A household income of $60k budgets just fine in the majority of the US. Heck, it budgeted just fine in SoCal just 10 years ago. Of course half the households in the US make less than that.

It is true that inflation doesn't tell the full story. One example:

A typical family would have 1 car previously. This worked because they also had only 1 person in the workforce. I remember my mom dropping my dad off at work on days that she had errands that needed the car. However, the second car is often necessary because you have 2 people working and commuting to different places. Public transit is often nonexistent or poor enough that it adds over an hour a day to the commute time.

> Exercise without diet does almost absolutely nothing. Diet without exercise however can work just fine.

This is only true because people who aren't paying attention to their diet will naturally eat more when they exercise more (even ignoring the whole "I earned this pizza" effect TFA mentions).

If you are currently maintaining your weight, log what you eat and eat the exact same foods and exact same amounts of food with and without exercise (say running 5k per day), you would lose weight. For this specific example it's about 1 pound every 10 days that you would lose. Of course if you define "diet" as paying attention to what you eat, then this would technically be a diet, but I don't think that's what you meant by diet.

That's of course not to say you shouldn't diet. Cutting out a single 20oz bottle of soda per day is almost as big a calorie shift as running a 5k every day! Which is kind of the point the article is making; big gains to savings can be made by small cuts to spending.

Of course this really only applies to households near the median. Once you get down under $40k per year for a family you get to the point where all your savings will be wiped out by an emergency expense (with healthcare being one probable source; households under $40k per year are likely to be under-insured)