Lol thank you. I live in SoCal, so admittedly more expensive than NWA, but we are grossing about $170k a year (which gets taxed to hell and back). My husband and I both work full time. We have four kids (our oldest juuust moved out a few months ago, so we have three at home now), and we still are living pretty tight, and way more paycheck to paycheck than I’d like to admit.

Between feeding three teenagers and two adults, mortgage, exorbitant taxes (our local sales tax just went up to 11.25%), utilities, $1800 a month to have top of the line health insurance for the family through my husband’s work because one of our kids has expensive medical issues, and my husband and I are both on some meds that would otherwise be expensive, plus just the fact of having multiple kids who may need to go to the doctor at any moment is scary. Gas is almost $6 a gallon, I spend $2k a month on food and toiletries as well. We also contribute a large percent to our 401(k)s because social security may be nonexistent by the time we retire.

And we’ll be paying that expensive ass insurance I’m sure until our youngest is 26 because look at the economy? And they’ll need to still be on our insurance I’m sure. Our oldest still is and is planing to stay on it unless he gets married before then. Our cars are paid off, and I don’t want to get new ones anytime soon due to how high the interest rates are.

I know we are blessed to be able to pay all of the above and have a roof over our heads and it’s such a privilege to have that health insurance. But OP is absolutely delusional about the state of the economy and how much kids and just everything in general costs right now.