this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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It is a valid question.
How exactly do we quantify this concept because if its self reporting, I guarantee it includes people who have larger incomes claiming they are living pay check to pay check. These people should not be lumped with those who are struggling to afford a basic quality of life.
Paycheck to paycheck can be a pretty broad term. I worked at the bottom rung in healthcare scraping by and had to endure listening to people making 3x what I made talking about when their check was gonna hit the bank. It's easy to be broke when you have a spending problem
seriously. I had a client who brought in six figures per month after expenses. He still barely scraped by because he (1) was in major debt which he never paid down, only refinanced, (2) kept renovating his house unnecessarily (3) refused to stop taking vacations to Liberia (4) for some reason his wife is credibly accused of war crimes which occurred after they got married.
i was a college student and i had better credit, but he had access to more liquid funds. it was weird. if he missed a week of work, he'd be fine. if he missed two, he could not handle the pileup of bills. i could take a couple months off work and be fine. like i said, weird.
my old boss found some criminally interesting clients.
I had a boss years ago who owned a temp agency. When he bought the business it was giving him $40,000 per month in profits but this had dropped to $25,000 per month -- probably because he spent his day playing solitaire on his computer and listening to Rush LImbaugh instead of, you know, actually doing anything to benefit the business. I had the pleasure once of watching him berate his two receptionists (who made $7.25 an hour and had nothing whatsoever to do with the success of the business) for this drop in his income. He was friends with a bunch of west coast venture capitalists who were each worth hundreds of millions of dollars and his "poverty" absolutely burned him to his core.
Guy was pissed he wasn't as good at exploiting people as his VC friends. What a joke of a person.
Americans are famous for living beyond their means. Obviously there are a lot of genuinely poor people. But there are also many that just aren't financially responsible.
That really should be what's taught in schools instead of trying to teach them to pass some tests to get the schools money
I think, if your savings can't cover your basic needs for a month, you're in it. If you miss one paycheck, your life basically falls apart. It also means, if you have a sudden cost (car repair, water pipe burst, or illness in the USA) that is more than a monthly paycheck (which in turn is more than your savings), you're done.
While people like to dramatize their own Situation, wouldnt it be pretty easy to define it AS people who have as much spending as they have income without being able to save [amount].
If we want to exclude people who just dont save their money: people who have as much fixed spending as they have income