It’s no question the cost of living in the U.S. is out of hand. As a result, the minimum wage is a constant topic of conversation and you’d think by now we would’ve made some progress.
People are always taking to social media to talk about it, and most recently, TikToker Ryan Halbert tried to find out just how much money you need to make per hour just to live.
According to his math, which factors in average costs for monthly expenses, the magic number is $25/hour. He explains how and why in this viral video.
TikToker Ryan Halbert went viral after he explained in a video why employees earning less than $25 an hour should be concerned
If you’re making less than $25 an hour right now, you should be terrified. If you are making less than $25, you’re gonna be very pissed off. This information is gonna scare the hell out of you.
Using monthly basic expenses for the average American, he breaks down in the video why the cost of living is alarming
I just spent some time looking at some monthly averages of regular costs of living all across the US average costs, and I put ’em all in a spreadsheet and did all the math for you, so you can see exactly what the big picture is.
So these are just normal expenses that most single consumers have, and this is all of them laid out on the national average. You’re looking at $3,285 a month just in your cost of living expenses, which means to break even and just squeeze by paycheck to paycheck, you have to be making $3,285 every four weeks.
This is calculated by your monthly income at a 40-hour work week. So it’s your hourly rate times 160 hours for four weeks in a month. ‘Cause I don’t believe anybody should have to work more than a 40-hour week just to survive.
I figured this out by looking at my pay stubs from the last time I was an employee, about six years ago. It could even get worse than that because chances are you’re gonna be paying more than 16% in total. Anything like child support or alimony added to that and forget about it.
So this gives you very limited options. You either have to kill yourself working way, way too many hours or you’ve gotta figure out a way to make a ton of money. And also keep in mind these expenses are factoring in doing nothing.
No free time, no going out to eat, no extra miles on the car, nothing. You didn’t have a breakdown that month. You incurred no additional hardships. This is just your cost of living and what you have to make in order to cover it.
Now, human instinct is to say, “All right, what can we cut out of that cost of living to make it a little bit more affordable?” But here’s the problem with that. Life already sucks ’cause you’re living paycheck to paycheck and now you’re gonna make it worse by taking away some of the luxuries that you have, that you actually need.
Even if you took out your cell phone, your internet, and your streaming, you’d save about 200 a month. The only thing you could put additional in your pocket is $200 ever. That will never increase, so you have to increase your income. It’s a must.
So you can do that by working more hours, or you can get a side hustle, which makes you supplement your income. But what happens when you’re 65 and all that extra money you made from working those hours was spent having fun and you can’t retire now, you gotta keep on working until you basically drop dead?
You’ve gotta invest. You have to invest, and make more money so you can invest the money to make yourself better off in the future.
You Cab View The Full Video Here
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Here’s How Fellow TikTokerrs Reacted
Some Commenters Disputed Some Of The Information Presented With The Video Which Ryan Addressed In A Follow-Up Video
@digitalsolutionss #stitch with @Ryan Halbert | Business Growth
h/t: BoredPanda