The Cost of Living/Housing Crisis
&gt; The typical worker takes home $3308 per month<p>The article is a good read, but to anyone who&#x27;s felt the belt tighten lately, it will likely contain no surprises.<p>I&#x27;m just going to make a couple points of comparison to my own situation.<p>I take home about 7k monthly after taxes. This is our sole income. That puts us about on par with the &quot;typical&quot; household with two working adults.<p>Our monthly mortgage payment is about 1700 on a 1200 sq ft house which is really too small for our family of five. I often find myself regretting our conservatism when we purchased our home in 2020. We figured that we were buying a starter home for the next few years, but with rates doubled since then and with the crazy housing prices, it&#x27;s going to be a long time before we can consider an upgrade. That&#x27;s on a 250k mortgage. Often wish we&#x27;d taken another 100k, which probably would have increased our payment to the mid 2k range... We could afford that nowadays. Hindsight...<p>Our grocery bills have been excessive, well over 1000 monthly. Grocery store prices seem like they&#x27;ve almost doubled over the last few years.<p>Amenities like summer camps and pool memberships in our area are also pretty high, and spots are limited and competitive. Over the summer keeping the kids entertained was tough and expensive.<p>We&#x27;re extremely fortunate to make the kind of money I make. We&#x27;re able to pay our bills, save, and maintain a nice lifestyle. We feel squeezed but aren&#x27;t in any danger of homelessness or starvation. We&#x27;re comfortable, but lots of luxury stuff is out of reach. We camp for vacation. We tend not to make big purchases. We just had to have $2500 worth of plumbing work done. We could afford it but it sure sucked.<p>We&#x27;ve often considered moving home. We&#x27;re from a rural area about an hour from the metro area we live in now, and with remote work a tech job back home is actually plausible now. But the schools back home are pretty low ranked, whereas right now we live in one of the top districts in the state.<p>I don&#x27;t have some grand point to make, guess I&#x27;m just laying out what life looks like on an average+ dev salary (155k gross). I can&#x27;t help but wonder how people making substantially less are managing, especially in the cities.