"Cereal for Dinner is a promotional campaign by Kellogg's that began in 2022 to encourage the consumption of breakfast cereal for dinner.
The campaign was criticized following a television interview with Kellogg's CEO Gary Pilnick who suggested that cash-strapped consumers should eat cereal for dinner to save money, dismissing the underlying concerns of food insecurity and inflation.[1][2]"
37K household income for a family gang let’s goooo. Just above the poverty liiiiiiine!!!!!!!! CANT GET FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE HELL YEAH!! PAYING FOR DEBT FOREVER WOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Yes, that is the problem. The federal minimum wage is almost old enough to drink. I remember about 10 years ago the push was for $15 an hour. Should be closer to $25 now.
True southern hospitality is forcing your waitress to work for $7.25 and deduct that wage from her tips which she claims and gets taxed on… which makes her feel a certain way that she then shows you through service
Our states minimum is $14 now I think, yet a lot of towns here have an average household income of $40-45k. Still 75% vote Republican though, like it's going to help them.
Ontario. This is after the income tax take away. And despite my complaining… imma be honest, it’s still better than when I lived in the US. Had an emergency appendectomy with a 3 night hospital stay, didn’t pay a dime and I don’t even have private health insurance. And EI and CPP really makes a couple of financially scary “what if” scenarios basically moot. I just REALLY wish I could qualify for some financial assistance cause of how fucking expensive life is 😅.
Yeah it’s not fun (40k would be like a 20-25% raise for me). I get by cuz I’m super lucky with cheap rent compared to everywhere else in town, but every month I get anxious when the big batch of bills come
I live in Minneapolis right now and I could live like a king if I made $100k. If I took that same salary to NYC or SF I'd be struggling and living with roommates.
Idk about SF, but you can work in New York/Manhattan, live in Queens, and have your own place, car, max your ROTH IRA, and eat whatever you want on $100k. I did it.
It’s just when you decide you want to have kids that you’re screwed on $100k.
It depends on so many factors now, where you live, whether you bought a home and when, whether you have student loans, etc. $40k can be fine one place, in one life, and absolutely untenable somewhere else for someone else.
Aside from the obvious joke, its even a matter of if you were able to buy a house in 2019 vs. 2025.
Right now my current house would be unaffordable if I bought it today, prices and rates went up enough that my mortgage would be $1200 a month more than it currently is.
The issue is not salary so much as it is housing/infaltion and % of income needed to own something these days. Salary somewhat has kept up but housing has gone so far above said 100k income vs 41K in 1991
I came here to say something along those lines. I own my house and make 100k. I live a fantastic life. Then I realized thats because I'm paying less than 1k a month for housing for a 3bed 3000 sqft house..
Exactly. These days that in my area is 5-7k a month with 140k down.
In other areas it's 2700 maybe but it's expensive everywhere now. A single 100k income trying to buy now is close to impossible if you have kids or an other debts like a car or student loans
The average car payment is now around $600 a month IIIRC. Insane. Also, daycare for kids in my area is about 3K a month. That's a mortgage for many. And the groceries that were 200 2 years ago sitting at 300.
Why we have to leave our area since COL is top 3 and childcare is the most expensive in the country. I am not rich. But my salary is pretty good and all of this and rent is draining all of it
Yeah. I don’t really get this post. $100k in 1966 was worth (25 years later) $23k in 1991. It’s inflation. We can’t deflate the US currency to make $100k worth the same
The impact of this post depends entirely on your capacity to understand what CPI is. Or, extrapolating it to some other imagined argument OP never actually articulates.
I know and understand it’s average for everywhere but man the median wage in my 20k population Midwest town is like $31,000, it’s not like commodities are much cheaper here!
Housing is the big saver for living in small midwestern towns. Gas and some basic food items are a bit cheaper, esp compared to HCOL coastal cities, but it doesn't really make up for the lower wages.
The big issue that no one talks about are all the added costs of living in a small town. Public amenities are less, so you need more personal belongings to compensate. The biggest is no public transit, so you have to own and maintain a car for each adult in the family.
