I love that you did not take offense and provided a considerate response.

Your response is more appropriate for the original story’s title. The original story as also a good story if properly titled and framed. It does describe the finances of some of the poor/working class single people who are in a precarious position.

This new story/response also is accurately (mostly) descriptive of a different more typically average group of Americans. Your words indicate that you used average numbers, those numbers will often skew high that is why we should try to used median numbers if possible. I don’t think they are way of base and you fudge them down a bit. It does a good job of portraying how many people get to the point of not being able to save money. I could point to a lot of ways that that budget could be modified to create more savings or more likely to have money for the other expenses that aren’t major but add up. Actually here and elsewhere there are stories by people better qualified to write about money saving ideas.

I don’t know if you had a point other than to indicated that the majority of Americans are really just getting by, if they are doing that well.

What do we do for these people? They already make well above the minimum wage, raising the minimum wage won’t help them. Their employer picks up a big part of their health insurance. Food is already pretty cheap. The cost of housing is huge and a hard problem to fix.

Their prospect are looking not too bad if they don’t have unexpected expenses as in a few years their credit cards and the car would be paid off giving them $600 a month more discretionary income.

TEK