Most of us know a minimum wage is not a living wage, so in your opinion what would a minimum living wage be for the area that you live in?

San Francisco just went to $10.74 hour, but the Mayor thinks it should be $15 which is really a bare minimum to live here.

@zenvelo interesting and what is the Government set minimum wage there?
and what in your opinion should be the minimum living wage?

@zenvelo sorry answered to quick thanks, but still what is your opinion as to where the minimum living wage should be.

We live in South Carolina. A few years ago, my husband lived on $10/hr (at 40 hours per week) without help from anyone. He lived in a single-wide, but he had food, cable, electricity, and a cell phone. I’d say living wage would be something like that down here, where cost of living is pretty low. Minimum wage, of course, is not even close to $10 here.

I don’t see how you can have a “living wage” that’s hourly. Not all companies offer full time work. If someone is working 25 hours per week at $10/hr, they’re bringing home much less than someone working 40 hours per week at the same wage. Shouldn’t the “living wage” be weekly, monthly, or annual income instead of hourly?

It’s currently $7.50 in Missouri. That’s about $60 a day (8 hrs), and $300 a week (40 hrs), $1200 per month before taxes. Let’s say $1000 a month take home.

A cheap college rental here is around $400 per month, or a trailer for $300. Leaving @ $600 for everything else, including health care, gas/ insurance, food, cell, etc…

It’d doable but tough, because our cost of living is low.

When I was in college, I lived on ramen noodles, cheap hamburger and didn’t get to party much because I worked as well. Eventually I gave up college and went to work full-time, then a pt night job. We all have to pay our dues I guess, but it was hard to decide between having money and a degree.

@SQUEEKY2 I agree that for San Francisco, $15 is about the minimum. It’s expensive to live here. It’s expensive to live in Oakland, which has many working class and impoverished neighborhoods.

Where I work and live (one of the more affluent areas of the country), someone would need at least $35,000 to live, which I think comes to around $17 per hour.

I guess, in thinking about this issue, what makes it more interesting is the debate about what we need to consider something “livable.” Cell phones, cable, it all is something we consider a necessity, yet without them we could still live. I don’t know what cell phone plans go for, as mine is provided by my job, but I think at least $40 per month, maybe up to $100? Cable, I know I pay for the “bundle” which is home phone, cable and internet, about $150. I could certainly survive without cable and phone yet to me, they’re a necessity. Same with a car. Car plus insurance is at least a few hundred a month, or even with an old clunker, you’d need to repair it, put gas in it, pay for insurance. Some areas of the country a car is a necessity. Where I live, there are no buses in the vicinity, so unless you have a car, you’d be doing many miles of walking per day just to get to a tiny one horse town deli. Is a car considered something necessary that the living wage should include?

I think of what is necessary to live as being rent/mortgage, food, heat and power, clothes, transportation to work, toiletries, what else? Any other ideas? What I listed is really bare minimum. It’s of course, nice to take a vacation, go to a movie, get a cup of coffee now and then but are they considered necessities? Probably not.

@jca totally agree we don’t get cable TV ,don’t watch enough to make it worth while,as for a cell phone, some might consider it one of their necessities, and in a way it might be a part truth because potential employers can always get in touch with them.
as for a vehicle like you said if transit isn’t available one would need a vehicle just to get to work but that should be considered in that area when talking aboult a living wage.

Tampa, FL.

Last year, I was bringing home $12 an hour full time. My take-home was $860 every two weeks.

My rent – for a run down, mold-filled trailer built in the early 70s, with no insulation and bad wiring and rotting floors – is $600 a month. Electricity is between $100 and $150 a month, and I’m insane about power switches and unplugging things. My car is paid off but it’s 25 years old, and with an hour commute in stop/go traffic each way, five times a week, it broke down regularly, and I spent about $300 a month in gas just on the commute – that’s not counting anything other than driving to and from work. Car insurance was about $1800 every six months, which I had to pay up front, but for sake of argument, $300 a month. No cable service. We each had a pre-paid cell phone. Mine was $35 a month, and his was $50 a month.

