If you made 100k a year where I grew up, you could buy a house every single year. Not a mortgage or down payment, you could pay for the full cost of quite a few houses with less than a 100k.

Start off with this worthless anecdote (they reveal later they grew up in rural Appalachia mountains).

This. Majority of times people don't manage their money. 100k is enough if you not buying nonsense. I know people that live in less and do better

Or single mom with 2 kids, a $3300 monthly mortgage, (my house is 50 years old) and prices just keep going up.... got a hybrid to help on gas... just got my car tab bill and it was almost $600.... I feel like I'm constantly drowning, despite making more on paper than both my parents combined....

Buying a hybrid to help on gas . Includes the rent to give us a good idea she can't somehow make it on $4,000 a month after taxes and mortgage .

Not disagreeing with your main point, but I want to point out that as a fellow grad student, we tend to forget we do have subsidized apartments, free healthcare, comparatively very small commutes on avg etc on top of our salary.

Uhh none of that was true for me or anyone else at my school, or most of the grad students I've interacted with, aside from basic (non-dental/vision) healthcare being included in the funding package for some programs. We lived in the city because it was generally cheaper than living near campus and we did not have subsidized housing. Rent took up about thirty percent of my stipend.

So in other words, you lived nowhere near where you wanted to live? Thats a big thing about the COL in relation to the 100k target OP laid out.

Also, were you a student pre-pandemic? Were you a student pre-pre pandemic? The costs have only rise insanely high in the last 4 years. 5 years ago you could have bought a house in my neighbourhood for 150k, today its 500k.

Now imagine making 100k a year and having to rent a 400k condo in order to live in a decent neighbourhood, walk to work, have any space at all, etc. And all of a sudden now youre meant to somehow save for a down payment while rent sucks up half of your 100k a year paycheque.

And I know what youre going to say. "4k is way too much for rent, you need a cheaper apartment" and of course, you would need to rent a cheaper apartment, in a less nice neighbourhood, and smaller, with fewer amenities... But remember.. youre making 100k a year, how is that not a ridiculous situation to be in?

This is a different responder (or they forgot to log back into the account) but it's delightfully weird. All kinds of leaps in logic and even uses a stupid measure (rent a $400k condo) hoping you wouldn't think about how much this person is actually paying for rent. Can you imagine not living exactly where you want? Not I.

Where I live, to rent a three bedroom house costs about $3,500 per month.

If you assume mom and dad both have a car and car insurance, assume a family cell phone plan, electric and gas bills, gas for the car, assume a normal amount of credit card debt and assume a normal assortment of medical expenses and assorted media payments... Then add groceries for a family of four, plus some dental/orthodontist/medical costs for the kids, you're up to needing about $6k let month just to break even.

$6k per month is about what you'll make after taxes if you earn $10k per month, which is $120k per year. So that's about the break even point for a middle class family of four.

This poor guy carefully crafted this scenario where he came up with all the expenses he could for a family of four but they only went up to $70k a year. So he just assumes a 40% tax rate (it's more like 15%).

Massive generalization: Jobs that pay this well tend to exist in expensive areas. I can see how someone making 125k with kids in NYC would legitimately struggle, but you'd be a very rich man in my little town.

This. Our house old income is 300k…we also bought a house for 700k and had to bid 100k over asking price. It's wild out there…

To put things into perspective, before buying a home, we were paying $2600 for a 1 br, 800 sqft apartment.

I can't tell if this is a humblebrag, a lie, or he just completely misread what this post was saying. There are also a lot of similar responses too. Just to save you some effort, even if this person lived in California and bought this house at a 7% mortgage rate they would be netting about $17,500 a month and the mortgage would be like $6,000-7,000.

I live in NYC, I Make 6 figures. It's easy to not have money when

-the cheapest dirty takeout food place costs $40.

-Groceries while coupon clipping is $500 a week.

Now this guy is definitely a liar. Lists a bunch of other things.

Single mom of 3, Sonoma county. Rent with no utilities going for over $3k. When my landlord passed a rent increase on to me that brought my rent to $3,650, I balked and gave up lease figuring I would find something. Oops. Now can't find a place, seems new market rate. Now paying a hotel what rent was and my things that are important are in storage. Stopped tonight and bought- clementines, crackers, chicken, Parmesan cheese and some kalmatta olives and wtf almost $80!! Can't seem to save and get ahead.

“Single mom of 3”

Stopped reading. There's your answer

A ton of other posts where you know they're either just making up numbers that feel right, or there's $700 a month worth of uber eats orders they're not mentioning.