How can a family live on $50,000 per year.

oh learned one -

kids:

read em and weep - thought I included: cars "for each of our kids" - 6 of the 7

income listed @: (perhaps vaguely)

50-60k, some years more, early married yrs less; had maybe 2 or 3 in ~75k range

Schooling paid the minute I walked away - both bachelors and masters

house paid - 10 yrs ago

oh and still happily married

cheep peep wrote:

oh learned one -

kids:

read em and weep - thought I included: cars "for each of our kids" - 6 of the 7

income listed @: (perhaps vaguely)

50-60k, some years more, early married yrs less; had maybe 2 or 3 in ~75k range

Schooling paid the minute I walked away - both bachelors and masters

house paid - 10 yrs ago

oh and still happily married

Ahh, see right there, you did not do it (survive as a family on $50k/yr), you did it by making $10,000--$25,000 more than that. Give an extra $10,000--$25,000 to me, and we'll see how your family fares.

Also, you still have not said WHEN you earned your money.

$50,000 in 1980 = $137,391 in 2011

$50,000 in 1985 = $105,214 in 2011

$50,000 in 1990 = $86,618 in 2011

$50,000 in 1995 = $74,285 in 2011

$50,000 in 2000 = $65,743 in 2011

So, of course things WERE not that hard, even though you have admitted that you were cheap, IF you were making your money in a different era. I don't know if you kids have graduated, BUT, clearly they are old enough to need a car.

So let's say you had your kids and bought your house in the 1995-2000 time frame. If you earned $50k-$60k then, with a couple years at $75k, you earned a grand total of $25k-$35k PER YEAR more than the question, and had a couple years about $55k ABOVE the question. No wonder you could pay for your 3,000 sq ft mansion, in five years alone you made $100k-$200k more than the question asked.

Another time factor that clearly changes the equation is that the housing market is seriously F'd right now. If you bought a house in the 2000s you paid a seriously elevated price over prior cohorts. If you are looking to buy a house now in the 2010s, you will not secure a mortgage because the credit markets are bone dry.

While YOU may have been able to survive and live well being a cheap skate on an inflation adjusted $75k-$100k+ annual salary, your daughter could not survive on $50k/yr with a family as the question asked, no matter how cheap.

Also, I forgot to mention, if you graduated with your BA and MA in a prior era, of course you don't have debt on that, today's game is a LOT different than yours. That is why the Occupy people are pissed, and while I do not support their movement, I understand their frustration.

learnedthinker wrote:

Also, I forgot to mention, if you graduated with your BA and MA in a prior era, of course you don't have debt on that, today's game is a LOT different than yours. That is why the Occupy people are pissed, and while I do not support their movement, I understand their frustration.

I neither support or understand the whiney entitled mind-set of the Occupiers. Losers. All of them.

your an exacting taskmaster - ...

you're right I didn't figure in inflation or any of that. 2 yrs @ 75k and perhaps 1 at 55k

3 kids have bachelors - 2 of those have masters. Another 2 are in process. They pay - via scholarships and part time work during school full time summer. One married, supplanting college route, to guy that is now (after 5 yrs) a 150k+ guy and moving up the corporate.

My position is - it can be done and I agree 50k doesn't go as far as it used to - but people can get by on far less than they think. I'll send you a check for my income over the years in excess of 50k per year. We did put that xtra in savings and some on our house (it's not a mansion). This one is more than adequate for us.

Post of the month!

Consider This wrote:

It's hard to believe someone who is too dumb to make it on $50k/yr. could be smart enough to make $169k/yr.

cheep peep wrote:

your an exacting taskmaster - ...

And you're a sarcastic douchebag. The fact that you were able to budget yourself into a nice life by making somewhere along the lines of $30,000--$40,000 annually over a lifetime (!), does not shed light onto the plight of today's middle class, and you should not hold yourself up as exemplary in your ability to budget. Feel free to hold yourself out as a great person when it comes to how to make more than $50k yearly, how to raise daughters that marry corporate men with large salaries, or anything else that you are actually good out. But, don't hold yourself as someone that can survive in today's world on a lower than median salary, because you didn't and you can't.

That should be "$30k--$40k annually above the median over a lifetime" in the second sentence.

Brojos, add an edit function.

Ralphy wrote:

J.R. wrote:

NOT so. I was a professional with my own business for many years. One time an associate was hyping cell phones and trying to get me to use one. He said what if you're out on a long run and someone wants to call you? I said, they'd be out of luck hahaha. End of discussion.

Was this in '95?

1987

That was 24 years ago. The world has changed. Get a cell phone, dude

I don't have a cell phone, my wife does, but I don't. But what I really wanted to comment on was the original topic.

