Part of the reason I don’t live in America is I see a lot of people on salaries 2-4x mine who seem to be unable to have time to see their friends.
This is just a choice though. A choice Americans absolutely love making, but a choice none-the-less. On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum. OTOH, I have what I consider an absurdly luxurious life and I spend less than $60,000/year TOTAL.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DwlQ_5A2mKU - this is a video of someone who makes $2,200/month and has zero expenses (her parents pay for everything) and is in serious financial trouble.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that if you have a monthly expense, it becomes “necessary fixed expense” damn quickly.
Even if it’s $50 a month for telephone sanitizing.
... Wait, how the hell did they figure that out? Did they itemise it? Was most of it just going on a very expensive mortgage or something? Are they including retirement savings?
(I've no rent or mortgage, due to having been very lucky with employer equity, but I'm not sure I could spend 60k EUR a year on myself even if I wanted to; there is only so much stuff that you'd reasonably want to spend money on.)
I remember there was large car payments.
OI have been driving for more than 25 years, I've had a car payment for maybe 10 months in those 25 years. To me a car payment is a massive luxury, to this dude it's a minimum basic.