I’m not making an argument about the current state of wages. I’m just saying 4.4 million isn’t as unattainable as people think. And household income gets murky when you include single income households. And the definition for this article of American Dream includes 2 kids, so if kids aren’t in your planning the 4.4 million mark is probably 1 million less if you still want to attain those other things. I think some folks see that number and think “OMG I’m never going to have that much money.” You are right, you will never have that much money all at once, but over a lifetime you may have earned and/or spent that much without ever leaving the sort of “middle” income range in America.

I agree. All I’m saying is if 50% of salaries are above that 60k mark and as a dual income you are probably getting close to hitting the dream at that level. That’s not as dire as thinking only 10% of the population can afford it. 4.4 million is a scary number, but no one is expected to have that as liquidity or even net worth. That value of spend is actually more attainable over time than it looks when seeing it as raw sticker price.

And again, “American Dream” means family with 2 kids. Not everyone wants that or needs that. If you are a single person and happy living with just a partner or without kids (DINK lifestyle is fun), this is not saying you need 4.4 million to have a decent living standard.

The inflation piece is confusing to me to, but I think it does talk about investment. It says retirement is 1.6 million based on expected annual withdraw rate. So I’m guessing that is not the contribution amount but final amount including return on investment. So does that 4.4 million number actually somehow translate into a sub 4 million dollar contribution value? Same with college. If you start investing in college funds at child birth that have 18 years of growth, is that child cost the cost basis, or accrued value at time of spend? On the other hand the home cost includes mortgage interest, but the value of the house will hopefully exceed the cost you put into it.

I disagree. Workers in trades like electricians will make that much. I think entry level electricians make like 55k. So after 5 years in that work, you will likely be earning above median salary. But for professions like teachers in school districts that don’t pay well… It sucks. Not ideal, but not as dire as some might think. And when you throw in the number of people these days choosing not to have kids, that shaves 1 million dollars off the cost of the American Dream life (but hard to say how much of that decision is based on expected income vs lifestyle values).

Tech workers I assume are making starting around 75k and getting into 100k fairly easily depending on geographic location. And depending on company and trajectory you could be getting into 200 to 300k territory in tech.

I’m seeing median salary listed around 65. Is the median household income reflecting the number of single income families out there or just single people generally?

American dream implies nuclear family life. Retirement, home ownership, and owning new cars are factored in that math. It includes the cost of having 2 kids.

If you read the article…

Here’s the breakdown. We’ll explain the math below.

Retirement: $1.6 million

Homeownership: $930,000

Raising two kids: $832,000

Owning new cars: $811,000

Annual vacations: $179,000

Wedding: $44,000

Pets: $37,000

Funeral: $8,000

I think people underestimate lifetime earnings. Let’s assume 35 years of salary work to retire at 65 (it takes a while to get a career going an maybe a layoff and parental leave…) That would be about 125k a year. Make that a dual income family and that’s 2 people making 63k a year. It’s a bit hard to understand pre and post tax though because some of the calculations like retirement are pretax. And then factor in gains from investment…

So isn’t this calculation saying a 2 family income making median salaries can live the dream? That’s not great for 50% of Americans and probably means a lesser proportion of Americans can attain the dream than before. But that number 4.4 million actually is not crazy high. In a more just work though, dual income families making above the lowest 25 to 30% salaries should be able to afford the American Dream with some caveats around used cars instead of new, and maybe more frugal wedding and college expense due to financial aid and what not.

It’s basically just British terminology for layoffs with a severance package.

Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn’t have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.

Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.

But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn’t always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren’t easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it’s basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don’t own it all, but that’s fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.

I don’t think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn’t get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB’s for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it’s not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

Weird choice of quotes and headlines:

From the OP article:

“He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, The New York Times reported.”

From the NYT link in the quote:

“As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely”

But when you go to the link to the NY Times article that references Mr. Seinfeld as being recently vocal about his support of Israel, one of the concluding comments in the article is:

Surely, Mr. Seinfeld sees it differently. His public comments have largely avoided geopolitical specifics, dwelling little on the choices of the Netanyahu government or prospective conditions for a cease-fire.

And he can still sound hesitant even in recent discussions about the Jewishness of “Seinfeld” — which an NBC executive once described as “too New York, too Jewish.”

Nothing about this makes me think Seinfield is a a strong supported of the war. Support for Israel after the attack can be a lot of things and does not mean pro Netanyahu war machine.

But the point is we can’t trust personal responsibility. If a significant volume of the population is basically guaranteed to not invest and save voluntarily for retirement that is always going to be a social problem. Also, there’s the problem of employers voluntarily providing retirement programs. Sure, I think there’s a question of what or how that savings is invested for retirement (pension, 401k, etc), but it seems there needs to be more mandate to require employer’s of a certain size to support retirement plans. And possibly even more mandate to require contributions to retirement plans. The article describes this in Australia: “Australia’s Superannuation Guarantee requires companies to contribute the equivalent of 11 percent of an employee’s monthly pay to an investment account that is controlled by the worker, who can also put in additional money. The “Super,” as it is known, includes full-time and part-time workers and has proved to be enormously successful. With its relatively small population — just 27 million — Australia now has the world’s fourth-highest per capita contributions to a pension system, and almost 80 percent of its work force is covered.”

I think the “Pensions you don’t contribute to and the amount you get is fixed.” is a bit murky. If you have a pension that probably means you have a lower salary compared to an equivalent non pension job, because part of your labor value goes into funding the pension. But the main thing is 401(k) puts a lot of responsibility on the individual. And as this article points out, if you put a lot put retirement financial planning on the individual, that creates a larger social problem since many people can’t sufficiently do that themselves, even if they are being responsible with what they earn.

But isn’t the point of this article highlighting personal responsibility can’t solve the larger social issue we are facing.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch. I know folks forget to do this when setting up IRAs, but kind of hard to do with 401k. Who knows.

How do you think pension plans make money? They are managed by fiduciaries responsible for investing. Guess where they invest. 20% of the stock market is owned by pension funds :https://retiregenz.com/what-percentage-of-the-stock-market-is-owned-by-pension-funds/

So my employer did this thing where new hires automatically got enrolled in a 401k. If you did absolutely nothing to your 401k, each year it would automatically up your percentage to a max of Y. Is that common or uncommon? And in this world of 401k over pension, should that be more of a norm to help protect people that don’t know better build retirement savings. It doesn’t solve the problem of folks not having enough money and needing to use 401k for emergency funds…

Is it possible that commenter is putting money into retirement accounts but not putting that money into any funds, etfs, or bonds? But even then, I would hope it’s in a money market type core position where they are getting some return. But I rolled over all my stuff into a target fund at my new employer 9 years ago. I’m up 21% on my cost basis.