I graduated 3 years ago and took a job making 34k. My wife, two kids and I lived on that just fine for two years. I moved across the country and now make 42k per year and we have had another child. I own a decent sized house on an acre of land and we have two vehicles, one a big suv and the other a smaller fuel efficient car. We make it with no problems.

I save 15% of my income for retirement and we go on one major trip nearly every year(last year was a cruise to Mexico, this year will prolly be to London). There is also lots of little travel for family and camping etc. 50k per year for a family is definitely doable. We don't eat out a lot, a few times a month, but we do make time once a week at least to do something as a family and then time out with just the wife and I. That means we are paying a sitter for our kids each week on top of all those other expenses people have.

I wish I was making 169k a year. I would retire after ten years and life would be grand.

I want to tell all of you that this subject is well...very subjective. Unless you have been there you have no idea what it is like to live at a given financial threshold.

I live in Missouri, Family of 3 with 1 on the way. My son is very sick and while he was in the hospital several years ago I lost my job and currently am in a position where I have to take care of him as he is significantly delayed with and still has many medical issues.

Given the above we live off of my wife's salary of 32k annually. Fortunately I got a good deal on a family members home when they passed away while I was working so our mortgage is only 560 a month. We do have several bills including 2 car payments(both expensive as we have a handicap accessible van), utilities, student loans(I have a masters, my wife a bachelors) and various other medical related expenditures.

We make it, but quite frankly it sucks. We have a roof over our heads so I suppose I cannot complain but living paycheck to paycheck is stressful from both a health and marriage perspective. I don't suggest that anyone put themselves in the place and do whatever you can to stay out or get out of it. Makes life very difficult even when you have a family that you love wholeheartedly.

An Archy wrote:

That was 24 years ago. The world has changed. Get a cell phone, dude

I don't need one.

If you need me to have one, then don't be so needy.

^^^^^^ This is bullshit. The guy below you was making $2k less and almost starving.

And, I crunched the numbers.

If you made $34k/year, you took home less. I went to a paycheck calculator and randomly selected Colorado as your residence because it seemed pretty middle of the road. If you lived in Colorado and made $34k/yr, your take home pay for the year would be $29,258/yr.

That works out to $2,438.17/mo. According to the internet and google searches, a family of four (which you indicated you had) with a "moderate" food budget will spend $771.10 on groceries per month. The average family health insurance premium is $414 per month. A moderate cell phone estimate for your wife is $50 per month. A moderate estimate for car insurance for you two cars is $100 per month. With a big SUV and another car, we will moderately estimate gas costs at $300 (American average is $368:

. Even a modest mortgage of $150,000 or so will cost you $1,000/month. But lets be generous to you and say that your housing AND maintenance is $800/mo. And, let's very conservatively estimate your utilities, gas, sewer, water, trash, electricity, not even internet, at $50/month.

Subtracting all those costs from your take home pay = -NEGATIVE$46.93!!! So obviously you would not be able to eat out or take your vacations, and certainly not save 15% for retirement, and in fact you would be failing to make ends meet.

Really it seems that one of the following is true:

(1) You are lying about how little you make to prove a point

(2) You have extraordinarily low household costs; maybe because your parents gave you a house or pay your bills or something.

(3) You received government subsidies for your rent, housing, utilities, or groceries, in which case it was ME and NOT YOU that provided for your family.

So which was it?

It is currently my wife and I and our 6 year old son. The 2nd child will make for a family of 4.

I wasn't going to quite put the screws to him, but this does sound a little hard to believe even for me.Back in 1998, I actually made about $44,000 per year, and we made it, but we had just one kid then, and two cars that were paid for, and I had dropped down to 5% retirement giving for a couple years as we were getting ready to buy a house, and I needed 3% down. We also weren't going on any vacations to London. We were going to the Outer Banks in North Carolina on the cheap back then.Now, if you've got two paid for cars, and you are very budget conscious with your grocery bill (my family of 4 actually spends just $600 a month at the grocery store, but this is partly due to eating out more often than we had in the past and my daughter buying her lunch (I don't that as part of our grocery bill) every day at school (my son packs every day), using coupons and being vigilant, and you buy the least amount of insurance and don't have cable TV and so on, and you have a super cheap house,...you COULD make it on $42,000.Maybe he lives in an area of the country where his house is $50,000 or something like that.

i hit the "like "button

Then you haven't been the situation when you meet the right person. We make more than 50 and its not easy so I'm thinking 50 would be tough - there's no guarantee that if you have the money now you won't have less later either. Your comment is really jr high.

just say no wrote:

[quote]brotastic wrote:

I'm agreeing with the guy who said not to get a wife or have kids if you can't afford them. They make condoms for a reason. Don't blame someone else.

J.R. you're the man! I live on less than 25k with a lot of the same strategies you mentioned. And I still go to Boston Marathon every year! I can't and don't want to imagine making 169k and all the worthless crap i would be buying!!