Well said.
I think the center of your personal issue is that jobs in your career field are very tenuous & giggy even by contemporary standards. When you’re working, the money is GREAT by ordinary American standards. But that also means it’s a high wire with a long way to fall when e.g. $200K suddenly turns into $0.
As a result, a prudent player in your space really needs to pretend their take-home pay is about half what it is to account for the fact it’s not probably not coming all 12 months of this year or any year.
I had a sorta similar precariousness in that I worked as a union worker in a seniority-based field for a company that spent 25 years teetering in and out of bankruptcy. I wasn’t there that whole time, but much of it.
It was a huge gamble: proactively change companies and start over at the bottom of the seniority pile with the shitty life and low newbie status and wages all over again? Guaranteed to never achieve the (well paid) upper ranks before aging out into retirement? O stick it out here for an OK-not-great wage with tolerable workplace status while hoping like hell every day that this place survives another 20 years to retirement? Scary stressful shit I assure you.
Living on half your take home income and saving / investing the rest was the norm. Along with having a second business / side hustle to back up your precarious main job. Which habit eventually paid off quite nicely for me, thank you. Now retired, I’m not quite a 1%er, but close. With luck I’ll get there, albeit too late to really enjoy it.
If you and your wife both had fairly secure jobs as generic middle / upper-middle managers, where you could reliably assume you could serve at least 10 years in each position without a forced job change, your financial position, and more importantly your psychological / emotional position would be utterly different, even if your W2s were the same as now (when you’re working).
Moving on to the macro case ...
IMO it's the loss of the "jobs for life" that is killing (has killed?) the middle class. Or at least the jobs for life assumption.
Joe Lunchbucket down at the (non-union) plant may not make a great wage, but he knew he could count on it as he was considering buying a car. Whether he was paying cash from savings or getting a car loan he knew he’d have the future paycheck cashflow to refill the savings or pay the loan payments. Even less “glamorous” jobs like poor Brenda slinging hash down at the diner could reasonably count on the diner staying in business for decades and as long as she kept showing up, old Mel the owner would keep paying her. And the customers would keep showing up, so Mel would have the cashflow to do so.
To be sure, there’s some rose-tinted glasses in my story. Businesses large and small shut down or moved all the time even during the glory days of the post-war boom. But they were the exception not the rule. Ordinary people reasonably expected, and usually experienced, that their current job would last until they themselves voluntarily moved on or they screwed it up by drinking, fighting, whatever and got fired.
Nowadays churn for churn’s sake is the standard. It’s all about the numbers for the big money that controls the corporate world, and the shop floor workers and middle managers are at the tip of that whip being cracked daily.
