given that the average American spends 4 hours/day watching TV[1], that's well under $1 per hour of entertainment. There aren't a lot of hobbies or entertainment media that are cheaper.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio...
Just focusing on TV, for starters there's free TV over the air. There's YouTube and Amazon Prime Video and Netflix and CuriosityStream and Hulu and whatever your local state-supported TV network is putting online for free, there's DVDs from your public library, etc. etc. No, these options won't let you catch the latest Game of Thrones episode as soon as it airs, but they'll keep you entertained.
If you really want to get nitty-gritty about it, there is at least an interesting thought experiment you can run where someone who's both living paycheck to paycheck and paying for a sizable cable TV package has, intentionally or not, chosen, say, ESPN over financial solvency. Because that cable TV bill could be converted into a steadily growing rainy day fund.
I download and seed hundreds of GB's a month of torrents and run a couple cryptocurrency nodes in a household of 4 where everyone uses youtube, netflix, and spotify often and we've broken 1TB once in a decade..
What I'm saying is YMMV. I bet you'd see different results if one or two of your housemates turned on 4K on youtube/netflix.
Let's assume we devote 70% of the 1TB cap to streaming (netflix, youtube, etc.). This leaves 300GB for anything else, which be more than enough. Using netfilx's highest bitrate for 1080p, we get 268 hours of content for 700 GB. At the highest bitrate for 720p, we get 518 hours of content. Dividing that by 30 days, we get 8.9 and 17.3 hours per day for 1080p and 720p respectively. 8.9 hours split among two screens (one for kids and one for adults) might be tight if they don't have anything else to do, but 17.3 hours sounds more than enough if the kids are in school and the adults are employed full-time.
It isn't like television/video is some kind of necessity for life.
Going to the library takes a whole hell of a lot more time and work than turning on your TV.
Also, I know a lot of people argue that watching TV can maybe relieve stress in some way, or allow them to "wind down" after a "long day" at "work", but I'm not sure you need to wind down for four hours (not saying you are saying that).
Books, sports, art, music, are all way cheaper forms of entertaining oneself.
Most hobbies or entertainment don't have a charge per hour.
Costs:
- Instruments & accessories (serious guitar players often have at least one acoustic and one electric - and good quality ones are going to be at least $500, but could go way higher. Other accessories: at least a metronome and tuner, potentially also some pedals, amps, drum machine, etc)
- Renting/owning/traveling to a practice space if playing in a group
- Educational material: Lessons, Books, sheet music, music apps
- Recording / mixing equipment
Sure you can get a used acoustic guitar and watch youtube videos to learn it - but I don't know many people who do that and stick to it.
The real up-side though, is that decent musical gear doesn't lose a ton of value over time unless it gets broken or stolen. Also, if you're not professional, you can pace out your purchases.
My personal collection grew over 10 years, and is just for amateur use, jamming with friends mostly. I've got a couple guitars, bass, keyboard, 2 banjos, amps and mics. When I add up everything I've spent, it was probably 2/3 the cost of 10 years of $100/mo cable. I wasted a decent portion of that cost on a few other instruments I never played and ending up giving away as gifts to friends though.
Books can be free if borrowed from a library - but ownership has an ‘hourly cost’
Mind sports like chess have an insanely low hourly cost, but regular sports that involve consumables like trainers have an hourly cost.
Music is free if you sing, but otherwise involves buying and maintaining an instrument. Strings, for example are consumables.
Even the library has a cost, but it is generally much much lower if you have good access to a library.
Movies is like $25 an hour, though skipping concessions and going to a cheaper theater can bring it down to under $10 an hour.
A short video game (assuming full price release day) is like $7 an hour. (Cost is higher if you play games less because the upfront cost of the system is split over fewer games).
A long video game is goes from $2 an hour to $.50 an hour, and can go much cheaper for games you enjoy for extremely long times.
Books for me are around $2 to $.50 an hour ($20 book that last 10 hours to a $10 book that lasts as long). Libraries make all of this much much cheaper if you have one.
I actually read a lot of web novels/fan fiction which are generally free and thus my only cost is for the internet access that I'm paying for anyways.
Sports can be a lot harder to measure because there is a large variance in the costs depending on numerous factors, but I would assume they aren't that much cheaper (though generally much healthier for you).
I find art, especially for anything that is above crayola level brand, is quite a bit more expensive. So for kids it is cheap, but for adults who spend any serious amount of time in it, the costs go up pretty fast.
So in comparison, $1 an hour for TV isn't bad, but it is filled with ads. So many ads I personally refrain from TV.
Saving is opposite of spending, when a lot of people spend less, they'll also earn less, some more disproportionately, this cycle continues until its a great depression.
You can start from a high saving society to a high spending society and enjoy years of boom, or you can jump of a cliff - 70% of US economy is consumer spending, as in, most everyone's salary is supported by that. You can't save when you are jobless.
While it seems like common logic to someone that has the ability to live cheaply and save money, the more important thing is someone emotional response in this situation - that person actually feels good about saving. Something like this is not intrinsic to human development, and is usually acquired through the persons upbringing.
So when a person that makes little money decides to buy a high end smartphone, its not because they are doing it out of stupidity, they are doing it because they need to feel the same positive emotion that the former person feels. And as long as they can get by day to day, they are not incentivized to make any changes.
The discussion to enact change needs to start with answering this question - how do you effectively "reprogram" someone to value delayed gratification over immediate gratification?
Do a little back of the napkin budget on $4,200/month (GENEROUS) take-home pay in say, Fremont, California.
You run out of money real, real quick.
If a person can't make ends meet on that kind of money in Fremont, that probably says more about Fremont than it does about anything else.
EDIT: The median personal income for all workers (including part-time), is of course much lower, more like 2700.
But it doesn't make that much sense to compare the national median income with a high CoL area, where you also expect higher salaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
There are a whole lot of people who _should_ be able to afford an unexpected car repair bill, and could quite easily do so, if they weren't spending $100 a month on cable TV, $800 every other year on a high-end smartphone, $500/month on owning an SUV when a $200/mo economy car would serve just fine, etc., and put the money into a basic rainy day fund instead.
And a middle and working class that was just a little bit more frugal might create some downward pressure on prices that would, in turn, alleviate what less wealthy people need to pay on just the basics.