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It’s interesting to compare these figures to my own situation, for sure.
Housing costs: I live in a 3 room apartment (2 bedrooms + kitchen + living room + 1 bathroom), it’s our equivalent of a condo which I had to spend ~$50k on a down payment. The total monthly cost on it is ~$1600, which I share with my partner. Some of that goes towards paying off the loan, and some of it becomes discounted because interest payments are tax deductible in my country. The apartment is located in what I would call not the most desirable but fully acceptable area of the capital of my country, with a 15 minute bike ride to reach the central station of my city, and the same to the office where I work. There’s also plenty of transit available, but I prefer biking because it’s fun, less expensive and gives me built in exercise.
The insurance on the apartment is somewhere between $20-30/month, and covers both the apartment, accidental damage to property and travel insurance.
For the garage, I pay $25/year for a private bike parking spot in one of the bike sheds in my apartment coop.
I don’t have a car, but there’s some amount of cost to the upkeep of my bike. Generously I’d put it at $200/year maybe, but I’ve also spent some amount of upfront cost buying the thing.
Health insurance is free in my country. A visit to the doctor will set you back perhaps $30, with a cap of ~$150 per year. There’s also a cap on prescription medicine at $300 per year.
Water + electricity + internet was included in the total monthly cost for the apartment. Our electricity/water costs represent maybe $30 of that expense post, and the internet comes at no extra cost in the apartment coop. I get a phone plan as a part of my employment contract, so I don’t have to spend anything on that.
For food at home, me and my partner spend maybe $400 between ourselves generously on home-cooked meals. For eating out it’s maybe $100 a month at most.
I cut my hair once every three months for around $30. My gym membership is $40/year, which covers both me and my partner (seriously, I love my apartment coop, it’s the best). The only subscriptions I have are a VPN subscription setting me back a little under $4/month and Nebula which is $37.5/year. The toiletries I included in the food expenses.
Student loans are comparatively inexpensive to service in my country. I pay about $200 quarterly on it.
Weddings are not particularly common among my friends, and the last time I attended one was more than 5 years ago.
I don’t really drink any more, so there’s no expense to be had on the alcohol front.
Where I spend more is on vacations - I have 6 weeks of paid vacation per year, and I try to make good use of it. Sometimes this means taking the train to visit family, which is not particularly expensive since the train is cheap and food and accomodation with family is free, but at least once a year it means a longer vacation where we stay at hotels and eat out every day, making it a more costly affair.
Being able to take home $5500 a month in my country would be extremely uncommon though, placing you very highly on the income scale.
Sell the $20,000 suv and get a 2004 Honda Civic or similar, and dont borrow any money to buy it
This! There are few things financially stupider than loaning money at a high rate to purchase a rapidly depreciating asset.
I have been essentially carless for almost three years. I own a car, but it’s “on loan” to my mom because she lives where a car is an essential and I don’t, and she’s too poverty-stricken to buy one.
That said, I bought a Segway Max G3 in June and it’s awesome for getting around if you only need to operate within a 5-6 mile radius. The mileage is way higher if you stick to 10mph, but I’m a speed demon. I actually save a lot of money on energy costs because it takes way less electric to charge the battery than would be consumed if I were at home using my devices, appliances, and running heat or A/C.
Just make sure to shop for a deal and don’t buy the first one you see. I saved $400 on the one I bought. It was a floor model from a retailer in LA that only had 4 miles on the odometer.
to add on to this, a lot of places you dont need a motorcycle license (although classes are a good idea regardless) to ride a 50cc moped. got one last year and it is saving my ass on maintenance and gas. follow licensing/registration laws, guys :)
Car dependency is definitely not bankrupting people… The wealth Gap and wage Gap and unrestrained capitalism are bankrupting people. But sure car dependencies definitely a part of that
You missing a $150 monthly expense for weed. Other than that I can tell you’re overspending on your car, $70 on car insurance is cheap lol as a 26 yo.
And cars are this expensive after we’ve made almost all roads completely free to drive on.
I have a degree and I have never made 85k in my life. I never get a yearly vacation either, I hate to break it to whoever this person is but this is not “middle class” in 2026. This is upper middle class at least.
