Followed by the I wasn’t attacking you. Maybe leave the goddamn part out if you want some to edit something you had second thoughts about posting.
And clearly I was already doing it because I noticed you removed it.
Fair, but … I said I was attacking you, just not for that reason.
You could leave out the attack part. You know. I’m done with this.
Getting attacked for actually quoting now. Guys have fun with yourselves.
Okay. And thanks for removing it, btw. I hope we meet on better terms in the future, and I’m sorry for contributing hostility.
Folk, you just misunderstood each other somehow.
A 1000 a month student debt payment + 4000 a month mortgage (thats a loan amount over $800k) is still only $5k a month in payments. Add another $800 for two cars that’s now $5.8k per month. IF you are making $250k and your post tax take home is $200k that’s still $16k a month, leaving you $10.2k a month after basic living expenses. Even if you take away $2k for health and dental insurance a month you are still taking home $8k. Even if your student loan debt is up to is up to $2k a year ($100k loans on a 5 year repayment schedule) you’d still have more take home pay than the median house hold income pre-tax.
No way is that “barely middle class” anywhere in America.
In San Francisco, $117K is the threshold for “low income”, which is not really the same thing as the poverty line.
And an income of $250K is easily in the top 20% for San Francisco, which I think is fair to consider “high income.”
The range I’ve heard used for “middle class” is 66% to 200% of the median household income. $250K is in that range in San Francisco by my googling. That makes those folks middle class, albeit at the higher end of the range.
Ok, but be aware that the number you cited for “poverty line” was itself defined as 80% of median income. So comparing those two numbers is guaranteed to lead to counterintuitive results everywhere you look. Even in Kansas City, you’ll find that “poverty” afflicts the “middle class”.
Actually that would be ME.
I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, legs up (advantages, if you prefer) I had early in my professional life is that I didn’t have any student debt to pay off. I had a full tuition scholarship from my school and had enough additional scholarship money from other sources to cover room, board, books, etc… At the time I knew that wasn’t a normal experience at all, but I didn’t realize AT ALL just how amazing it was and what a difference it would make.
Seriously, man. I tried to be careful with my student loans. I didn’t attend expensive private universities, I also opted out of the University of Utah as well because it was the most expensive state school around here. I went with cheaper state schools instead, which around here were thankfully still quite good.
Even with taking a lot of steps to minimize my student loan debt, my student loan payments still outweigh every single other monthly expense I have outside my mortgage. Seriously, the way I budget is to split all my bills between the two halves of the month. On one, I have all my expenses such as internet, cell phone service, utilities, you name it. On the other is: student loans. And the student loans are a larger expense.
It’s all rather absurd to saddle young people who are having to start their lives, get into their first home, acquire all the things they need for said home, build up savings, etc with such massive debt. What an anchor on the economy it must be.
Even with ~100k in scholarship monies and my parents taking out Parent PLUS loans my student loans started out over $600/mo. For this area that’s a reasonable mortgage. At 32 I’m just now about to pay them off and haven’t even thought about home ownership (though I don’t think it’s for me, it’s not like I’ve really had the option). A few months of unemployment a couple years back wiped out the savings I’d managed to scrape together at the time - getting a down payment together for a house is laughable.
One of our priorities for our kids has been to help them get through school without crippling dept. We figure it’s the best gift we can give them. We have been greatly assisted in that by their dual Canada/US citizenship. Canadian universities are far, far less expensive then their U.S. counterparts. So we have one kid done, one in progress and two to go. No chance we could pull this off if they all went to school here.
My father left each of his grandchildren $30k for higher education. Four of them used it, one bought a Toy Hauler. My kids went to two years of JC before attending Cal State schools. For one of them the $30k was ample, for the other (as she went out of town) we paid probably an additional $15k. i really am thankful for what my father did.
Might be worth looking into the UK for those of you with kids approaching college age in the US. Cheaper and limited culture shock, presumably. I know a couple of people who’ve sent daughters to Scotland.
Definitely, though the prices still seem to be going up fast, at least for the one attended.
My parents contributed $10k at the start of my undergrad. I was fortunate to go to a co-op engineering program that paid the balance of my expenses and got me two years experience along with the 4-year degree (which takes five years due to the co-op sessions). I kind of bounced back and forth between work and grad school for the next 10 years, though thankfully scholarships, awards, TA’s and some consulting paid for all the grad school expenses. So I was very fortunate to spend all that time in school and not have any debt at the end!
Yeah, I had 250k in debt when I finished 10 years of school. 3k a month payback on those loans. I can afford it, but there’s nothing going into savings/emergency fund for the next few years until I finish paying them off. I’m not complaining - it’s the choice I made and the only way to get where I wanted to go, but I do in fact know someone with over 100k in student loan debt :)
I think some of the worst are the humanities majors who go into law school. They take on debt for the undergrad and then take on major debt for law school, and there seems to be a glut of lawyers and more and more legal solutions are being offered by software.
Not saying we don’t need lawyers because we do. We need a way for people to attempt to redress a wrong, dissolve or create partnerships, etc. But a lot of lawyers seem to be struggling.
A lot of what you said has truth to it. Yet, at the same time, the salary for associates at the top firms just jumped last year. We’re now at $205K for a starting 1st year and $425 for a 7th year associate, when you include the essentially guaranteed bonuses.
The legal industry is a world of the haves and have-nots.