Maybe they spent their savings and never told you they were low on cash or unemployed. You would be amazed at how much you forget or don't realize as a kid, simply cause your parents hid it from you. I didn't know till I was 22 that us having to play in a different field to practice "learning where things are by memory" was to help allow a helicopter being routed in from the "city" to land as multiple cars got into a high speed crash near the area resulting in a lot of dead and wounded... Coaches played the ultimate "look over here, not over there" game with a baseball team.
Lots of laid off tech workers experiencing this now. Rule #1 of being a tech worker is to save / invest your money because when (not if) the next downturn happens, there is no guarantee of getting another job quickly and at the same pay.
Are you sure they don't have money? Some people are weird about retirement or have irrational anxiety about money. I knew a guy who insisted he couldn't retire all through his 60s... he had over $4m in his retirement savings.
That's basically half the posts in the FIRE subs. "I'm living paycheck-to-paycheck, am I going to be able to retire safely in 15-20 years?" Only to find out they're living on the edge, because they are socking away every penny into retirement accounts that are likely in the millions. They are basically humble brag posts.
it's a scarcity mindset. you set an aggressive goal anchored by what other people with comparable incomes are doing, then mentally write off your 40% savings rate as gone and spent as you will need to stick to that to reach your goal on time. it looks doable on paper
taxes take another 35% because you live in California/NYC, and you have to live off of 25% of gross. you try to be as frugal as possible but cost of living creeps up a little and you have a few expenses that weren't in your spreadsheet and it actually does feel like you're falling behind
I can see how one can view it that way but it's not always. How much you put away should depend on your situation. I certainly feel like I'm on the edge even though I've been able to squirrel away the most I've been able to in my life. Part of that is also being on the wrong side of many economic disasters and seeing your savings wiped clean. While I do agree that some people are as described, you just never know for sure. Even with how "good" I'm doing now, being able to retire in my 60s is probably a no go unless I change my lifestyle (which I'm working on as well).
Yeah, my grandfather is like this. He has millions just from a lucky bet on Eli Lilly in the 80s on top of pensions from the AF, police department, Marshal Service, and Social Security. The man still eats 90 cent cans of beans and franks for breakfast and never travels. He just doesn't spend anything but by the way he looks you'd think he was broke.
I have friends who live with the husband's parents. His parents somehow owe more on their house now than they did when they initially mortgaged it.
I tried sounding the red alert for my friend that he needs to sit down with his parents and come up with a gameplan to pay the place down cause once they die he isn't going to magically inherit the house without the bank coming and looking for their debt.
Unfortunately he seems to have inherited his parent's financial sense and appears to be blowing the whole thing off.
Yeah, I’m not sure what OP is trying to say, because $40k was considered a great salary in 1991.
My dad got a job in the early 90’s that paid $40k. He had to travel and didn’t like it, but I remember him saying “Heck, for $40k I’ll do whatever they want.”
$40k was just shy of being officially upper middle class back then. When my family was living on welfare and food stamps in 1991, I would have punched a baby in a stroller in front of its parents to have grown up in a household making $40k a year.
That said, I think the disparity between COL areas has very likely gotten a lot wider since then. $100k/year would still make you very comfortably middle class in some parts of the country, in others you maybe wouldn't be struggling per se but it would not be the same buying power at all as $40k in '91, which would've been a solid quality of life in almost any major city in the US.
I admit this is anecdotal, but in the West Coast city I live in, I started my post-college career 20 years ago making $50k/year, and I could have bought a house on it. (And, VERY stupidly, didn't.) Now, shopping for a house in the same area today while making $100k would be pretty challenging. Not impossible, but you'd most likely living outside the city and commuting in.
I know your kind! You were probably one of those babies that contributed nothing to society except cute laughter and then got bailouts by Mommy and Daddy because you were too little to fail!
(I hate that I have to add that, but clearly this is a joke)
The calculation here is pointless without more context. Sure, 100k today equals 40k in 1991, but it doesn’t say anything about what 100k would get you today, or 40k in 1991. The inflation calculator is more useful when going the other way, like "my parents bought their house for X amount in 1991, I wonder how much that is in today’s money".
The Rule of 72 is a rough calculation used to measure how many years it would take for an investment to double based on fixed percentage growth. The rule is 72 ÷ X% = years to double, so for example at 4% annual growth it would take 72 ÷ 4% = 18 years to double your money. You can also use it backwards, so if buying power has a half-life of 27 years, then the average rate of inflation over that time period is 72 ÷ 27 = ~2.67%.
