this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
524 points (96.5% liked)
Not The Onion
18625 readers
1878 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How fucking expensive is stuff over there!?
A lot of dumb people here make a lot of money and spend more than they make.
the COL also varies wildly. I could move 1.5 hours away from where I live now and pay like 1/3 of what I do now for rent/mortgage. But I'd have to drive 3+ hours a day to get to my job. and the salaries 1.5 hours outside my city are literally half what they are in the city. i'd have to take 50% paycut to work in a rural area.
things cost a lot in places where salaries are high. it's that simple. high income areas have huge demand for jobs housing, and other necessiteis, so costs are high.
but nobody wants to live where it's cheap to live because there are limited job opportunities. I could afford a mansion in louisiana... but my job doesn't exist there and if it did, it would pay like 40K a year vs the 150K i make currently.
hence lots of people are moving more and more to the major cities trying to get the bigger salaries.
Part of that high city housing cost is zoning and other planning constraints on building upwards. Have to increase supply if you want to bring the cost down.
I post this occasionally:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/
https://archive.ph/jRQIm
If it were possible to reduce the cost-of-living bar to letting more people move to cities, it'd be possible to increase productivity for a lot of people.
I remember the "The Rent is Too Damn High" guy running for mayor of New York City a few years back. The guy had a point.
Like, policymakers have not done a great job on that.
There is some truth in the common refrain of "Americans overspend on cars, junk, etc", but the answer to your question is very fucking expensive. I moved to the french Riviera and my cost of living went way down compared to Florida. And that includes going from employer funded healthcare to paying out of pocket for all health care in France. Everything is cheaper, food, car, insurance, I even spend less on fuel because I only need to drive once per week so I only fill my car up with 7€/gallon gas every few weeks.
would love to see some numbers on where tf that salary is going
most of the time these articles come out... the folks in question are massively overspending on cars, travel, and other luxury goods they really can't afford but insist that they 'need'.
my locally subreddit was full of people like this would would argue with you that spending $500-1000 every weekend on eating out was 'normal'. if you are making 7K a month and spending 4K of it on partying... yeah you will feel like life is a struggle. and if you pointed out maybe they could cut back their spending they would just start insulting you calling you a loser with no life who stays at home...
1k every weekend?
I would say that you surely exaggerate, but I have learned that there is no upper limit to stupidity.
Almost certainly its mostly going to rent.
See my post above.