That’s $1435 going out per month, and $1720 coming in. And we still haven’t bought food or repaired the car. Oh, and bringing in $12 an hour full time, you don’t get food stamps or Medicaid. Isn’t that awesome?

So, the short answer is, I have no fucking idea what a living wage is, because I’ve never seen one.

^ Edited to fix my typo. $1720 coming in. not $1150

@Seek_Kolinahr What’s up with your car insurance? Geesh, that is a small fortune right there. Where’s hubs income from the band?

Aww… it’s cute that you think local bands make money. The only way local bands turn a profit is by selling merch. At the club itself the best they can hope for is gas money home and free beer.

^_^

The car insurance was due to his fake DUI, that we couldn’t afford to get turned over, even though there’s a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s office for rigging breathalyzers. Fortunately, that’s over, and the car insurance is now a mere $900 every six months. Which is still more per 6-month period than the car is worth, but that’s our lot.

My pickup truck,that I bought new 16years ago is $1000 a year to insure here in BC Canada and I have a 40% discount for 4years of safe driving.

Just to get by for a family of four is around 35,000 to 40,000 around here. Less than that and they have to know a lot of tricks to get by. It can be done but it isn’t fun.

@Seek_Kolinahr But here the local bands will play family reunions or hs dances/ hippie fests, whatever and get a little income, that sucks! How abut doing t-shirts then upselling them for another $10?

Wow, too bad on the dui. :(

Up until I got this job (and I haven’t received my first paycheck yet, so I guess this is still the situation), we were bringing in less money than we were spending ($2700 vs. $3100). My husband makes $19.20/hr, so that’s definitely higher than the living wage, but we kept our cable, phones, auto loans, and pets (things you probably wouldn’t keep if you couldn’t afford it) because we knew we could do it for a few months until I graduated and survive just fine. Luckily, we had some income tax refund money saved up so our account stayed in good shape. Plus, my husband gets some killer overtime in November and December – he brought home nearly $1000 a week quite a few times recently.

However, emergency vet bills, necessary work clothes, and unnecessary (to some people, but not me) makeup, haircuts, and a few other purchases have put us in some credit card debt (about $4000), but we’ll take care of most of that with this year’s income tax refund in about a month and the rest we’ll pay off monthly as my paychecks start rolling in (preferably before my student loan payments start coming out). I get nervous when we have less than $1000 in the bank and we’re teetering on the edge right now, so I’m ready to start getting paid.

I was almost going to say that I didn’t know how people made it even at $15/hr, but that’s just ridiculous. We don’t live cheaply or watch our spending as closely as we could. We could live cheaper, but I’m glad we don’t have to and I hope we never do. I’ve grown accustomed to this...

@Adirondackwannabe $35000 for four people seems pretty cheap to me. That’s like $17–18K per year if both parents are working. That’s about $8 an hour each. If it’s a single-parent home or a household in which only one partner works, then that would be more difficult. I thought “living wage” meant the lowest amount you need just to support yourself, not a family of four. I think I may be confused about what a living wage actually is.

@KNOWITALL

No one is hiring this band for a Bar Mitzvah. ^_^

The merch thing is the only option for income really, but that requires money for investment.

@Seek_Kolinahr Ulcer, nice. My dad’s band’s name is Kush (excuse me while I roll my eyes). The video won’t load while I’m at work. What kind of music is it? My dad and uncle have a metal/hair band out of my parents’ garage (please hold for another eye roll).

@livelaughlove21 35000 is pretty cheap. That’s a bare minimum, and it’s not comfortable. I used a family of four because I’ve usually dealt with mostly families.

It’s extreme metal. A little Grindcore, a little Thrash, a little Death, a little technical. Autopsy and Repulsion mixed with Triumph and Mercyful Fate.

