When I was single I was comfortable with £11k which is adjusted for inflation from 2016. Maybe some of you are miserable because you think you need expensive things to be happy.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Yeah, sounds about right if you want to be able to be comfortable at home and have money for maybe a modest vacation once a year.
I make way less, but it would be nice to be able to afford to travel at least once a year. Not worry about car repairs setting me back etc etc.
Don't forget any shot at a reasonable retirement too
I’m planning to die to reduce my spend.
That is, most literally, my plan. Not going to suicide, but either the environment or shit politics will take me out before I'm too elderly.
And I'm not being snarky. No healthcare and seeing the ecosystem collapse has done me in. And for the young, you haven't seen the shit I've seen. Our systems are racing towards a cliff. You'd be even madder if you had lived my young life and seen where we're at now.
I'm either going to die in the water riots or I'll be shot dead by a Google Amazon compliance assistance team for using an adblocker.
Who cares what people "feel"? It has nothing to do with "feelings". Just calculate how much it actually costs to live comfortably, and you'll find that $150k works.
You can't define "comfortably" without feeling.
You can, though. At least to the extent of saying that "comfortable" means that all your basic needs are met, and you have money left over for more than that. How much more, is a matter of preference...but as long as that basic minimum is met, the rest is just different degrees of comfort.
Well, then I can say that $40k is definitely "comfortable." That's $1500 rent, $300/month food, another $200 gas/elec/internet, a thousand left over for odds & ends and another couple hundred saved.
Pretty much my budget in a MCOL major metro.
What about taxes? Health Insurance? Car insurance or transportation budget. You can live comfortably on $10 a day for food?? $3.30 a meal? That eats up the rest of that $1300 a month and leaves nothing for entertainment, savings, gifts or dating. Nothing left for meeting that health insurance deductible so you still can't go to the doctor. Survivable? Absolutely! Doesn't sound comfortable to me though.
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You don't have kids? Plan to retire? Have an emergency savings amount? No credit card debt? Car loans? Student loans?
I probably should have been more clear when I said "minimum basic requirements". I wasn't talking "survival"...I was talking about "comfort". The point at which you are no longer living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I was also assuming household income...not individual...so I should have been more specific there, as well.
I make about twice what you calculated, and my bank account is consistently at zero after all my household expenses are covered. That's for my family...not just me. I have no emergency savings, which means if anything in my life breaks down, I go into debt just to pay for repairs...and it takes months to finish paying it off. That's not "comfortable". It's eternally stressful, since emergencies like that usually come up more often than I can pay off the last one.
My point, though, was that it's all quantifiable. Even the differences between individual circumstances can be calculated. Everyone can look at their life and "know" the number that would get them into that "comfort zone".
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Feelings are important because without them, there would be a concrete number of dollars at which a person starves to death. One more dollar and they live. Once we know that number, the right wing will begin pushing everyone towards it.
Feelings are important because I want to enjoy a twinkie every now and then. I want to be able to afford a day off for mental health, or a friend's birthday. There should be healthy ambiguity in the number of dollars it costs to live because without it there's just near-starvation.
Wanting a Twinkie here and there and a new iPad/car every year is very different. What you want is found pretty much anywhere that isn't touched by imperialism and war in general, lol. But maybe the average American can't be happy and comfortable without many expensive toys? Or life is just expensive AF invariably there, idk.
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Yeah, this hits home all right. I'm Gen-X, and while I always got by OK on a very low income even here in Seattle, it was entirely due to have a very modest lifestyle and the sheer luck of that rarest of Seattle unicorns, reasonable rent.
The stars aligned, and over the course of only a few years I've suddenly moved into a very comfortable 6 figure salary, and oh holy jebus words cannot express how much stress just…evaporates…when you've got enough to cover all expenses and easily sock away some money too.
Of course, that was promptly replaced by a new stress, the realization that I might just possibly thread the needle and end up with a comfortable retirement—not rich mind you, just not in penury—but I now had to save, save, save, save, save.
Work affords me access to both a 403B and a 457B, which has helped immensely in my quest to get savings built up appropriate for my age bracket, but all that anxiety is back now that I've got a retirement fund that was on track, but now the orange twitiot is doing his damndest to wreck our economy, likely for good. I'm just waiting to watch everything I've invested go up in smoke. It's nerve-wracking, but hey, at least I'm Gen-X and know exactly what it's like to live with existential dread. After a childhood fearing nuclear holocaust at any moment, this new anxiety is practically a cakewalk!
Oh, who am I kidding? It still sucks.
Fuck.
Just want to say, to a fellow slacker, I get you. OTOH, my nerves aren't too wrecked yet. Like you, I know how to be poor, but fuck me, I didn't expect an environmental and political holocaust to drop on my old ass.
Particularly since that has to also include investing for later retirement in an entirely uncertain economic future.
wow, what afucking shithole of an economic system, huh?