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Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k

There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways

 help



The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income

(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)


One caution there; if you read the small print, they're using PPP figures. Which is definitely better than using nominal figures, but doesn't account for anything. In particular, it doesn't account for transfers, either direct (social welfare payments) or indirect (subsidised healthcare, housing, childcare etc etc).

Not to say it's a useless figure, but it can mislead (especially for lower income people, where healthcare costs and childcare costs, say, might be literally 0 in some countries, and a huge part of their income in others).

And obviously for people trying to do the FIRE thing in particular, healthcare costs are likely to be a very big deal; for those in countries like the US where most people get healthcare through their job, that's an additional consideration that people in countries where it's done by income-based subsidised insurance, or free-at-point-of-use systems, don't have.




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