Hi, I don’t mean to sound entitled. Here is my reasoning/ breakdown.
Example 1- DFW:
$65,000 in a state with not income tax gets you about $4600/month. That does not include medical benefit deductions, HSA or 401k. You can pay easily half of the leftover in rent and utilities on a small apartment. Not much room for saving or car payment. Owning a house is out of question entirely unless you had some previous savings or significant equity.
Example 2- LA:
The situation is much worse in LA. $75k after taxes gets you $4980, while the costs of living are significantly higher compared to DFW.
Here's the minimum expense breakdown for DFW from MIT which the article is based on: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/19100 (totaling $32,371 for a 1 adult 0 child household, for which they use a zero-bedroom apartment).
Note that the median household income pre-tax is $58.2k (Dallas, 2.5 persons/household) to $67.9k (FW, 2.8 persons/household). So a single earning 65k after tax complaining that that's near poverty line sounds pretty entitled to me. (For LA the median gross income is $69.8k for 2.75 persons/household.)