I have degrees, make $110k before taxes and overtime. Our household makes over $200k before taxes, with 2 kids. We are upper middle class, i think. $85k, single person household is firmly middle class.
We do 1-2 large vacations with a dozen camp trips yearly. Our vehicles average age is also 20 years old and our house is way below what we could afford, so that may be part of our financial freedom.
My spouse and I have three degrees between the two of us and neither of us has ever made that much. At this point we will likely be too old for kids before we can afford them.
I got lucky and ended up at a job with almost infinite growth. Masters in mechE and I do controls, scada, and inventory management stuff. My wife is a high paid dental assistant.
My job is imposter syndrome defined. I enter a factory and I’m the most important person in the building, but I feel like I barely understand what I’m doing. Wish I could give career advice besides ‘be the expert in the room’. Which I know cant be everyone.
There is no middle class.
You either work to live or you own the means.
Bro, YOU’RE being robbed. If you spent less time trying to act like this is some pie-in-the-sky dream you’d have more energy to fight for yourself and others.
You’ve just been lied to, or so beaten down that your expectarions for middle class have declined.
The OP’s math should be middle class.
I wouldn’t put too much stock into the actual numbers. Even in just the US, the same middle class lifestyle might be $50k in one location and $200k in another.
Case in point, I live in a comfortable single-bedroom apartment in a low crime rate area for $650 a month. OP’s figure is almost triple that.
sounds more like you’re not middle class if you don’t have income for discretionary spending
that’s, like, the definition of middle class
By the classic definition I am middle class by virtue of having a degree and not being in a blue collar job.
We understand the usage and meaning of the term middle class VERY differently
You are going to need to take that up with Wikipedia:
Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation’s income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%.
That doesn’t say anything about blue collar or having a degree.
The trades are blue collar and can make more than a lot of lower paying white collar jobs. Hell, I just had a union blue collar job back in the day and had to be picky about which tech career path I took out of that because it paid as well as the lower end jobs I had been eyeing.
The classic definition of middle class was, as far as I learned it, making enough money that you could afford to pay for your family’s expenses without needing your wife to also work.
This came out of the poor working conditions in factories in the 1800s, where people often were hurt, maimed, or even killed (compared to today, this was quite common). If you made enough money that only one family member had to suffer (at this time it was always the husband), that was the bare minimum to be considered middle class. This was regardless of income, it was more about what you could afford.
Prior to this, I’m not sure middle class was really much of a concept. Most groups were separated by trade and upbringing, and pretty much overall separating the low class from artisans, merchants, nobility, and royalty, with no real middle class afaik. It was, for example, quite common for artisan families to all work together
Edit: i feel compelled to share that i studied history for my degree, and i am sharing one of the definitions i was taught.
Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation’s income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%.
From Wikipedia.
I thought we were talking classical definitions, not the definition/s currently considered common according to Wikipedia.
I had no intention of declaring your personal financial situation. I was trying to provide historical context for the term (as far as I know).
No we were talking about your understanding of what middle class means but if you are going to to be pedantic:
The modern usage of the term “middle-class”, however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General’s report, in which the statistician T. H. C. Stevensonidentified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class.[15] The middle class includes: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is control of significant human capital while still being under the dominion of the elite upper class, who control much of the financial and legal capital in the world.
I’m not sure where the combativeness is coming from. I came in to share my understanding of the origin of the concept of middle class. I was not intending on being pedantic.
There’s no need to aggressively copy and paste a few Wikipedia articles and pretend to be an expert
Some places also have required inspections at certain intervals for vehicles. I think it was every other year in Texas and cost like $45. Also tags in places that do that which was yearly from what I remember.
$420
“Miscellaneous expense” bro spends almost as much on weed as gas…
I am fortunate enough that I could buy an apartment last year (south Germany) my mortgage+refinancing is about the same as your rent.
I have not own a car since 2017 and I don’t think I would have been able to afford to buy an apartment if I did have a car this whole time.
Annual vacation costing $1500 🤣
for one person? yeah
The car is not the issue here. There is so much wrong with how much this person has spent a lot of items/services.
