Two months ago, CNBC got flak on Twitter for a post that delved into the budget of a Cambridge millennial who “is excellent with money.” The catch was he was building that budget from a $100,000 salary.
The piece was actually part of a series that goes over the budgets of urban young people who are also “excellent with money,” making ends meet on their paltry six-figure salaries. In December, we gleaned that 25-year-old Trevor Klee, a self-described “terrible employee,” makes $125 to $160 an hour for tutoring sessions. His students sign on for a 10-hour minimum.
Klee told CNBC, “You can get more money a lot of the time if you ask for it. … I just charged more and now I make more money.”
That might work for Klee, but the half million Americans earning a minimum wage can’t simply charge their bosses more for their time. Making a budget stretch isn’t much of an accomplishment if your income is a giant rubber band.
I still remember this post months later because looking at Klee’s budget made me think about the moving target that has been my own living expenses. Whenever I started earning more, certain bills also went up, things that I think of as being pretty universal necessities.
Health insurance
Ten years ago, I paid for a monthly plan that was about $130 a month. When I decided to start Big If True and go without employer-provided insurance, I went through the arduous process of signing up for insurance through the state marketplace and was quoted about $400 a month for a barebones plan. Did I get four times less healthy in 10 years? Because if I did, someone should tell me to take better care of myself.
Medical bills
Going to doctors is something I’ve embraced in my 30s, like meditation and avoiding the urge to sneeze when bending over to pick something up off the floor. If you’re under 30: Trust me. It can be incapacitating.
So, I’ve been pretty disappointed the last few years when it seemed like every doctor I went to started giving me the old one-two-how-do-you-do, which is what I call it when I leave the doctor’s office thinking I’ve paid for each of the five golden minutes spent with a licensed professional physician, only to get a second bill in the mail weeks later.
Usually it’s for lab work with a price tag that says my blood and urine are more valuable than I’d ever imagined. If I could just sell my precious bodily fluids, I could be like Trevor Klee, sipping champagne in Cambridge while my parents pay my cellphone bill.
One time, a doctor in Mississippi billed me for lab work, but his office had actually outsourced it to a lab, which had also outsourced the work to another lab. I found out when I got three bills for one test.
That was an extreme case, but all of this could be prevented if doctors would tell their patients up front how much everything costs. I’ve asked, and not only does it appear to make doctors uncomfortable, in my experience at least, they won’t answer the question.
The last time I went to my primary care physician, she wanted to run lab work and I asked the cost. She told me it would be a just “a little bit” and she was going with the cheapest version.
Then I got the old one-two-how-do-you-do. Several hundred dollars is not “a little bit” of anything unless my blood is liquid gold, and in that case, they should be paying me for it.
Internet
About 10 years ago, I paid $35 a month for the internet. That amount slowly crept up until net neutrality rules were repealed last year, and then it flew like a two-bit bottle rocket. Now I pay a little more than $100 a month for the internet.
Is what I’m getting now three times better than what it was a decade ago? Are there three times more videos of animals riding turtles, three times more America-hating Russians pretending to be America-hating Americans?
We treat the internet like a luxury and not a utility, but it isn’t a luxury if jobs of every kind require you to use the internet when you aren’t at work. For years, low-paying service industry jobs have put work schedules and pay stubs and tax records online, the kinds of things you wouldn’t want to look at in a public place.
Phone and phone bill
I can’t remember my cellphone bill from before smartphones came out, but I know it was about $50 for a long time. Now it’s a little more than $100 with no expansions to my plan.
Then there’s the phone itself. No matter how much you’re earning, there’s a cultural assumption that the only type of phone to get is a smartphone so you can internet wherever you are.
There’s some variation, but smartphones aren’t cheap. According to Recode, the average price for a smartphone hit $363. They also have this funny quirk where they stop working efficiently within a few years of purchase, so instead of spreading the cost of a big purchase over five to 10 years, we’re buying flat, expensive egg timers every two years.
Ever-rising expenses aren’t sustainable for a minimum wage earner, and even at higher salaries, they cut into potential savings each month. Factor in things like student loan debt and car payments and you’ll realize that what once was a decent salary has become a financial situation where an unexpected bill could put a checkbook in the red.
Baby boomers didn’t seem to get what drove Occupy Wall Street or Bernie Sanders supporters. They certainly don’t know what to make of the attention paid to
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). Millennials were promised a future that is either elusive or doesn’t exist. No wonder we’re pissed.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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