I'll grant you the loan repayment, but the other things aren't expenses. "Lost income" is a psychological artefact, not anything concrete. It's a result of comparing against some hypothetical ideal financial situation. The same for "catching up" on retirement savings.

The concrete part is that people with that level of income (large, but not so large as to make all problems disappear) know that to be comfortable in the future they need to save a big chunk of their income. The people living with much lower incomes just don't have that luxury at all. Which is kind of the point - it's totally different worlds.

Yes, the problems of those with lower income are more immediate and I think it is grossly unfair to blame their predicament on their character or inherent talents.

I disagree that lost income is purely psychological. There are biological realities to deal with, especially in the US without the social safety net of other countries, that make lost income important. The first two that come to mind are the significant cost of raising children and retirement. Those are ticking clock issues to many people.

I agree they are two different worlds for low and middle income people. But we could play this game with even lower income people elsewhere in the world and reduce the issues of the developed countries poor.

When currency is being devalued year after year, lost income (up to a certain amount) most certainly is an expense. The longer you sit out of the asset inflation game, the more you fall behind. So whatever the cause for you falling behind has to make up for it. Maybe I’m wrong, but that model has served me well.

I agree that currency devaluation and so on means that saving money earlier in life has a larger impact on your lifetime comfort than saving money later. I don't really follow how it's classed as an expense though. And I don't know how you determine how much income you have "lost".

I think we probably agree on the situation but disagree on what terms make sense to describe it.

Assuming you need $x by some age due to being unable to earn more money (illness, old age, not wanting to work), then not earning income in your possible working years pushes up the amount of income needed in other working years to reach the same $x.

For example, if you get your bachelors in 3 years instead of 4 and spend $30k on tuition and earn $90k by working, then that would result in an extra $120k in compared to spending 4 years in college.

I class it as an expense, because everything has an opportunity cost, which is defined as your 2nd best option. It is not always useful, for example thinking about spending time with your kids rather earning $15 driving for uber or something. But it could be, if you need that $15 to feed your kids.

Even this shows a basic lack of understanding of what "tough" means for someone who is actually poor.

As soon as you put "saving for retirement" as something that's even possible, you're no longer in the realm of what's genuinely "tough".

"Oh, those people making three times what I do a month have it so tough! After paying way more than the minimum on their student loans and putting aside a large chunk of money for retirement, they might only have a thousand dollars or so of truly disposable income!"

"Tough" is when "disposable income" is a fantasy, and you're regularly having to choose between whether to pay your heating bill or buy enough food for the rest of the week.

And a poor person in Sudan will say poor person in US will not know what tough is.

The comment I responded to was about a politician complaining about a certain payrate. To which I wanted to show that it is possible to have to have to be stretched thin (mentally), and the politician is not thinking about having to cancel their third overseas vacation. Yes, they’re not on the very last rung of the ladder, but slipping off your rung also causes worry.

But you continue to prove the article's point: that the feeling of "slipping off your rung" and having to downsize from 3 yachts to 2 or (shock!) 1, however frustrating, upsetting, and stressful it may be to the person losing both money and status, does not remotely compare to the feeling of not knowing whether you will still have a home or even be alive next year, next quarter, or next month because you don't have enough money to pay for heat, food, and rent.

It's in euros though, much less likely that someone on that salary in Europe would be truly struggling, compared to someone living in the USA.