It depends on what you expect your standard of living to be. You can live on min. wage here. It’s hard, but it CAN be done.

@Adirondackwannabe There was a time that if I made $35,000 I would feel RICH. It isn’t a bare minimum around here. I’d say $10,000 is closer. Which I’ve lived on supporting 3 kids.

It freaks me out that my husband makes more in 2 months than I did in an entire year and we still live pretty frugally. Sort of. I still can’t imagine how I did it!

@Seek_Kolinahr I’ll pretend to know what that means…

That’s the idea. Put it this way, it’s not the “metal” on the 80s station.

@Seek_Kolinahr This probably sound weird, being a christian and 40 yrs old, but I LOVE that kind of thrash metal, takes me back to my 20’s and jumping in the pit…lol Which one was your hubby, not the one singing was it? Too cool.

Actually, the hubs’ friend is fronting him $500 to get some albums pressed. I’m working on artwork for them now, since my last computer crash obliterated about a million files.

Just finished “Lucid Dreams of Suffering”, now working on “Beat to a Pulp”, including the crowd-pleasing favourite “Dead Maggot-Spitting Head”.

Yes, my hubby, Mitch, is the guitar/vocalist. Maggot is on the bass and Gary is on drums.

@Seek_Kolinahr Cool. They say all artists pay a hefty price for living their dreams and creating. :)

When I discussed the amount of $35k annually, I was meaning it for one person, around here.
With another person in the household and two kids, you would need about $100,000.

How about 4 kids and one adult? (I know I said 3 up there, but at one point it was 4. My daughter had a son.)

$100,000 a year sounds like a friggin’ dream boat.

I know what you mean @Seek_Kolinahr. It used to kill me when people would say, “We only make $40,000 a year!” I had to keep my mouth shut because I had no desire to broadcast my poverty at the time but I was like….you have no idea!

Where I live, a studio is $1,000 per month. One person needs 35k before taxes to make ends meet.

To have a family and live the American dream I suppose you would need to learn around $40 per hour here in Tacoma, WA.

@gondwanalon I’m not talking about living the dream, just a living minimum wage.

@gondwanalon $40/hr? That is a dream!

Here in NJ, a single person would need at least $50k/year to live in a one bedroom in a relatively safe neighborhood, have a reliable car and decent health and auto insurance to not be paycheck-to-paycheck. So that’s a “living” wage, which is what the minimum should be in civil society.

@jca “Where I live, a studio is $1,000 per month. One person needs 35k before taxes to make ends meet.”

That describes my area, too. Median household income in many parts of the city is over 100k.

The newly introduced minimum wage in Germany is €8.50 or about $11.64

@mattbrowne Ok, but is that what you would call a living wage as well?

In Salt Lake City, it should be $10 an hour, but it is $7.25. It would be tough to live on $10, but could be done if you lived in the cheapest accommodations, had minimal debt, and if you weren’t supporting anyone else.

@Skaggfacemutt Thanks that is the kind of answer I am looking for.

In NJ, the minimum wage just increase from $7.25 to 8.25/hour and the voters approved to tie it to cost-of-living increases. The problem with that is the it only really benefits minimum wage workers; the rest of us who make more than minimum wage do not get cost-of-living increases.

As I suggest in my first comment, $50,000/year ($24.04/hour) is what one would need to have a modestly comfortable lifestyle in this area – where we are either in the NYC or Philadelphia metropolitan area, for the most part. @jca suggested $35,000/year ($16.83/hour) in the NYC metro area to ‘make ends meet’, but I don’t consider paycheck-to-paycheck as a “living wage”.

Some of our staff earn around $16–17/hour, and they can’t afford health insurance for themselves and one child on our small-employer plan. The kids have qualified for the state plan, and perhaps with the Affordable Care Act they’ll get a little more of a break. Again, these people won’t be helped in any way by the minimum wage increases, since they’re already earning about twice the minimum.

I don’t think we are talking about modestly comfortable. I think we are talking about “broke as a joke” but not starving or homeless.