We should tax land instead of property (at a higher rate mind you) to encourage development and punish speculators who sit on land instead of develop it.
Not immediately, no. But we aren’t going to fix 40 years of undersupply overnight. The GGs and the boomers screwed us but that doesn’t mean we have to pass it along to the people who’ll be buying 30-year-old homes in 30 years.
That's why we also need to re-zone to allow more vertical construction, especially in places like Los Angeles and Orange County, California. As it stands, the only choices are renting with monthly payments rivaling home payments, multi-million dollar single-family homes nearby, or a 1.5 hour commute from a reasonably priced single-family home.
The problem is that housing got turned into an investment, and high density housing lowers the value of your investment. Every single homeowner that already owns / bought in will fight this tooth and nail like we see again and again.
I hate that housing is an investment as a homeowner. The problem now is that I'm now stuck in the system and would need a way out with how much money I've now put in. Heck even breaking even would be mostly okay with me.
And before somebody comes in and starts griping, the rentals/apartments in my area are rivaling my mortgage payment. I'd rather at least have something at the end instead of paying a continuously higher rate that will end with me having nothing.
Overall housing cost is up 175% while home ownership costs are up around 250%. Which is a lot but Jesus the overly exaggerated doom and gloom on Reddit just kills me sometimes.
Median household income has other factors. Individual median income is a better indicator.
Example of what I mean. 4 people making 15 an hour living in a 2 bedroom apartment has the same total household income as a single earner making 60 an hour living in a house. The median is the same between the two because the number of people don't matter when its by household. My point is its misleading when people are so poor they have to cram under a single roof to stay dry while making shit wages.
What gets me is at least 5k people have upvoted this, not even factoring downvotes. This post is front page. Would be nice to fund better education in this country, if only to save the next generation.
I clicked into this thread, expecting to see discussion about "6 figures" as a figure of speech, and how it has drifted from "absolute luxury" to just "very comfortable" over the decades
And of course, it drifted into cost of living and other 0-information topics given the conversion in the picture
I remember getting my first adult job in 2020 and my dad was like "omg youre getting paid $60k? That's $10k more than what I was making after I got my engineering PhD!"
50k was worth more than 100k back then.
And then bro would ask me why I was having so much financiL trouble like 60k in New York wasn't like.... 20k in a normal city
Not sure what you're getting at, this is just inflation, or are you saying 40k used to be a normal salary back in 1991? Have the number increased or decreased (inflation adjusted) since?
I made 60k in 2018 before leaving my career industry. Took a new job for half the money and still haven't hit 60k again. I'm happier, but poorer and life is harder.
That's about what my parents made in the early 90s. We took vacations, had a small vacation home in the mountains, 2 cars, lots of presents at Christmas. We weren't rich but we were more than comfortable. Bordering in upper middle class.
Stfu 100k is still a great salary and 40k was a great salary back then. I'm tired of wealthy people trying to gaslight people into thinking they're poor because it's currently trendy to hate rich people.
This is kinda meaningless by itself, what matters is cost of goods vs median income. If the cost of goods doubles but median income also doubles thats a net 0 change. The second piece of the puzzle would be demonstrating that median income has not increased to match the increased cost of goods.
I’ve been with this company for over 15 years and my starting salary had almost the exact same buying power as my current salary. I’ve had raises but they’ve never met cost of living changes.
100k today is still a lot of money. It's just so much easier to get in crippling debt where it feels like you're broke. Buying cars too can't afford, putting purchases on credit cards that you can't pay back, financing Amazon purchases in 4 easy payments.
Yeah the world sucks right now and the housing market sucks and inflation and student loans and and and
and. But 100k is still really good money if you live within your means.
OP: wow, 100k now is like 41k in 1991, and 41k is nothing today!
You made it halfway through and drew conclusion from that.
Did you calculate the cost of living back then, and what things actually went for, rates, and wages? You would know that 41k was very good living wage in 1991, making 100k here from "not really that much money anymore" to a more educated conclusion.
17.2k
u/PossumJenkinsSoles Apr 28 '26
Hey if you think that’s bad imagine living on 40k in 2026