For my reference

[twirlgrrl]

From an article in the paper: "Last year, the California Budget Project calculated the earnings which a two-worker family with two children must earn in the Bay Area to be middle class - that is, to make enough money to provide a safe home and "make ends meet without help from public programs." The magic number: $77,076 - less if the family does not have to buy its own health care or pay for child care."

Is that crazy? Am I crazy to think that the magic number should be even higher in The City proper, since our housing costs are 1/3 higher than the Bay Area as a whole?

Comments

[lust-inthe-dust.livejournal.com]

naw mang, you just cwaaaazy!!!

;)

P.S....more or less quit my fricken job today...details should be finalized by the end of this week. I can work there all summer if I like?! (so far!)

[canetoad.livejournal.com]

Let's see: housing, full-time childcare, food, transportation, utilities, clothes and medicine for a family of four? 77K? Optimistically, that's 4600/month net. Yes, you can make ends meet without public program help... but it probably wouldn't be anything remotely recognizable as "middle class" living, and you would have a very tough time creating any significant savings.

On the other hand, I remember being middle class as a kid, and current notions of what that lifestyle is "supposed" to include are absolutely bloated, super-sized one might say. We were, by today's standards living quite poorly in many ways. But it never felt like it; my parents made interesting trade-offs in terms of quality of life versus quantity of life, and I long for such a balance in my life today. I do try for it, but I know I'm not even close.

[twirlgrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I don't even know how to think that through, that whole balance thing. I don't feel like we do any sort of keeping-up-with-the-joneses in terms of lifestyle, though. We don't buy things because we're supposed to have them. But we buy too much anyway!