I like my job but as usual I feel I should get another one and try and make more money.
Anyway here is my question. How much money should a single man in Chicago make. This is my goal.
I want to be able to live in a nice (no roaches) 1 bed apt with furniture. Go one a one week vacation once a year. Make a car payment and be able to buy some new clothes maybe once every other month.
I’m guessing about 35,000/year. But this seems like a lot but still when I look at decent apts etc this seems a reasonable goal. Or is it too much not enuff. What does everyone think?
Figure out a weekly/monthly/yearly budget for expenses. Include anything you can think of. When it comes to variable costs like an electric bill, go with an average per month.
After you figure out your outgoing cash flow for the year, figure out how much you want staying in, in the form of savings, investments, rainy day money, just in case money. basically, the amount of money you would feel comfortable in actually getting to keep.
Add the 2 together, and be sure to account for taxes. Wow, that made me sound like a monetary dork. Time to apply for the Alex P. Keaton school of economics.
We went right out there and refused to do accoustical versions of the electrical songs that we had refused to record in the first place.
Sell your soul.
Make all the money you can.
Step on those around you to get what you want.
You can NEVER have enough money.
:::heartless, money-grubbing hat off:::
Listen to Mullinator. Budget.
You can live with only one one-week vacation a year? I’d go mad. I’d take off a week of no pay just to get another vacation.
handy made a good comment - related to a situation that occurred in my own life recently. I just accepted a position with a company who did not make me an offer - they asked me what I would take. So, I had to research it (which involved calling a half dozen guys I could trust and having to ask the question, “What do you make?”). I got some consistent replies and based my reply on those and got exactly what I wanted.
IIRC, Mark, you’re a travel agent. Is that right? I think, if you want to move up, you need a target level that you want to achieve.
Don’t ask what you need to make, ask what you WANT to spend. Some people (my brother) live hand to mouth on over several thousand dollars a month due to their outrageous spending habits. Other people (like me) live on less than 400.00 a month.
It all comes down to what is important to you. For example: I’d be willing to take the bus at 30.00 a month rather than pay 400.00 for the ownership of a car. If a good apartment costs 800.00 a month but a slightly smaller one (with some bugs) goes for 400.00 you need to decide what is more important; having that extra 400.00 to work with or having no bugs in your dwelling. It’s a matter of choice.
Best!
Byz
Voted most sex obsessed. (Yeah, blow me smart ass!)
I’m with Byz on this. Personally, I can live with less stuff and enjoy what I have.
It’s learning to live with less and making intelligent choices on what you do need.
Oh, and if I worked at a company where I only received one week a year off, I’d opt for the extra one week unpaid or not take the job. Vacation time is THAT critical to me.
Repeat after me my mantra’s to understand the Zen of Shirley:
There will never be enough money.
Make money your God and it will hound you like the devil.
Told to me by a property manager in Chicago:
“All the apartments in this city have them, but in the slums they’re roaches. In the nice apartments they’re water bugs.” I opted for the roaches and was charged only 250.00 a month for an efficiency on Kenmore (north of Wrigleyville, running beteen Irving Park and St Mary’s of the Lake) because it was on the ground floor on an alley, and all they’d need to do was break a window to get at me. The closest thing to a burglar in that alley was a tabby cat in heat pulling a train of tomcats one afternoon (I put a saucer of milk out for her between engagements.)Granted, 250.00 a month was ten years ago, but then, I couldn’t even dream of 35,000.00. Good luck Marxxx, and remember, there’s only one unforgivable sin in Chicago: being a sucker.
I am not sure $35,000 will be enough to free you enough to get away from feeling like you are living from paycheck to paycheck, at least not with the goals you described. It has been years since I made that little and even then it wasn’t enough. The car I had was used, and I had to borrow money for problems that popped up along the way. I would say shoot for $60,000 if you have an occupation that can support that figure.
On a side note, I would like to add that a lot of people making very little money seem to live very happy and contented lives. I make an incredible amount of money by most people’s standards, within the top 5% if not top 1% (I haven’t seen the latest surveys of what salaries are today in America) and I am lonely and desperately unhappy. I am not the person to tell you how to be happy, but I did at least try to answer your question about a reasonable income for the goals you outlined.
Originally posted by Markxxx:
I’m guessing about 35,000/year. But this seems like a lot
HighTechBurrito replied:
You’re lucky! Some people I know have trouble living on $50,000 a year. I do live in the Silicon Valley, so that explains a lot.
