This is spot-on.
It's worked for me -- I didn't have a solid handle on my finances when I moved out of my parents' place, so I lowballed and found a place I knew I could afford even with a pretty pessimistic view of financial discipline.
Nine years later I'm living in the same place, and I've gotten a raise every year, so I'm making quite a bit more than I was back then. Driving an even more economical car. Eating better -- buying groceries instead of eating out all the time.
I could fritter it away, let my ISP bleed me dry with a $162 cable+internet+whatever+modem plan when the $30 plan works just fine and I bought my own modem. I could shovel $95/mo to Verizon, but I'm on Ting and I use wifi whenever possible, and my bill averages $26 and I own the phone.
I could send $8/mo to Hulu and $15/mo to HBO and $11/mo to Netflix and $13/mo to Amazon and $10/mo to Spotify and $10/mo to Pandora and.... how many more are there?! But I don't feel like my life would be improved by having all those. (I do Spotify, but none of the others. In the event that I feel like rubbing my nose in a pile of TV, there's this thing called broadcast.)
I feel like there's a never-ending stream of these things, with their pundits on the morning show and Weekend Edition making you feel like you're missing out on life if you don't watch at least one show on every such service. And Disney+ is coming...
To me, it's that incremental monthly spending that inexorably, insidiously, increasingly, gobbles up every spare dollar the middle class can scrape together. I've been literally counseling my friends on how to talk their cable providers into a lower rate.
Many of them didn't know that was possible.
Cancel your shit, people.
The only point you missed was saying that you only spend $5 a day on food.
Tell me this dear sir or madam...
1) How many kids do you have?
2) How much did you spend on healthcare in the last 5 years?
Financial shocks exceeding savings coupled with a system which requires drawing on high APY credit in order to absorb those shocks I think is a more likely culprit.
Just one event like that can have a family struggling to stay afloat and carrying thousands per year in interest payments on top of everything else.
The point that person is making is, if a person who makes more than the minimum wage is to reduce spending to 90% of the current spending they would be better able to absorb these unforeseen financial shocks.
> How many kids do you have?
This is another thing I notice (outside and in the article too). A lot of people who live paycheck to paycheck have 3 or more kids. Naturally more kids increase costs. Now I am by no means saying people shouldn't have more kids, but that number should depend on their financial situation too.
Like huge medical bills?
1) Poverty, at the level where spending on a reasonable floor of basics (food, shelter, education, leisure) leaves little for savings. This is a resource constraint, and even a perfectly optimally-run household would end up living paycheck-to-paycheck.
2) Severe exogenous financial shocks that exceed whatever buffer you were able to build, and an inability to adjust consumption downwards due to sticky commitments or psychological reasons. For lower-middle and middle-class households, this is possible simply due to bad luck; one thing the US economy is pretty bad at is providing a solid way to derisk tail risks, the obvious example being healthcare. This is naturally less common the more severe the shock, and irresponsible financial management can be a contributor in some of these cases (ie not saving an emergency fund, etc).
3) Consumption rising to meet one's income. The resource constraint is irrelevant here, as above the poverty level, this is primarily about hedonism and jockeying for status. The big caveat here is that people tend to short-circuit cost-benefit analyses when it comes to their kids: neighborhood safety and public school quality can lead to people substantially (and understandably) overextending themselves wrt housing costs. I'd caution against leaning too blindly on this mitigating factor though, as there are lots of differences between living modestly in a good school district and living generally beyond your means.
There's a degree of freedom around consumption that's likely a lot more significant than your comment assumes; this seems to follow directly from the fact that someone living beyond their means at percentile X would substantially improve their financial security if they spent as much as percentile X-10 (or whatever). For all but the lowest percentiles, this is completely feasible, and yet these low-savings studies consistently find a much larger swathe of people in these categories.
The model that makes the most sense to me is that, excluding the lowest quintile, the habit of clamping consumption to income is one of the biggest factors in our low savings. As mentioned above, the US systemically tends to put a lot more risk on the individual than a lot of societies do; you can be better off if you manage this responsibly (and aren't in the lowest income brackets), but financial illiteracy is IME rampant, even among generally well-educated people.
[1] Lack of access to quality education likely is, but through the mechanism of low numeracy/personal finance skills/critical thinking skills.