First World Problems: Why trying to be Middle-Class in America is Depressing

It's been a long time since I've dirtied my fingertips with a blog post. I had been planning for my next post to be an uplifting piece about the flood my wife and I experienced, the triviality of material goods, and how perspective and a positive attitude can help overcome the direst of circumstances. I should've known I'd never get around to that one. (I will, I promise). Instead, brace yourselves for a stark, honest look at what it's like to live in America. Or go to Buzzfeed and click on something much more entertaining and visually stimulating.  Cuz this is probably going to be depressing.

Let's start with a little bit of context. I'm not poor. Simply by virtue of being American, I'm placed in, like, the 20^th percentile of richest people on the planet (I'm too lazy to Google; that's probably close enough). Even among Americans I'm not one of the poorest.  I'm probably not even in the bottom 25%.  And so for the past few years, I've been traipsing around, all lackadaisical like, feeling economically infallible.  I’ve drunk jarras of cerveza in flamenco caves in Andalucia, swum with stingless jellyfish in Palau, sampled loads of street food in Thailand, and surfed in Peru.  All because it was relatively cheap to do so.  (It still is.)

In my extended state of kidulthood, the dollars I made went a long way.  I didn’t pay rent.  I didn’t have bills.  I could just work at Burger King for a few months making minimum wage (which is several times higher than the average Bangladeshi makes), and then go travel the world for a few months.  It certainly seemed to me a more responsible alternative than what I saw many of my peers doing: working shitty retail jobs, buying new cars and other luxury items—trading the majority of their waking hours for material goods.


To the average American in today's workaday (read: wage enslaved) world, that last statement must seem like heresy, since work and the things it allows you to buy are pretty much the meaning of life.  But lest I be dismissed as some utopian trustafarian who enjoys life at the expense of those who work hard, let me just clarify that despite enjoying my life, I was also doing what conventional wisdom suggested I do in order to become a productive member of society.  I got a college degree.  And I didn't just drink my way through college and have a degree handed to me.  I worked my ass off, double majored, became fluent in a second language, and graduated with honors.  Because, I believed, if you've got a college degree, you can get a good job.  That was what I was told, from the time I was in elementary school, when they were already trying to decide what I should do with my life.  Get a college degree, you'll get a good job.

I did get a good job.  In fact, I got several.  After college, I joined the Peace Corps for some valuable experience in my chosen field: Teaching English Abroad.  After Peace Corps, I married my wife in Costa Rica, and we decided to keep the party going.  We lived and taught English in Ecuador, then South Korea, and then informally in the Philippines.  And we loved every minute of it.  Well, most minutes.  But the key thing is that it wasn't that difficult to survive.

That's me loving every minute of the Philippines.

In our several years of living abroad, we were pretty much breaking even.  In South Korea, we were banking a ton of money.  Our rent was covered by our employer, meaning almost every penny of our very generous salaries stayed in our pocket.  But even in Ecuador, where each of us worked around 20 hours a week making $4US an hour, we were making rent and were able to eat incredibly well on the cheap local produce (we also got free health care, imagine that).  And if we spent more than we made, it was because we wanted to do touristy shit while we were abroad (like eat out a lot).  And, because we had a few grand in the bank of combined savings when we left the states, losing a bit of money here and there wasn’t a big deal.

After months of doing pretty much nothing, vacationing in the Philippines, we decided to come back to the states.  We briefly entertained the idea of me going to grad school, but ultimately decided on coming to Nashville so that I could pursue music, because if you don’t buy a ticket, you don’t win the lottery.  (I don’t play the lottery.  Just FYI).  Nashville is an awesome town, and we love living here.  There’s a wealth of diversity, culture, art, music, and progressive ideas that make it a great place to live.  And, one of the main reasons we moved here is that the cost of living is so much cheaper than other places in the U.S.  So keep that in mind when I bring math into the picture.

Nashville's pretty cool.

What it Costs to Live in the United States

Let's get right to it. Combined, my wife and I owe about $40,000 in student loans, which, for a couple, has got to be below average.  Unfortunately, we’re both English majors, which means that, in terms of earnings potential, both of our degrees are essentially useless. Did anyone tell us this when we were choosing majors as college freshmen?  No.  Do I regret the choice?  Kind of.  Although it has led to many of the awesome experiences I’ve had abroad.  But if you had said to me in 2004 (when I chose my major), “you’re going to live in the U.S.  Do you want to be an English major?”  I would’ve said, ‘fuck no.’  And now I work at the Home Depot.

Don’t get me wrong.  The Home Depot is awesome, and I'm thankful that after searching for months and applying to dozens of jobs, I was finally able to get a job with them.  As far as huge corporations go, they’re great.  They treat their employees well, offer benefits, all kinds of stuff.  And employees at Home Depot get paid significantly better than the minimum wage.  But at the end of the day, when you’re in America, $10 an hour only goes so far.  That’s what we’re figuring out now.

Here’s the math:

Leia works at a day care (somewhat related to her chosen career path) making around $11 an hour.  She works full time (40 hours/week).  I’m making around $10 an hour, working part time (around 25 hours/week) to allow me time to do music stuff.  A quick tally shows that, before taxes, we earn about $690/week.  That’s about $2,760 a month. $33,120 a year.  Thirty three thousand dollars. That’s a lot of f***ing money.  A lot.  Or at least, it sounds like a lot.

That's probably less than $33k.

This is Leia in a few years.  After we become butterflies.

But let’s look at what we have to spend.  And just so you know, I’m really looking at what we have to spend.  In our house, I walk around behind people turning out lights.  We unplug everything when we leave the house or go to sleep.  When we shower, the tap goes on for a few seconds to get us wet, then off while we lather, and on for a few more seconds to rinse off.  We sew patches in our holey jeans rather than buying new ones.  We wash ziploc bags and reuse them. By American standards, we consume way less than the bare minimum.