Markxxx – a good rule of thumb is to be making your age x 1,000. That is, you want a salary of $35,000 a year if you are 35 years old; $40,000 a year if you are 40, etc. Others have suggested making rent x 4, etc. but the problem with that is that we all tend to spend as much as we earn. As you make more money, you will start spending more so you’ll never be quite out of debt, etc.
As for making $50,000 a year in Silicon Valley, yes, that will BARELY get you by! The cost of living (and worse, the lack of housing) is SO terrible in Silicon Valley that most houses are on the market only one day before dozens of people WITH CASH TO OFFER are standing in line to buy them up. It’s a complete sellers’ market right now. I have friends of mine who needs to move to Cupertino (home of the Apple Macs) – she applied to over a dozen places in a week and none of the landlords would even bother to return her call. Another friend of mine has an approved loan for $200,000 and he couldn’t find anything for under $300,000 (so he’s gonna go buy a small apartment unit instead). I realize it’s a cyclical thing (just wait until the bottom drops out on the NASDAQ for long periods), but it’s real tough for those looking for housing.
If you want to buy an affordable house (less than $200,000), you will have to move out to Tracy (that’s 80 minutes away with no traffic). Ain’t nothing affordable in the Valley unless you are an engineer making $100,000 married to another engineer making $200,000. [talk about “revenge of the nerds” – if ANYBODY told you that there was no reason to take all those hard math classes in high school and then go off to college and choose a hard science instead of liberal arts, they were wrong!]
Maybe this sounds like an asshole bragging about making lots of money, but I’m in exactly the same place. It’s not worth bragging about. Out culture values money above all things, but if you really want to enjoy life money isn’t going to do it. Make a budget, find out how much you need to make to avoid going into debt, and try to make that much. But whatever you do don’t put money ahead of the really important things in life.
Splat, I am not sure if you are calling me an asshole or not. But I wasn’t trying to brag. I was trying to relate what I knew. If I said “I’ve heard of people making lots of money and not being happy” then I would just be stating an opinion without any defendable documentation. But I was giving my experience, which is a fact. I realize the OP wasn’t about whether money and happiness are related, it was just something on my mind. I am sorry I offended anyone with my reply. If the moderator would edit my original post and remove the offending paragraph I would appreciate it.
Absolutely not! I’m sorry if it sounded like I was. In my experience when I make comments like yours (like I said, I’m in exactly the same boat) people who think money is the solution to everything tend to react negatively. My comment was a clumsy (and apparently ineffective) attempt to defuse this.
This may be a little off topic, but I’m just stunned by how expensive housing is in some parts of the US…
I’m in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, and here, there are many houses for in the area of $70-90k, and these are pretty decent houses… if you’re willing to get a fixer-upper, you can find some within 20 minutes of town, for under $40k.
I only made $23k last year, and if I knew how to budget properly, I’d be able to get by easily, supporting a wife and 2 kids. If I was supporting myself alone, I’d be considered pretty well off…
Does anybody know where someone with only high school education, and 5 years experience in the bakery field, can find better than $14/hour? (and where the cost of living doesn’t counteract the increase in salary)
Denver’s been good to me. Really good. I have a ninth grade education, and feel like I’m doing pretty well. Then again, you don’t have to be well educated to be a decent salesperson, only articulate and persuasive.
Glenoled: The cost of housing in the U.S. and Canada are both extremely location dependent. Moncton may be cheap, but try buying a house in Vancouver. A decent bungalow can set you back $350,000. On the other hand, my wife and I were in Ft. Lauderdale a few years ago, and were amazed to find that the houses were generally about 20% cheaper than they are here in Edmonton, which still has some of the cheapest housing for a major city in Canada.
And remember, in the U.S. you can deduct your mortgage interest, which makes a house maybe 15% cheaper to own.
Markxxx, since you are apparently young, I cannot emphasize enough: put money away in investments! Open a Roth IRA and a Datek account and put as much in as you can…because time, not the market, is your friend.
Fortunately for me, the State of Florida put lots of money into my retirement rather than paying me a great salary, and having seen that money quadruple over the past couple of years has made me really thankful.
Putting just $5,000 away now could mean half a million by the time you retire (depending on your age, of course).
On the money <> happiness issue: I’ve always been content but ambitious, and my happiness never depended on my wealth (sometimes, in fact, I think a complete disaster would be a nice change of pace for me). I started out as a Deputy Sheriff at $9,600 a year; now, at 10+ times that, my core life isn’t much different - just what hangs on the wall and sits in the garage!