WTF $70 for internet? Is it that normal?
I pay 21€ for mine.
In the US, yes. It’s stupid expensive because we gave the telecoms a lot of money to upgrade the infrastructure and they didn’t, so we gave them a bunch more but they still didn’t. So now we pay off our debt to telecoms by paying too much for internet. Freedom.
Wasn’t even optional at my last place, just added on as a fee so they could say rent was lower, base rent was like $800, ended up costing more like $1100 after non optional fees.
It’s $100/month in my building in NYC. Cable internet, maybe 300mb/s down. But I get packet loss upwards of 20% sometimes.
European internet is heavily subsidized by the state
Canadian Internet is not.
180 per month :(
Are you rural? We get it for $80 a month. 2gb/s from Rogers. Technically rural as well but just on the outskirts of a city.
Canada’s problem is not a lack of subsidy. It’s the state’s tolerance for oligopoly.
Source: I grew up in Canada and moved to Europe in my 30s.
Nice joke
$120/month for 1Gbps here in the suburbs.
1750 for a suicide apartment
It’s troll post
I found a 1br in Springfield, MA for $1750 after 10 seconds of searching.
I was thinking, WTF $70 for internet? I pay almost $200.
It also have $100/month of attending weddings. Those are rare enough they get rolled into vacation expenses normally.
Also parking is in hangouts instead of cars lol.
Not the point of the post, i know, but who spends 70$ a month on on “gym”? I bought weights and a pullup bar for a one-time payment of like 50$, and i jog outside for free
Planet Fitness for $15/month
*$70 and *$50. Congratulations, you look like an idiot.
Lol what?
They’re being ridiculous about it, but the dollar sign is placed before the number.
Aah right, the currency symbol is after the number where I’m from so I did the same here out of habit
Could be something like a YMCA which I personally prefer over a Planet Fitness when I do have a gym membership. One example of my preference for it is because mentally I can’t do treadmills when running and some places I have lived before haven’t bean great for running outside. Most YMCAs have an indoor track that you can run on even if it is tiny, and there are usually multiple options across town. Not many other gyms in my area with indoor tracks.
That’s a really dumb example. The OP could be a swimmer in which case a more expensive YMCA membership makes even more sense then. Just as another example.
I wouldn’t have the space for a home gym. I could sort out the shed with a new roof, but there is no power and the walls are done for, so 35 quid a month it is.
A friend got a $30/month gym membership that has unlimited guest passes, so they bring friends. The machines are fun. I think there’s classes too, but guests can’t do those so I haven’t.
Yeah, for that price, they should be getting the whole James.
Lots of people pay $70 a month, I was paying $200 at one point for CrossFit classes
I mean we can pick this apart in a ton of ways. $60/m on clothes? My house would be 80% plain cotton T-shirts by mass. I probably spend a bit more than that in a while year. Typically that’s a carton of socks and replacing a couple pairs of pants which get damaged.
But then I probably spend like $500/m at one bar near my house.
I think my next door neighbors are not going to be thrilled to have 220kg+ deadlifts dropped above them.
Having said that, I don’t spend 70 a month for the gym, and I currently have two memberships.
60 for electricity! Wow.
Its 30 minimum where I’m at. Because thats how much they charge you without the 40c per kilowatt. Crazy
yeah. here in new england it’s about 200 a month average. sometimes it’s 180. sometimes it’s 300. yay.
Oof. Yeah I feel that.
Actual unhinged electricity rates, many places you get cheaper rate than that for using a fast EV charger
If you go outside where I’m at, its suddenly half the price. But yeah its a bit worse than this website:
https://nrgcleanpower.com/learning-center/fresno-electricity-rates/
PGE sucks.
There’s a metric ton of solar being put up because its super expensive to have PGE.
Well, until January. I planned a solar setup to get partially offgrid to avoid $400 PG&E bills, but installations trigger tax assessments next year. Completely negates any benefits.
Ive looked at plug in solar. It seems like it would be useful. A coworker of mine has a solar mini-split. Both look interesting to me. PGE Fucking sucks.
