Medical and dental can be really pricy. So can big city rents. Last I checked, an SRO in San Francisco was $1000/mo or more. Most areas, higher average income correlates quite closely to higher local living expenses.
So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
SRO was $1250 for me in SF when I was slumming it a couple years ago. That's a shared bathroom and shower for the entire floor.
Let's say his rent is $1,000/month, if that's the biggest expense then rent, medical, and dental together won't be more than $3,000/month. That's a ton of money for basic expenses, but easily doable on $110k/year with plenty left over.
I think you may have missed my point as well: being financially insecure as a single man making $110k/year is weird, and has to be due to individual circumstances (whether bad luck or bad planning) and has nothing to do with the economy as a whole.
But, when it comes down to it, I see absolutely no reason for you to dismiss his question simply because you think he has a personal problem. Whether he has a personal problem or not, there are things wrong with the big picture. I don't think it is a less legitimate question just because the asker happens to have a high income. It seems rather ass-holish to reply at all if you have no plans to talk about the thing he asked about and are merely taking this as an opportunity to talk trash about him as an individual.
Of course, that's just my personal opinion. Lots happens on HN that I don't like. I don't run the place, so whatever.
Carry on.
He's making something like twice the median income of the US. Whatever his financial problems are, they're not remotely representative. Since his question is based on the assumption that his woes are due to widespread problems, I think it's entirely relevant to point out that they are not.
If he's actually in proper Seattle and not the surrounding area, the nearest affordable housing might be dozens of miles away from where he works, increasing his transit costs considerably.
Health insurance keeps getting more expensive, and if his plan isn't great he might be shelling out thousands of dollars a year to hit his deductibles, especially if he's not in great health.
'Sounds like a budgeting problem' is missing the point, which is that the set of unavoidable expenses - things you have to pay - keeps getting bigger and bigger, but incomes for a big chunk of the US don't grow quite as fast as that.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, Matt Yglesias's book The Rent Is Too Damn High is good on this subject; increasing rent is not some law of nature but a result of development restrictions in many metropolitan areas, which got started in earnest in the '70s and the results of which are getting worse every year with population increases and rising returns to knowledge creation (see Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City for more on both).