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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>50% of the country is broke

what is meant by this? is this the often cited "50% of Americans don't have any savings" number?

in savings accounts only

>Some 50.8 million households or 43% of households can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill, according to an analysis of U.S. government data released this month by the United Way Alice Project, a nonprofit based in Cedar Knolls, N.J. that aims to highlight the number of people who live in poverty.

I'm going to assume they grossly overestimated when creating that number. Their aim is "to highlight the number of people who live in poverty". I think I am technically "poor" by a number of standards because I don't have any money in a savings account because I prefer higher yield investments.

Methodology described here [1] if you want to go beyond assuming their result is essentially a lie. In the per-state data [2] you see results like 31-32% below ALICE in the Dakotas, but 47-49% in NY and California. If one wanted to present a partisan hit piece to encourage establishment liberal/"Great Society" safety net policies, this would appear to be the opposite of what you would want to produce.

[1] https://www.unitedwayalice.org/methodology [2] https://www.unitedwayalice.org/in-the-us

The big one there that jumps out at me is "child care", in terms of things that are somewhat discretionary (in the sense that stay-at-home parenting is a thing). And at $10-30k per year per child depending on where you are in the US, it's a pretty large-ticket item.

Well let’s take me. Stay at home parenting... assumes I make enough money to cover her, the child, and her retirement, and medical. Which is 70-80k that she is providing right now. So We either take an 80k hit or 30k hit.

It’s pretty simple these days. I’m pushing a household income of close to 200k and I haven’t been on vacation in 3 years.

I could make a shitload sure, drop the wife, move into a studio and eat ramen.

If there's even a single 70-80k income involved, then I expect that household is no longer in the "can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill" bucket, unless it's insisting on living in a specific location with very high housing costs.

All I was saying above is that I am not surprised that a large fraction of households _are_ in that bucket as defined in the United Way report, because child care is expensive. And I expect the fraction of households in that bucket would likely be a lot smaller if "child care" were not being included in basic life necessities.

I am not going to comment on your personal financial situation; you are obviously a better judge of that than I am! I certainly know people with 200k household incomes who also have significant fixed expenses (student loans, medical expenses, whatever) that lead to them not having as much disposable income as one might think. But that's not really related to the United Way study.

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