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It’s wild how much these numbers vary across the Atlantic. Those car costs are tiny compared to living in the Netherlands or the UK for example. Fuel is much more expensive, as is parking.
Phone and internet access on the other hand… you poor bastards are getting robbed. You can get a good mobile plan here for £10/mo for example. I have fibre to my home for £32/mo.
Also, $60/mo for clothing? How often are you people buying new clothes?
Annual vacation costing $1500 🤣
for one person? yeah
Sell the $20,000 suv and get a 2004 Honda Civic or similar, and dont borrow any money to buy it
This! There are few things financially stupider than loaning money at a high rate to purchase a rapidly depreciating asset.
$420
“Miscellaneous expense” bro spends almost as much on weed as gas…
I have a degree and I have never made 85k in my life. I never get a yearly vacation either, I hate to break it to whoever this person is but this is not “middle class” in 2026. This is upper middle class at least.
There is no middle class.
You either work to live or you own the means.
You’ve just been lied to, or so beaten down that your expectarions for middle class have declined.
The OP’s math should be middle class.
I have degrees, make $110k before taxes and overtime. Our household makes over $200k before taxes, with 2 kids. We are upper middle class, i think. $85k, single person household is firmly middle class.
We do 1-2 large vacations with a dozen camp trips yearly. Our vehicles average age is also 20 years old and our house is way below what we could afford, so that may be part of our financial freedom.
My spouse and I have three degrees between the two of us and neither of us has ever made that much. At this point we will likely be too old for kids before we can afford them.
I got lucky and ended up at a job with almost infinite growth. Masters in mechE and I do controls, scada, and inventory management stuff. My wife is a high paid dental assistant.
My job is imposter syndrome defined. I enter a factory and I’m the most important person in the building, but I feel like I barely understand what I’m doing. Wish I could give career advice besides ‘be the expert in the room’. Which I know cant be everyone.
sounds more like you’re not middle class if you don’t have income for discretionary spending
that’s, like, the definition of middle class
By the classic definition I am middle class by virtue of having a degree and not being in a blue collar job.
We understand the usage and meaning of the term middle class VERY differently
You are going to need to take that up with Wikipedia:
Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation’s income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%.
The classic definition of middle class was, as far as I learned it, making enough money that you could afford to pay for your family’s expenses without needing your wife to also work.
This came out of the poor working conditions in factories in the 1800s, where people often were hurt, maimed, or even killed (compared to today, this was quite common). If you made enough money that only one family member had to suffer (at this time it was always the husband), that was the bare minimum to be considered middle class. This was regardless of income, it was more about what you could afford.
Prior to this, I’m not sure middle class was really much of a concept. Most groups were separated by trade and upbringing, and pretty much overall separating the low class from artisans, merchants, nobility, and royalty, with no real middle class afaik. It was, for example, quite common for artisan families to all work together
Edit: i feel compelled to share that i studied history for my degree, and i am sharing one of the definitions i was taught.
Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation’s income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%.
From Wikipedia.
I thought we were talking classical definitions, not the definition/s currently considered common according to Wikipedia.
I had no intention of declaring your personal financial situation. I was trying to provide historical context for the term (as far as I know).
No we were talking about your understanding of what middle class means but if you are going to to be pedantic:
The modern usage of the term “middle-class”, however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General’s report, in which the statistician T. H. C. Stevensonidentified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class.[15] The middle class includes: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is control of significant human capital while still being under the dominion of the elite upper class, who control much of the financial and legal capital in the world.
I’m not sure where the combativeness is coming from. I came in to share my understanding of the origin of the concept of middle class. I was not intending on being pedantic.
There’s no need to aggressively copy and paste a few Wikipedia articles and pretend to be an expert
I wouldn’t put too much stock into the actual numbers. Even in just the US, the same middle class lifestyle might be $50k in one location and $200k in another.
Case in point, I live in a comfortable single-bedroom apartment in a low crime rate area for $650 a month. OP’s figure is almost triple that.
Bro, YOU’RE being robbed. If you spent less time trying to act like this is some pie-in-the-sky dream you’d have more energy to fight for yourself and others.
And cars are this expensive after we’ve made almost all roads completely free to drive on.
