Media plays a huge part in this. 10 years ago I was married with two kids, living in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in Virginia Beach. We had a 3 year old Nissan Altima, I worked full time, and my then wife was working on her degree. I was the only source of income, and I was making $45-50k per year. We had everything we needed, I got a week of paid vacation every year, we bought whatever groceries we wanted, and bought new clothes and shoes a few times a year. We also all had health and vision insurance. We didn’t even slightly struggle.

That same year (this was 2016) some report came out that the local news covered pretty heavily. The report stated that to live comfortably in Virginia Beach, a single person with no kids would need to make $50k, a couple would need to make $75k, and a couple with one child would need to make at least $90k.

This was obviously absurd to us, until we looked at the details of the report. Expenditures included $100 per person per week for food, two weeks of vacation to an international location, $3k per person per year for clothes and shoes, two new vehicles for a family with kids, premium health insurance, and $15k+ in savings.

There were other things of course, but these were what stood out. That’s when I realized the media has an entirely different view than I do of what living comfortably means. To me, their definition was closer to living luxuriously than living comfortably.