There’s been much ballyhoo lately about cost of living and affordability in media lately (deservedly so, imo) but I’m curious how hard it is for those of us who are a little more capable than normies (we like to think).
Feel free to be somewhat vague. Not asking anyone to doxx themselves. I’ll start.
In my mid-thirties. Married, two kids. Combined income is just under 100k. We live in a low cost of living area which has helped us a lot. We were able to buy a house in ‘21 with a 15 year mortgage and it feels like we got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. We’ve been able to build about a 200k net worth, about half of which is home equity.
Day to day expenses are getting tougher, however. We’ve never had a car payment but our older kid has started school and that has put a strain on us since he goes to a private Christian school. I’ve worked in education and I consider sending a kid to public school to be akin to child abuse.
It feels harder and harder to save and invest. Just making ends meet with two kids in this red state feels like a Herculean task. Wondering if anyone else feels the same way.
I'm not one of those "if it was important you couldn't do it from home" types, but what I will say and speculate is that the expectations have gotten pulled so far down that a high quality employee can do their work in maybe a third of the work week. I guess that's what happen when you fill buildings with DEIs and H1Bs that can't tell their mouth from their ass much less produce anything. Downside? If everyone did a good job we'd need a ton less employees total. Corporate work life doesn't reward doing anything above the median of work though really unless you have dark skin or a magic triangle. Even then, the possession of such traits is your main value, not actually doing work.
I'm sure the government is even better at this incompetence than the business world. So they just sit at home click a few times each week and call it work.
I think there's big schism in WFH between lazy, pozzed bureaucrats and tech sector private corp employees and contract workers.
I think a lot of the private sector WFH is BS as well. But it bothers me a lot less since taxpayers generally aren't subsidizing it (big IF, I suppose), can choose not to buy from a company with a bad product or customer service, private corps with bad work culture can theoretically go under, etc.
But there's really no way to avoid being complicit and sucked dry from the WFH public sector types.
It's also infuriating that all these pozzed COVIDidian assholes somehow ended up with better working conditions and more perks as a fallout of their fealty to the COVID kabuki theater restrictrion regime.