@Skaggfacemutt: The OP’s questions asks what is the “minimum living wage” for the area you live in?

I noted in both my comments that my opinion of a “living wage” is that the person should be able to live in a fairly safe neighborhood, and own and maintain a reliable vehicle, and insure themselves and their dependents and their homes and cars, and not be “making ends meet” or living paycheck to paycheck.

To me, barely covering expenses is not “living” in civilized society. One should be able to also save some money for emergencies, for their kids’ or grandkids’ education, and for their retirement, and even to go to the movies or take a vacation once in a while.

I was divorced at 30 with an elementary school-aged child. I have a Master’s Degree, and in the mid-‘90s I was earning almost $50,000/year – but that was not enough to rent a small apartment in a safe neighborhood with decent schools near my job. Even then, $50k wasn’t a “living wage” if one had a dependent.

@hearat Oh, well, that would be the fortunate few. Everyone I know either lives in a safe neighborhood and drives a junker, or lives in a scarier neighborhood and drives a reliable car. Most don’t maintain their vehicle as they should, and most have inadequate insurance. All live payday to payday. None have much in savings.

I have most of your requirements, except the saving for emergencies part, or the money for the grandkids education part, or the not living paycheck to paycheck part.

I don’t make an “adequate living wage” according to your standards. If I had all that and a bag of chips, I would have to be making $80,000—$100,000 a year.

@Skaggfacemutt – I agree. Even 5 years ago when my son was still in High School, I was making over $70,000 but still couldn’t afford my own home. Six-figures is what one needs to live comfortably around here, a little bit above what I’d call ‘modestly comfortable’.

So if you have a safe neighborhood and reliable vehicle and adequate insurance, you are making ends meet, but you are not “living” in my opinion. That’s what I mean by a civilized living wage – being able to get some enjoy from life, not just sleep, work, eat, and veg in front of a screen, and die of stress-related diseases.

When I say a reliable car – I mean just that… one that is well maintained and not on the side of the road or an accident waiting to happen. I don’t mean it needs to be the latest model or have less than 60k miles on it.

I will say that I know plenty of people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, but I question what they choose to spend money on, whether it’s designer clothes and bags, fake nails and hair, shiny rims and sport tires, big screen HDTVs, etc. They might be able to set money aside if they stuck to a budget and prioritized differently.

I had more money as a single parent earning $35,000/year than I do now with a double-income family of (soon-to-be) 5.

We have no cable, free internet and phone, I make our cleaning/laundry products, no hairdresser or salon visits, heat is at 62 degrees at night, plastic covers the windows in the winter, used or clearance rack clothes (and not often), no vacation (I hope for a weekend of camping a year), live in a poor urban neighborhood with a gang on the corner and a graduation rate <40%, with debt and no savings.

I have no idea what a living wage is. Daycare, healthcare and homeowner expenses are killer.

^ Amen on the daycare thing. It has been completely undoable for us. Ever since my son was born, we’ve only had one of us working at a time, because after daycare costs and extra gas and vehicle expenses, we are basically paying for the privilege of never seeing each other or our kid.

I earn more than daycare + gas. I haven’t decided if that’s fortunate or unfortunate.

@Seek_Kolinahr I’ve talked to many people that have said the same thing. I worked with a girl that quit her job once she figured out that she was working to pay for daycare. She was making $12/hr at 40 hours per week, so she was probably spending $200 per week per kid for daycare. Ouch. Luckily, her husband could cover her and the kids under his insurance or else she would’ve had to keep the job just for medical insurance (it was super cheap at the bank). Now they own their own business together and have no medical insurance at the moment – I’ll refrain from making a judgment about that decision.

A lot of people I know with kids have opted to leave them with people that operate childcare programs out of their homes. Stay-at-home moms that want to watch kids for a living, mostly. They tend to be much cheaper than daycare and, if you know/trust that person, it’s probably safer for the kid as well.

