Jennifer Hitchcock

I'll say what a lot of people in banking won't say out loud. Plenty of jobs out there still pay $17 to $23 an hour. Full-time, that's roughly $2,940 to $3,980 a month before taxes. Now go find rent under $1,700. Add a car payment, insurance, gas, groceries, utilities, your phone bill. That's before health insurance comes out of your check. Before student loans. Before a kid gets sick and you're out $350 at urgent care. Before your car needs a transmission fix you didn't budget for. I've worked in wealth management for over a decade, so believe me, I'm not anti-savings. Savings matter. But there's a point where telling someone making $20 an hour to "cut out coffee" stops being useful advice. You cannot budget your way out of $3,800 in unavoidable monthly costs on a $3,000 paycheck. The math isn't a discipline problem. Sometimes the spreadsheet isn't broken. The income is just too low to cover what it costs to be alive right now.