Reply to AEI says Dual-income 1-kid $133k/yr is "upper middle class"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Fake news.

I live in a MCOL area with three kids, dual income with an HHI of $325 and we are struggling. Between childcare costs, student loan repayments, and credit card debt servicing (we took on cc debt during a spell of unemployment) we do not feel flush.

Yes you can make a lot of money in America but ain’t nothing free or cheap.[/quote]

This is the dumbest argument that is constantly repeated in some form or another.  "I have made (suboptimal) life choices that have led to significant financial burdens.  Our high salary in a MCOL area is spent servicing those obligations; therefore, we are not UMC."

It's a combination if financial illiteracy, rationalization, and trying to establish yourself as the hero of your own story.  [/quote]

DP. It's a mix here. The credit card debt and three kids are dumb choices for sure. As a PSA, try not to have kids at all until you have a solid emergency fund in place to deal with surprise unemployment. There are too many fixed costs with kids and you need to feel confident you can cover those for 3-6 months on one income or no income, depending on your situation. Also people have this weird idea that additional kids are like a negligible additional cost? I don't understand it. There are some efficiencies that come with a second kid, especially if close in age, but that third kid is going to push you into a different spending category for everything, forever -- childcare, transportation, food, travel, everything. Third kids are the most expensive kid. Perhaps the only situation here that might not be true is in a single-earner household with a SAHP who *really* loves being a SAHP (and therefore won't burnout and want to start outsourcing because they can't take another second of what is actually a really hard job especially when you hit that third kid).

But childcare as a line item is not extravagant, almost everyone needs that. And student loans have been a necessity for a lot of people for decades. I think that's changing and there are efforts in the works to wean the higher education industry off loans. But for instance, I could not have gotten a college degree without loans -- no family contribution, scholarships only covered half my costs, even in-state I needed 40k in loans to get through college, and it took me a long time to pay them off. But I can't imagine not having a college degree either -- there are so few jobs for people with HS only, and a lot of them are hard labor that I am physically not suited to do especially at my current age. Shaming people for taking out loans, especially back in the 00s and 10s when college costs were skyrocketing but financial aid awards were shrinking is just not fair. In this economy, college should be a right for anyone willing to do the work.[/quote]

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