It can be, but the issue is more with my husband’s kind of work. It’s not always predictable, so there might be a week in a row with no work, and the next week a ton of work. But that week he’s not working, we can’t afford to pay for care. And you can’t just choose which days to drop your kid off and pay just for those days. I mean, you can in some cases, but it costs about twice as much as regular daycare, because you’re taking a spot in their ratio that could otherwise be taken by predictable 9-to-5 office worker’s kid.

Well speaking as a division Vice President, my salary helps me to afford my stylish suspenders and my Porsche. As for my employees, I’d guess anywhere between $13.50 – $15 an hour would allow them to live within their means, unless they are fortunate enough to receive an huge settlement getting hit by a truck while backing out of their driveway.

For me, daycare (after school program) is almost $500 per month.

When I ran daycare I kept my prices low. I actually had another provider call and complain that I was ‘undermining’ other providers. Too bad. Many of my parents were paying out of pocket and they weren’t rich.

Enough to rent a bachelor’s apartment 40% of income, and the basics (water, power, food) from full time work. With a little left over for savings.

What is nice as a parent is to be able to send your child to things like camp, scouts, skating lessons, swimming lessons, stuff like that. The livable wage I quoted in this area can’t pay for those things.

No it can’t, @jca, but they can live without them. What really sucked was when we moved here it was .50 for each kid to get into the pool. Then they built a super duper new pool and the rates sky-rocketed to $2.50. My kids didn’t go to the pool any more. But we have a river and parks and woods so it’s all good.

@Dutchess_III That sucks!

There’s only one public pool anywhere close to me, and it’s gross and overpriced. I guess enough people here have their own pools that they feel no reason to build more. The rivers in my general area are not safe to swim in, and to go to a beach, parking is like $4.00 an hour.

That sucks even worse @Seek_Kolinahr!

Yeah, the old pool was simply a concrete pool with a diving board and a slide. Just a big hole with water in. It was fine. Same kind of pool I grew up with, and that’s all the kids need—water! But nooooo. City decided they had to build a water PARK. One of the myriad of features are these jets that come on in the shallow end. They just fire up and shoot water in the air. I’ve seen kids (younger ones) stand over them so the jets hit them in their privates. They just stand there with their eyes glazing over. We definitely needed THAT feature in a pool.

@Dutchess_III They just stand there with their eyes glazing over.

I seriously almost laughed out loud at that, sitting alone in my office. We have a pool in our subdivision that’s actually really nice and there are these fountain-type things in the shallow end that shoot water up. I always see kids sitting on those things. Ha!

Yep! And now we know why!

@SQUEEKY2 – It depends on where you live in Germany. In expensive cities minimum wage workers can apply for welfare supplements, e.g. for the heating bill in the winter.

@mattbrowne so the tax payers subsidize the minimum wage earners, so their employers can get away with paying them a wage they can not live on no matter how cheaply?
See that is the point of my question I know there are different wage scales and that is fine, but the lowest (minimum wage} should still put a roof over your head and food on the table, hence shouldn’t minimum wage be a LIVING wage?

I squeak by with $1588 a month. Min. wage is 10.90 per hour approx..

@talljasperman Ok but do you still need to be subsidized or can you live on it making it a living wage?

@SQUEEKY2 Yes, I get subsidized.

@talljasperman then your minimum wage is not a living wage,and my question would be what would the minimum living wage for your area have be for you not to have to be subsidized?

Canadian Supreme court Judge $27,500 start $110,000,
Canadian Rookie R.C.M.P. (Police Officer) gets $14,400 year to start, tops up at $110,000
Pastor $15,000— $20,000 per year, no limit if you start a mega church
AISH recipient $19,500 tops. tops with only cost of living adjustments
Welfare recipient $400 a month max $478/ month tops for long term disability.
Private in Army $19,500 a year , General $110,000 tops.
The AISH and welfare Recipients get free medication, ambulance rides and dental work.

