I’ll stop here because your position is incredibly privileged and you refuse to see that. The minimum wage is too low, that’s not the point though. 70k a year is absolutely a comfortable wage for a single person to live on in almost every place in the US, except the biggest of the major cities.

You may not get everything you want but you should be able to cover everything you need, including an emergency fund, and still have enough to put aside a 5-10% for savings most years on 70k. If you really don’t believe that, you live in a bubble.

You’re not going to get any argument from me that shit is fucked. Everyone should have guaranteed access to housing, food, and healthcare, and we don’t. A lot of kids were set up for failure by their parents insisting they take out college loans. But your standard for a minimum cost of living is basically the minimum to live like a boomer in the 70s.

The average white male boomer in the US lived like a king compared to everyone else around them, even at the time. The descendants of those people tend to think that the fact that their parents or grandparents had this means they should too. In reality, those boomers were incredibly lucky to be born into a privileged class during an economic golden age.

We don’t get that, we get the world they fucked up. Rich dickheads hogging all the wealth and stealing wages is nothing new, it’s been the standard for all of human history. What is new is that you can see clearly how well the privileged live compared to you. Maybe that will cause things to change, idk.

In the meantime, we need to make do. An emergency fund is intended to be used for emergencies, which are things that threaten your ability to acquire basic needs (food, housing, health). You keep it funded at 6 months of expenses (e.g., the minimum you need to meet your financial obligations plus food+rent). When it’s full, you don’t keep adding to it. When you use money from the fund, you replenish it as quickly as you can. Everyone should have one.

You shouldn’t be having an emergency every single year though. If you are, it’s not an emergency, it’s an extra expense you need to plan for. If you are spending double-digit percentages of your income on debt (car loans, credit cards, etc), you need to stop spending money on anything else but basic needs until you pay it off. Or start a revolution, but we’re arguing on the Internet so I don’t think the odds of that happening are high.

The world sucks. It’s not fair. You can still live a good life in it though, even if it’s not as good as it used to be.

Saving 20% of your income is way beyond emergency funds and what is needed for retirement. Typical guidelines for emergency funds are to set aside at least 6 months worth of living expenses, you don’t need to save 20% forever. If you saved even 10-15% of your income for retirement your entire life, you’d have a very comfortable retirement (assuming the world doesn’t burn down before then).

SmartAsset is a financial advisor service, and these numbers seem to be guidelines for middle-class earners. That’s pretty far beyond a minimum cost of living, so I’d say this title is misleading at best.

I don’t think everyone is entitled to wealth accumulation. Housing/health/food security, absolutely, but being able to build wealth by making enough to save 20% of your earnings is beyond a basic entitlement. I doubt most people would agree with you on that.

You could more accurately title this as “Minimum wage needed to live like an average boomer in 1975”. Still fucked up, and not misleading.

Edit: you added a bunch to your reply. I think the framing of this is just wrong, frankly. Wages absolutely have not kept up with the cost of living, but you’re going beyond that and saying everyone is entitled to the financial security of a middle-class earner. It’s a good goal, but not an entitlement, and no reasonable person would frame that as a minimum cost of living.

Can’t speak for all states but I have a really hard time believing this map based on the numbers for NC. The minimum wage needed for what any reasonable single person would consider the cost of living is not >$80k per year, even in the cities. You’d be relatively comfortable making that much here, even be able to save for a down payment on a house if you didn’t choose to live in an expensive area.

Where are you getting these numbers?