It is 1 million degrees in my attic.
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Ew.
According to the article, “…‘comfortable’ was defined as the annual income required to cover a 50/30/20 budget, allocating 50% of earnings to necessities such as housing and utility costs, 30% to discretionary spending, and 20% to savings or investments."
I have a bachelor’s and 15 years of experience, 11 years at the same company, and I am still not making quite as much money as the infographic says I’d need in Colorado.
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Whoa, I definitely would have expected the “lower COL” states to be…lower?
(I’m also now internally laughing/crying over the comfortable Indiana salary being $85k, when I made $11k as a grad student 
)
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I make slightly over 50% of what it says I need in my state. Feels about right for how “comfortable” I feel
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Louisiana should probably be higher on account of home insurance rates being well into the 5 figures for a lot of folks. Which also gets passed down to renters.
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That is a LOT of money. Ouch. Also expected there to be lower cost states than listed.
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Do you feel comfortable on that salary? There’s such a a big range and variability within states that I have a hard time taking them too seriously.
I make (quite a bit) over the amount shown for my state and we are definitely comfortable. My sister lives only an hour away from me and makes 50% of the amount shown and is fairly comfortable…she lives in a much lower cost area than I do and her 4 bd house cost less than half of what my condo did (for example).
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I’m at about 2/3 of the comfortable amount for our LCOL state, and we’re disgustingly rich for our area. You can’t really make this a statewide thing.
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Agreed - this sort of statistic is only valuable in the most macro sense, and isn’t really useful elsewise. Like, yeah, the coasts (and especially the northeast and pacific coast in general plus AK and HI are the most expensive places to live in the US. In general. And like… we all know that. There is absolutely a huge range though, even in the “expensive” states. You can have LCOL areas in HCOL states. I live in one. (Or at the very least, MCOL.) My parents live in a development where there are some truly rich people (like multiple multiple millionaires) and yet the county that they live in has the second highest poverty rate in that (generally) LCOL state (and it is truly abysmal the conditions so many people live in in their county, so many people have so little).
(Also I didn’t read the article, so I’m just stirring up sh*!, sorry!)
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I thought that with my recent raise we were over the household (2 adults raising 2 kids) comfortable income, but we’re not. Fort Collins is on the expensive side of Colorado cities, but we’re more affordable than Denver or Boulder, at least.
I’d say we’re comfortable. We’re definitely saving more than 20% of our income, even paying for daycare. I think that might be helped by the fact that we got into the housing market at just the right time (twice!) - our mortgage is at 2.6%.
My sister is making ~ $50k a year in the same city, and she’s DEFINITELY not comfortable. Maybe if she had a roommate. Right now housing is eating up almost 45% of her gross income, and she can’t afford health insurance.
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The data this pulls is from the MIT Living Wage calculator – I’d go look at that directly for your metro area as opposed to looking at state-wide metrics. My parents live in New York State and the living wage for their county is about 1/3 of the state living wage. 
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Ooh, interesting. I wonder what the difference is between the Living wage on the MIT site and the Comfortable wage definition from that study. The living wage for our area is listed at $24.54/hr., half of the infographic.
ETA - it says you need to make $27/hr to live in Aspen, that sounds super low.
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Oh, interesting. College Town shows a living wage of $38k before taxes, which seems reasonable.
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The Comfortable wage was pulled from the MIT Living Wage calculator, just from their state level calculator.
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I was swishing mouthwash and went to the closet to grab pajamas when I got a powerful urge to sneeze. I tried to suppress it, but ended up with mouthwash in my nose and all over my clothes. My nose is burning. Rude.
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That has never happened to me but I can feel it. Ugh sorry
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Ooh thats nasty. I hope your nose recovers
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I may have Tiny Complainted this before but I hate it when I answer the phone and the other person says “hello?” YOU called ME, and you know I’m on the line because it connected!
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It is warm tap water season. At night when I wash my face, the cold tap is at least 100 degrees 
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I can’t even imagine. That sounds awful.
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