Not the point of the post, i know, but who spends 70$ a month on on “gym”? I bought weights and a pullup bar for a one-time payment of like 50$, and i jog outside for free
I mean we can pick this apart in a ton of ways. $60/m on clothes? My house would be 80% plain cotton T-shirts by mass. I probably spend a bit more than that in a while year. Typically that’s a carton of socks and replacing a couple pairs of pants which get damaged.
But then I probably spend like $500/m at one bar near my house.
Yeah, for that price, they should be getting the whole James.
I think my next door neighbors are not going to be thrilled to have 220kg+ deadlifts dropped above them.
Having said that, I don’t spend 70 a month for the gym, and I currently have two memberships.
A friend got a $30/month gym membership that has unlimited guest passes, so they bring friends. The machines are fun. I think there’s classes too, but guests can’t do those so I haven’t.
Planet Fitness for $15/month
I wouldn’t have the space for a home gym. I could sort out the shed with a new roof, but there is no power and the walls are done for, so 35 quid a month it is.
WTF $70 for internet? Is it that normal?
I pay 21€ for mine.
$120/month for 1Gbps here in the suburbs.
In the US, yes. It’s stupid expensive because we gave the telecoms a lot of money to upgrade the infrastructure and they didn’t, so we gave them a bunch more but they still didn’t. So now we pay off our debt to telecoms by paying too much for internet. Freedom.
I was thinking, WTF $70 for internet? I pay almost $200.
It also have $100/month of attending weddings. Those are rare enough they get rolled into vacation expenses normally.
Also parking is in hangouts instead of cars lol.
Wasn’t even optional at my last place, just added on as a fee so they could say rent was lower, base rent was like $800, ended up costing more like $1100 after non optional fees.
European internet is heavily subsidized by the state
Nice joke
Canadian Internet is not.
180 per month :(
Canada’s problem is not a lack of subsidy. It’s the state’s tolerance for oligopoly.
Source: I grew up in Canada and moved to Europe in my 30s.
Are you rural? We get it for $80 a month. 2gb/s from Rogers. Technically rural as well but just on the outskirts of a city.
It’s $100/month in my building in NYC. Cable internet, maybe 300mb/s down. But I get packet loss upwards of 20% sometimes.
1750 for a suicide apartment
It’s troll post
I found a 1br in Springfield, MA for $1750 after 10 seconds of searching.
I mean life is just expensive, yeah some of these items are a bit high but honestlyly overall it’s pretty realistic if you aren’t actively saving money and trying to live on the cheap.
The issue is that it doesn’t have to be as expensive as it is. The more prices increase and people pay those increased prices, the more they’ll increase. People aren’t willing to, collectively, stop their spending. They rationalize it like you have as “life” or they “treat yoself” themselves into financial ruin.
There’s $700/month of savings hidden in the drop from $85k gross to $66k net.
I’d say it’s fairly accurate. I think the electric cost should be double though.
Its nice to see a breakdown like this, but in the figures the “savings” section has a higher total than the “transportation” section…
60 for electricity! Wow.
Its 30 minimum where I’m at. Because thats how much they charge you without the 40c per kilowatt. Crazy
yeah. here in new england it’s about 200 a month average. sometimes it’s 180. sometimes it’s 300. yay.
Oof. Yeah I feel that.
Actual unhinged electricity rates, many places you get cheaper rate than that for using a fast EV charger
If you go outside where I’m at, its suddenly half the price. But yeah its a bit worse than this website:
https://nrgcleanpower.com/learning-center/fresno-electricity-rates/
PGE sucks.
There’s a metric ton of solar being put up because its super expensive to have PGE.
Well, until January. I planned a solar setup to get partially offgrid to avoid $400 PG&E bills, but installations trigger tax assessments next year. Completely negates any benefits.
Ive looked at plug in solar. It seems like it would be useful. A coworker of mine has a solar mini-split. Both look interesting to me. PGE Fucking sucks.
It’s interesting to compare these figures to my own situation, for sure.
