You know what else makes it difficult to write about living beneath your means? Taking your son out for lunch and seeing posters like this:
$10 an hour? Really? And the poster was huuuuuge. As if the well-known and no doubt very profitable fast food restaurant we were in was proudly trumpeting the fact that it paid so much that an employee could work FULL TIME just to put almost 70% of her take-home pay each month towards the average rent of a one-bedroom apartment in our town. Or 100% of it towards the cost of family health insurance.
I’m surprised they managed to not add an explanation mark to that starting wage. That comes later—after they list all the benefits, one of which is discounted meals. And much more! Did I mention this was a fast food restaurant? You really can’t throw in some meals?
Sure, $10 an hour might seem like a lot of money. If you’re nine. Maybe this chain of restaurants is targeting teenagers out of school for the summer or retirees looking to get out of the house, folks who don’t necessarily need a living wage since they have other resources, say … parents or pensions.
Even so, there are likely people for whom these jobs are their best, if not only, option for a paycheck, a woefully inadequate paycheck to cover their most basic physiological needs—food, shelter, warmth.
And if so, they make a total lie of what I do 😔.
I’m sorry—I don’t know what dark magic you possess, but NO ONE is living beneath those means. I know. I ran through the mental calculations as my four-year-old was scarfing down his two cheeseburger value meal. Yeah, I can sit here and make snarky math jokes, tell you to buy in bulk, boast about my thrift store finds, and shake an impotent fist at the powers that be, but let’s face it. I’m mostly inoculated from those powers that be. I might even be on a first name basis with a few of them. I’ve never really faced running out of money before the end of the month or found myself without a backstop, financial or otherwise.
What business do I have writing this blog?
I did have a lot going on in April, but truth be told, it’s hard to adopt a cheery—OK, angry—“you-can-do-it!” attitude when you regularly come face to face, or face to poster, with the fact that for a lot of people, they can’t do it. They can’t make enough to live, let alone thrive beneath their means. And this one fast food establishment’s $10 an hour isn’t a one-off starting wage, either. You couldn’t get away with paying that unless the grocery store, the coffee shop, and the big box down the street weren’t all offering similar wages.
The stated mission of Live Beneath Your Means is to teach women and other heads of households the principles of personal finance and to give them the tools and confidence to pursue their dreams. But before I can do that, I need other people to pay them more than $10 an hour.
In the meantime, I’ll keep writing and making jokes (umm, breathing). And advocating for a higher minimum wage. And using my means to support businesses—serving fries and otherwise—that are pushing for the same things.
Hi Grace-
Glad to see you blogging again! I happen to politely disagree with your recent, personal questioning about the merits of your blog. I actually think that this is a GREAT blog topic and one that can be used to help demonstrate that even a person who is making what appears to be a very small hourly wage can “still” build wealth and be financially better off in the long run (even if starting from such a financial “disadvantage”). Regardless of one’s income level, (rich, poor, middle?) we all suffer from some varying amount of “lifestyle creep”. There is ALWAYS some small amount of take home earnings that can be “put aside” today in order to build future wealth for tomorrow. It has never been easier in the history of humanity for the “commoner” to build wealth (certainly within the borders of any global, democratized, capitalist nation). Anyone can open an investment account (especially a tax-sheltered one), there is no excuse. Even at $10/hour, there is no excuse for not being able to save “$1 a day” of one’s earnings (~1.25% of a day’s wages). If that $1 per day (For simplicity’s sake and using general assumptions, I’ll round to $25/month investible income {or $300/year}) is annually invested repeatedly over a 40 year working career (say, age 20-60) into even a self administered, tax-sheltered account using passive indexing and an 8% return for the broader US market (which is actually lower than the historical average of the S&P for the past 90 years) with dividends re-invested, should grow to be just over 200k in value and throwing off about $7000 in annual dividend income! That’s not too shabby of an outcome considering one earned only $10/hour for a 40 year working career, when the median 401K balance today for a 60 year old is only about 63K!! That’s over 3X’s the current median!! It gets even better if one can manage to save/invest $2/day for 40 years! I don’t disagree that it can be very difficult to actually “live” on $10/hour, but I also think that there is absolutely no excuse for any individual (regardless of whether or not they were born into disadvantaged circumstances) to not be able to improve one’s financial situation regardless of what a person brings home in wages. To me, this is what makes capitalism and personal freedom really great, despite some of its flaws.
I appreciate your thoughts, Jim! And I must agree to some extent if I am still writing, yes? Nevertheless, someone making $10 an hour will have a challenging time building the kind of financial security in the form of liquid savings that will allow them to actually further set aside $1 a day to invest. Your calculations assume they will never need to access those funds for say, an emergency, expenses that happen to all of us and have nothing to do with lifestyle. I would love to write about you mentoring someone who indeed makes $10 an hour (hint, hint!).