The linked CNN article[1] breaks it down as essentially $52k on childcare and expensive child activities, 23k on food including some undoubtedly expensive "date nights" and the rest on the sort of insurance and maintenance costs you incur when everything you have is very expensive. The Bloomberg author's probably aiming to make it seem even more frivolous by having "other" as a massive line item, not that I'm convinced sure many people facing real rather than self-imposed spending constraints would consider $9k per annum on "no fancy bags, shoes or threads" clothing an example of the sort of thriftiness the article subjects seem to think they're demonstrating, or $23k to be a food budget for two adults and two kids that couldn't possibly be trimmed a little...

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple...

Yes, this is a portrait of lifestyle inflation. Their income almost perfectly matches their outflows, that’s not struggle here, that’s lifestyle inflation. If they made $1MM I’d imagine their outflows would be right around $950.

Apparently "miscellaneous" is only $10k/year, "other expenses" is separate from that. The single biggest line item outside of taxes!

There is a further breakdown in the linked article: https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea...

It includes things like food, student loan payments and "children's lessons".

It’s crazy how accurate the “$100 gas $800 rent $400 food $2000 $impulse_expense please someone help me budget my family is dying” meme is.

At the risk of repeating what gets said every time this topic comes up, basic financial education should be taught in schools.

Yeah. What's crazy is the article didn't talk about it. Biggest red flag right there.

Eating all organic, fresh-from-farm food, eating at luxury restaurants, attending internationally acclaimed shows in the best seating, and maybe even investing in a little bit of modern art? Oh, and purchasing all the best in skincare, makup, spas, saunas, cryotherapy, light therapy, etc? Personal trainers, coaches, cleaners, cooks? I could imagine a combination of all of those could be 8,500$ a month.

(EDIT: And I bet it's still feel inadequately uncultured compared to an even wealthier peer who owns several paintings, vintage wines, attends every big show in the best seating + hires a personal stylist!)

Unless you’re feeding a small army, it’s not possible for groceries alone to add up to anything like that. Eating out easily could ($200/day x 30 days = $6000!) but not from actual cooking.

Well, yes, individually food alone would be difficult. I listed several items assuming a mixture of all of them could add up to 100k.

Oh, I didn't add hobbyist activities- if my personal passion was vintage first edition signed books I could probably blow thousands and thousands easily.

Especially if they are picking up someone else’s tab food could easily be $200 a day in a big city. If you add in other random things like female beauty products and services, can/Uber, or if both or alcoholics $100k of misc year expenses is very realistic and might even involve personal restraint keeping it down.

Fresh from farm food is actually a great way to save money and eat healthier! Search for a local CSA and support it!

Don’t forget the weekly transfusion from your personal blood boy.

Do you have kids? Maybe not 8500 but there is always something from summer camp to orthodontics etc... Life with kids is worth it 200 percent but expensive.

You're saying it's reasonable for kids to eat up twice the median U. S. household income? Yeah, somehow that math doesn't add up to me. There's "expensive", and there's "you've got to be blowing money on stupid shit".

When it comes to kids, people often confuse what they cost with how much they spend on them.

It doesn't help a bit that you have to buy your kids' way up the class ladder. Well, buy them the opportunity, anyway—not living it at home, they may still not socialize to the "right" tier. Housing's more $/sqft in good school districts, or even more money for prep school if you're quite serious. Activities and sports, more money, especially if they're the "improving" sort where they'll mingle with your social betters. The sky's not the limit on that stuff, but for people working for a living it may as well be, since the ceiling's "summering" in the right places, sailing lessons, shit like that. Down the line those turn into better higher ed opportunities, better (richer, anyway) friends, et c.

You can absolutely resist spending extra on kids that way, but there's always that pang of guilt that they're missing something that might've made their lives a whole lot easier down the road (due to granfalloon-sort stuff, mostly, or knowing the right people). Might they marry into money if you send them to that summer camp? If you send them to a school where it's assumed everyone's doing serious preparation for the SAT and for college applications, might that not bump the school they get into up a notch or two on the name-recognition scale? Most spend at least some on this if they can—a couple moderately-priced activities per year and housing somewhere you wouldn't live if not for the schools, say.

It's all probabilities and chances, but the more you spend the better the worst likely outcome gets, too, and the bottom on that can be quite low indeed—it's not just dirty-ol' middle class envy. It's hard to resist.

FWIW, most results from behavioral genetics point to the nurture component of nature + nurture being maxed out for the normal range of experiences that kids have in the developed world. In other words, most of where you end up is genetics + chance. I guess you can make the argument that nurture really matters for ascending into the aristocracy, but the aristocracy is out of reach for the vast majority of people, no matter what they do.

IT doesn't have to be that expensive. Plenty of families have children on $30k/year (one income). Their kids don't get to go to summer camp, nor do anyone get a lot of nice to haves.

There are a lot of nonlinearities. Taxes, healthcare, eligibility for the financial aid when the kids go to college, etc.

Probably child care / private schooling for the two children. Don't see it itemized in the table.

That's probably utilities, cell phone, tv, after school/nanny/sports/etc for kids activities, Starbucks, food, etc. Not that it isn't a lot but I don't see any other line items for all the stuff and it can add up depending on how you live.

The Bloomberg article did a pretty poor job summarizing the expenses - the linked article actually has a better breakdown: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple...?

$42k for childcare and $23k for food are two of the biggest items listed as "other".

Private school for two kids could be that much in NYC.

If its private school tuition then it should have been under the line item of "private school tuition," not "other expenses."

I don't know about that family, but if I was making 500k my kids would probably be going to a private school.

At that income level your neighborhood is likely affluent enough that the public school would be very well funded as well.

Not always. Some are well funded. Others the rich kids from the nice neighborhood go to private schools, so the rich parents don't care about public school funding. Often poor parents don't care about school other than a cheap daycare and so they don't fund the public schools well either.

Note that school funding and outcome is not well correlated.

> Often poor parents don't care about school other than a cheap daycare and so they don't fund the public schools well either.

I think that’s a bit of an unfair characterisation. Most parents do want their children to have good educations.

Without having any source or data to back up this claim, I would expect that the difficulties faced by poorly funded schools full of poor pupils are not due to parents not caring about the schools or their children.

If you look at school districts that have more than one school: the schools in poor neighborhoods have worse results than the ones in middle class neighborhood. This is within the same school district so school funding is the same.

It is fair to say I don't know the parents don't care. However whatever the difference is, it is at home not the school.

Yes, and those people wouldn't be considered "struggling" or "living paycheck to paycheck", which is the point.

They have mortgage payments: it's trivial for a house to just up and eat $10k of your money, for one example. That's the big differentiator: at this level of income, they can afford to just pay random expenses that many folks would have to just jam onto eternal credit card debt.

EDIT: nvm, I misread the parent, and other sibling comments illuminate the actual breakdown of this line item.

Yeah but $10k a month?

$10k a month is $120k a year which is around 20% of the stated income, and a significant proportion of it is paying down principal, which is to say, building wealth.

2 or 3 years of wealthbuilding at that rate is enough to pay for the median American house in cash.

Right, but I'm not referencing the mortgage, I'm referencing the "other expenses" line item that the person I was responding to seemingly though could be accounted for with the expenses of having a home.

But someone else pointed out that the figure reflects other things anyway.

That would be the monthly credit card bill :-). It autopays the gym, the uber rides, the gifts, etc etc etc.