Housing costs: I live in a 3 room apartment (2 bedrooms + kitchen + living room + 1 bathroom), it’s our equivalent of a condo which I had to spend ~$50k on a down payment. The total monthly cost on it is ~$1600, which I share with my partner. Some of that goes towards paying off the loan, and some of it becomes discounted because interest payments are tax deductible in my country. The apartment is located in what I would call not the most desirable but fully acceptable area of the capital of my country, with a 15 minute bike ride to reach the central station of my city, and the same to the office where I work. There’s also plenty of transit available, but I prefer biking because it’s fun, less expensive and gives me built in exercise.
The insurance on the apartment is somewhere between $20-30/month, and covers both the apartment, accidental damage to property and travel insurance.
For the garage, I pay $25/year for a private bike parking spot in one of the bike sheds in my apartment coop.
I don’t have a car, but there’s some amount of cost to the upkeep of my bike. Generously I’d put it at $200/year maybe, but I’ve also spent some amount of upfront cost buying the thing.
Health insurance is free in my country. A visit to the doctor will set you back perhaps $30, with a cap of ~$150 per year. There’s also a cap on prescription medicine at $300 per year.
Water + electricity + internet was included in the total monthly cost for the apartment. Our electricity/water costs represent maybe $30 of that expense post, and the internet comes at no extra cost in the apartment coop. I get a phone plan as a part of my employment contract, so I don’t have to spend anything on that.
For food at home, me and my partner spend maybe $400 between ourselves generously on home-cooked meals. For eating out it’s maybe $100 a month at most.
I cut my hair once every three months for around $30. My gym membership is $40/year, which covers both me and my partner (seriously, I love my apartment coop, it’s the best). The only subscriptions I have are a VPN subscription setting me back a little under $4/month and Nebula which is $37.5/year. The toiletries I included in the food expenses.
Student loans are comparatively inexpensive to service in my country. I pay about $200 quarterly on it.
Weddings are not particularly common among my friends, and the last time I attended one was more than 5 years ago.
I don’t really drink any more, so there’s no expense to be had on the alcohol front.
Where I spend more is on vacations - I have 6 weeks of paid vacation per year, and I try to make good use of it. Sometimes this means taking the train to visit family, which is not particularly expensive since the train is cheap and food and accomodation with family is free, but at least once a year it means a longer vacation where we stay at hotels and eat out every day, making it a more costly affair.
Being able to take home $5500 a month in my country would be extremely uncommon though, placing you very highly on the income scale.
Are they classifying areas by the “crime rate”?
Also, aren’t maintenance and insurance costs too low?
This is how you know the whole thing is BS.
“Monthly rent. Near USA warm water port.”
That maintenance is high for a new car. I didn’t spend anything in the first 3 years I had my new car, and even after that it was more like $500 a year, not $150 a month.
They didn’t include a new car though, and a 20,000 SUV is not going to be in a like new state, its going to need some upkeep. $1800/yr is probably a little low. That’s one semi serious issue without including oil changes, or tires, or brakes.
ah that’s right, though you can get a good new car for under $30k, and you probably don’t need an SUV living by yourself
Insurance rates vary a lot on the plan, personal history, age, sex, location, etc. I can’t remember what I used to pay in the US, but this doesn’t strike me as crazy high or low.
I have been essentially carless for almost three years. I own a car, but it’s “on loan” to my mom because she lives where a car is an essential and I don’t, and she’s too poverty-stricken to buy one.
That said, I bought a Segway Max G3 in June and it’s awesome for getting around if you only need to operate within a 5-6 mile radius. The mileage is way higher if you stick to 10mph, but I’m a speed demon. I actually save a lot of money on energy costs because it takes way less electric to charge the battery than would be consumed if I were at home using my devices, appliances, and running heat or A/C.
Just make sure to shop for a deal and don’t buy the first one you see. I saved $400 on the one I bought. It was a floor model from a retailer in LA that only had 4 miles on the odometer.
to add on to this, a lot of places you dont need a motorcycle license (although classes are a good idea regardless) to ride a 50cc moped. got one last year and it is saving my ass on maintenance and gas. follow licensing/registration laws, guys :)
I am fortunate enough that I could buy an apartment last year (south Germany) my mortgage+refinancing is about the same as your rent.
I have not own a car since 2017 and I don’t think I would have been able to afford to buy an apartment if I did have a car this whole time.
