Whats a good salary to you?

[doc holiday13]

Hard to say but I think I'm probably make as little as one could make(in northern VA) and have a stay a home wife at ~$130k

 

[T-town]

To the OP, whatever salary allows you to reach your life goals is the answer IMO. Everyone's goals are different.

The flexibility to be able to leave work when you want, to tend to other things that are more important to you than work.

If you can combine those 2 things, you're in the sweet spot.

 

[ddowning]

If you look at how many pickups a year you could make falling in the 80s vs now we definitely are not winning

I make that comparison a lot. It is a sure sign we are not winning.

 

[Customweld]

If you look at how many pickups a year you could make falling in the 80s vs now we definitely are not winning

Even when I started cutting in '94, you could make a pretty dang good living. Used to go through about 3 sets of tires on my truck a year. It'd dang near break me to put that many tires on a pickup now!

 

[ddowning]

You make very good points, I guess to me it just seems strange to so (seemingly) casually let other people feed and cloth your kids while an able bodied adult refuses to work. That was really my main point, all feelings about homeschool aside, it just seems like the guy sort of expects handouts. I'd give more specific examples but I don't want to make it possible to identify him but we are talking handouts in the thousands of dollars, people anonymously paying his rent and things like that. I'd personally be embarrassed, moreover, I would have trouble repeating and staying married to a woman who wouldn't work while those things were taking place. its a case of "I would do anything for my family".....except.......working.

The fact that the guy talks about it openly leads me to believe he isn’t ashamed and actually likes not paying for his stuff.

Given those details, it is a bad situation. I had a job with no room to move up. I brought home $31k while my wife raised the kids. She worked, but with daycare the net was $10/day, so we made the decision for her to stay home. I changed careers and started a business. Now my kids are both in school and my wife and I work together in the business. We are not rich, but we are passed the day to day financial worries for the moment. To allow my kids to be raised at home and not at daycare, I worked every holiday and weekend for years to get our business going and not have to ask for handouts.

People in this country have forgotten tough love. Those people in the church need to stop enabling him. I will not help someone unless I see them working their ass off and still struggling. The best thing those people could do is set a good example of how to live and let him fall. When you are at rock bottom, there are only two options, die or climb. Kids learn a lot from being poor. My parents had a good marriage. They were very happy, except financially. The only thing they ever argued about was money. I vowed to fix that in my adult life.

Some people that choose this situation do so because they don't see another way. They need a good example.

 

[AKBorn]

TL/DR - If more people could control their expenditures, more people would be making a good salary right now...


I tend to agree with the previous posts that propose that whatever salary allows you to live the lifestyle you desire, and spend quality time with your family, is a good salary...

I retired 5 years ago (Jan 2020) at the age of 58. Based on my current IRA withdrawal rate, my money will last into at least my mid 90s, and I haven't been able to locate anyone yet that will guarantee that lifespan for me.

At the time I retired, any of my neighbors would have been shocked to learn my financial situation. I drove a 2009 Mazda6 as a work vehicle, and a 1994 Mazda B4000 pickup as my hunt/fish/golf/fun vehicle - if I was in my truck, I was doing something fun. I lived in an end unit townhome, had lived there for 24 years, and friends always told me it looked like I was still moving in. Suffice it to say, that material things have never had a hold on me. I probably owned the last working wood console color tv, until I gave it away upon leaving Maryland in June 2020.

From 2000 until 2020 when I retired, I dated a woman in California, which meant 5-6 trips out to CA every year. I also did 12-14 remote Alaska flyout hunts in that time. Aside from those expenditures, I didn't buy things unless I REALLY needed or wanted them. I used the same compound bow to hunt whitetails for 20+ years, and the same kayak to fish on the Potomac, and the same rifle to hunt during rifle season. Why upgrade? Those items never stopped working, so no need to replace them.

I had a friend who made about 25% of my gross salary, we always used to golf together. He would tell me "I wish I made the kind of money you make." I told him "If you made what I make, you'd have less savings than you have now. You have to buy every little thing that comes out as new and shiny, to no avail. You have 5 times as many possessions as I do; what's the point of having so much stuff?"

Once we were on a golf trip to South Carolina, and he dropped $300 on a leather Callaway golf bag. I gave him crap about that bag all the way home "How can you spend $300 on something that just holds your clubs? How many shots are you going to hit with the bag??" He still didn't get it.

I used to play golf with some other guys who were in decent shape financially. One of them told me once "That's the ugliest golf bag I've ever seen." I told him thanks, I considered that high praise. At the end of the round when I had beat him by a couple of shots, I asked him how he liked my bag now.