AISH is an acronym for Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped

I am on AISH for now and in a few years will be still be here writing on Fluther .

@talljasperman $14,400 for a cop? That’s like $6.92/hr, so I seriously doubt it. Cops around here start off no lower than $25,000 and most make more. Our county officers start off at $34,000. And that’s in one of the cheaper states.

Where the hell do you live? 1980?

@livelaughlove21 Sorry those where 1999 Canadian rates. When I considered becoming a cop.

@talljasperman I’m pretty sure things have changed in the past 15 years.

@livelaughlove21 Agreed.

According to this Non-commissioned police officers in Alberta start at a minimum of $21 CAD per hour.

@Seek_Kolinahr Thank you.

$43,000 a year – that sounds much more likely.

Kinda interesting at how much this question has steered off it’s tracks, all I really wanted to know what would be the lowest living wage for your area without needing to be subsidized.

^ This is what happens in Social.

@SQUEEKY2

It’s a hard question to answer, to be honest.

It depends on what you mean by “minimum”, and what your family situation is. There’s no real standard of “minimum”. Is having home internet access a necessity? Is central heating and cooling? Is owning a car? Is having health insurance?

@livelaughlove21 yeah guess will have to take that,get tired in general the mods act like crazy phd English teachers expecting us all to be college graduates .

@Seek_Kolinahr it shouldn’t be when people earning minimum wage need to subsidize their income with welfare or foodstamps,that’s not a living wage, how much would a minimum hourly living wage have to be in your area so you wont need to be subsidized, that’s all I am asking , as for internet, and a car that would totally depend on where you live as to make them a necessity.

All we can do is play averages at that point.

Presuming 4 people in a household, in Hillsborough County, FL. Two adults, two kids (one boy, one girl)

Fair market rent for a 3 bedroom apartment: $995
Median monthly household cost for households without a mortgage (presuming this is electric, heating/cooling, water, septic, trash and basic maintenance): $449
Mean commute time: 26 minutes, which works out to 16 miles at 40 miles an hour, or 667 miles per month in order to commute.
The bus system is basically useless. A car is necessary.
Auto insurance: $100 per month
Car payment: I’ve never had to pay a car payment, but let’s play with $300 a month. Does that seem reasonable for a reliable used car?
Petrol costs for a 20 MPG car: $120 per month to commute, throw in another 80 for grocery store trips, laundromat, picking the kids up from school, whatever. $200 per month in gas.
Renter’s Insurance cost: $12 per month
Monthly food cost for a family of four (with a toddler and Kindergarten age child, who know how to budget but aren’t crazy about it): $644.70. That goes up to $758 when both kids are in grade school. And these are 2010 numbers, the cost has gone up.
Presume both adults have low cost prepaid phones, $100 per month in phone costs. They don’t have cable or home internet access, since they’re lucky enough to live close to the library.

So, unless I’ve missed something important, that comes to $2800 per month, and they still don’t have health insurance or any savings.

If they’re working a regular full time job at 160 hours per month (or 40 hours per week), they need $17.50 per hour just to pay the bills.

http://www.city-data.com/county/Hillsborough_County-FL.html
http://www.ehow.com/about_6457176_average-cost-renter_s-insurance-florida.html
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/FoodPlans/2010/CostofFoodOct10.pdf

@Seek_Kolinahr see that’s what I am getting at ,and that is a living wage,not one anyone could call living well.
THANKS

@SQUEEKY2 – What you wrote is valid criticism and it’s part of the political debate in Germany. Some employers are indeed misusing the system. The counterargument is this: it is better for people to work and get some tax payer supplements than be unemployed and get far more tax payer supplements.

@mattbrowne but that still doesn’t answer the question,what would a minimum living wage be for your area so they could pay their bills without needing to be subsidized?

Now here is one to think about who are the tax payers really subsidizing,the minimum wage earner who doesn’t make enough to put a cheap roof over their head and food on the table, or is it the companies that wont pay them enough to do that?