at month to month.
We just had to refinance our mortgage because our credit card debt was out of control and the payments were too high.
But it did nothing to help with student loans or medical debts.