[hiram112]

I hear this trope all the time, that if I just avoided my Starbucks and IPhone, Netflix and Spotify subscriptions, I could live like a King on 10 hours per week job, in our modern land-of-plenty utopia.

But that's baloney. A 3BR average home in my city is now 6x median income, and that's with average households being 2 full-time workers instead of 1. And this isn't some 3k sq ft McMansion - another common strawman - it's the same dumpy house that a single earner easily afforded at 3x salary 40 years ago.

All the other big-ticket items that I spend 80% of my salary on have increased at similar rates.

A lot of Americans do overspend and are obsessed with keeping up with the Jones. You realize that when you go to the grocery store and 1/2 the cars in the parking lot are $50k SUVs and gigantic pickups.

But even if you're a modest person making $50k a year in a medium COL city, the cost of the new Iphone or flat screen TV you bought is inconsequential to the expenses you can't avoid - housing, health care, education, transportation, etc. All of these have almost doubled in price relative to the income of a single full time worker in the last four decades.

[cirrus3]

Yep.. this article is trope trope trope city, don't bother.