So here’s the breakdown.  (Items with a ** are non-necessities, but we allow ourselves a few indulgences to make the sedentary life more palatable):

Rent: about $600/month

Electricity: about $80/month

Groceries: about $300/month

**Internet: about $50/month

Gasoline: about $200/month

Car Insurance: about $80/month

**Cell phones: about $60/month

Student Loan Payments: about $300/month

**Eating out budget: about $100/month

Health insurance (including dental & vision): about $100/month

Credit card payment: about $500/month

Total Monthly Expenses: about $2,370

Now, a few of these expenses, you might say, aren't universal.  The most glaring, of course, would be the high credit card payment, since most people with incomes as low as ours don't have good enough credit to owe that much.  Luckily, we do, and it's enabled us to remain afloat after the flood.  The expenses from that (including repairs to our one vehicle, motel stays, replacing lost furniture, etc.) totaled around $6k in credit card debt (on our one cc, btw), and we're hoping to pay it off in a year. 

So you might just say, 'well a huge portion of your expense is the result of a natural disaster, and while that sucks, it's not representative of the American condition.'  That's very true.  But what does it cost to buy a used car?  To give birth?  If a family member has a medical emergency?  (Despite paying the premiums, insurance doesn't cover a thing until you meet the $1600 deductible, not to mention co-pays, co-insurance, etc.) And what if we had a kid?  What if we didn't live in low income housing?  How much would our rent be then?  What if one of us couldn't work because we had to take care of a child, or children? There are a whole host of circumstances that could supplant our own, and this budget would still be realistic, if not optimistic.

So let's zoom out a bit more and look at the bigger picture.  We make $2,760 a month and we spend $2,370/month on basic necessities, which means that even after taxes, we should be able to save about $300 a month.  And save that we will.  Of course, that’s assuming we don’t go a penny over budget.  No alcohol.  No extra nights eating out.  No iPads, new phones, clothes, shoes, etc.  But we can do it.  We’ve done it before.  And of course, I’m considering these figures in our own context, which is a relatively cheap place to live.  Imagine making ends meet in L.A. or New York.

And after 12 months of this, what will be our reward?  Well, our credit card will be very close to being paid off.  Unfortunately we will still owe around $35,000 in student loans.  Our rent will most likely go up, since our two incomes will put us over the threshold for low-income housing (I didn't have a job when we moved in).  But we should, if all goes well, have a few thousand in the bank by then.  And with a few thousand you can do what, exactly?

Can Someone call a Wahmbulance?

This depresses me, because my wife and I both hold university degrees, and yet we know that this is the fate that awaits us, should we choose to live in the U.S.  It’s a life of working way too hard at a job you don’t like for less pay than you think you deserve.  You can say that I made the wrong career or academic choices, and that things would have been better had I done this or that.  But how many people in this country are worse off than I am?  How many people have no degree and very few marketable skills in the first place?  How are those people expected to raise a family and put food on the table?  I can’t imagine how much more difficult our situation would be if we had a child right now.  Or several.It used to be that any reasonably intelligent person with a strong work ethic could go out and get a job, work hard, save up money, buy a house, and raise a family on one income.  For those of my generation, most of our parents got jobs straight out of high school (or didn't even finish), and within a few years they owned their own homes and had a bunch of kids running around, who they could afford to feed.

It's not that it's impossible to get ahead in this country (many immigrants do it by sharing a house with 20 people and spending frugally for a decade or so).  It's just that for those of us who grew up amid seemingly ubiquitous prosperity, the American dream doesn't look anything like the one we were taught to believe in.

The American dream is dead, and college for the sake of college is some of the most useless advice you could give someone.  I know I won't be pushing my son or daughter to go, unless they're dead set on a particular career field that requires a college degree, and even then, only if they've already worked in that field to be sure they like it.  Instead, I'll tell them, get a job, any job, as soon as you graduate high school.  Live frugally and save everything, and after 10 years or so, you may have enough saved up to start your own life and live comfortably.  Or, just take off and go vagabonding around the world like I did, but skip college and the massive debt burden it brings, and even if you come back penniless, you'll be ahead of the game.

At the end of the day, our problems are first world problems, for sure.  Ultimately, I'm complaining that we can only keep a roof over our head and put food on the table, and that's a pretty thin complaint.  We're not poor by global standards.  We're not even poor by American standards.  At this rate, we'll make around $33,000 in 12 months.  In the U.S., the poverty threshold for childless adults with no kids is less than half that: $14,600.  And at least 15% of Americans are impoverished by those standards. That's about 1 in 8.  So even though I consider us incredibly lucky to be doing as well as we are, it's a tough pill to swallow, because the more you learn about economics, history, and politics, the more it seems that it really doesn't have to be this way.

I have my own, relatively well-informed opinions about how we got to this point, but I'm not interested in detailing them here.  What I really want to convey is what I've learned since returning to the US: that $10, 11, 12 an hour, really isn’t as much money as I thought it was.  You might be able to survive on that, but that’s all you’re doing.  Surviving.  I'm so tired of the media vilifying the poor. And not only the media, but middle class people who are only slightly less poor themselves.  Are there freeloaders in this world?  Yes.  Are there people who game the system in order to live it up at the expense of others.  Indeed, there are. Many of them work on Wall Street. But the myth that people are only poor because they are too lazy, or aren't talented enough, is bullshit.  My story isn't unique.  So many people of my generation were middle-class when they were kids, and they aren't anymore.  I'm confident that my wife and I are smart enough, resilient enough, and hard-working enough to eventually claw our way back up to lower-middle-class, but it sure is hard to make a living in the good old U.S. of A.