[toomuchtodo]

Most [bottom 60% of U.S. households] Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025

Report: https://lisep.org/mql | https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63ba0d84fe573c7513595d6e/...

> One commonly used (though also criticized) benchmark for housing affordability is that no more than 30% of household income should go toward housing costs. Households that spend more than that are considered “cost burdened” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By that standard, 31.3% of American households were cost burdened in 2023, including 27.1% of households with a mortgage and 49.7% of households that rent, according to 1-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). (Many more people own than rent: In the second quarter of 2024, 65.6% of occupied housing units were owned while 34.4% were rented, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at...

[jandrewrogers]

The bottom line is that BLS statistics, backed up by Federal Reserve studies, show that the median American household has >$1,000 per month in excess income after all ordinary expenses without regard for the necessity of the expenses in the “ordinary” category. In Federal Reserve studies that probed this more deeply, the truly “paycheck to paycheck” population in the sense that most people understand it was 10-15% of the population. That is still a substantial number of households but far below the misleading 69% figure thrown about.

Americans are flush with income at the median and spend it on unnecessary luxury goods, as is their right. There really isn’t a way to argue around this fact.

The households that are paycheck to paycheck outside their own choice is much, much smaller. Including well-off households in the same category does a disservice to poorer households.