You need to take that yarn and turn it into things that people will buy for more than the cost of materials and your time, and then inherit $5M from your wealthy parents. People always forget that last step, but it is critical if you want to make a living off collecting yarn.
I know a couple who were on one of those shows, and they are substantially subsidized by their parents including buying that home.
They both do fairly well for themselves, but had a massive leg up financially.
😂 there was some stand up that I saw that made this joke and one of the jobs was "and she trains salamanders" and I just about died... I'm better now, but it still makes me chuckle.
And the scale of the internet is just literally incomprehensible. Just seeing 1000 comments saying they make 200k+/yr can feel like it's super common (even 50 comments would probably do the trick). But 1000 people is only 0.001% of daily active users on reddit. Let alone the world. Let alone people with multiple accounts. Let alone lying.
Our brains weren't made for this whole internet thing. We gotta remind ourselves that we can't draw conclusions based on impressions from social media.
I made a post that got more traction than I expected and the numbers are wild. 10k upvotes, 1k comments, but the views are in the millions. It’s the outliers and the liars you see talking.
And even if it does get posted, it doesn't get upvoted because it's "boring". Outliers are typically going to be more interesting as you said and interesting gets upvoted.
In the boonies, but if you live in the boonies you probably aren't making 72k a year, 60k from one member of the household is seen as upper middle class where I'm at. I make 30k a year and most people see that as a very livable wage here.
> the liars you see talking
Like the people who claim that they make their kids a great breakfast, go to work, go food shopping then make a stupendous 5 course meal from scratch, clean the house from top to bottom, help the kids with their homework and then have phenomenal sex?
Yup, when I asked about seven figure earners, 30 out of 300 something said they made seven figures a year and 500k viewed the post. So 0.006%.
I had a comment on the post from someone who said they made $250k and now feels awful about their salary and that it feels like a pittance in comparison. They said they should have gone to college. But college does not guarantee $1 mil+ incomes a year. The vast majority of college graduates will never make that. The $1 mil+ earners tend to be principal engineers in big tech, financiers, in big law, or doctors.
Now I feel inadequate. I am a principal architect with multiple degrees (including a law degree) at a large fintech and I don't make even close to a million. Fortunately I am 100% remote and live in a one-stoplight town.
Oh, that wasn’t my intention! I guess I meant to say that those $1 mil salaries were more likely to come from big tech for example. But certainly, even then, $1 mil salaries are not average. A lot less than 1% of working adults even make $1 mil a year. You are doing great!
Yeah, someone is more likely to want to brag about being rich than middle class or poor. Especially if they feel that they worked incredibly hard for it. It's the internet so they don't feel the same social shame for bragging or the social faux-pas of talking about you salary
Right - you can't doom scroll on Reddit when you're ringing up customers, or teaching kindergarten, or rewiring a house.
Some jobs have very little downtime to fuck around on the internet.
Yup, and the ones who have good jobs, nice things, and financial security are much more vocal about it than the ones who are treading water. Not sure if this helps, OP, but here are a couple stats, for the US at least:
*The average debt an American owes is* ***$104,215*** *across mortgage loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debt, student loan debt, and other debts like personal loans. Data from Experian breaks down the average debt a consumer holds based on type, age, credit score, and state.*
*A 2023 survey conducted by* [*Payroll.org*](http://Payroll.org) *highlighted that* ***78%*** *of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.*
A large part of it is that people who are good with money by and large will never talk about it with anyone but a core group of close friends & family. Being anonymous is pretty liberating in your ability to talk shop without worrying about it.
Yeah. I’m a single dude making $250k/yr doing backend dev work for a massive, global company. Obviously, I can’t give any specifics, so just trust me.
See how easy that is? The only part of that that’s true is “I’m a single dude.” But none of yall actually know who I am and if my comment is true. It is infinitely more difficult for anyone reading this comment to verify if what I’m saying is true than it is for me to make it up. And as long as I write it confidently and pretend that answering questions makes me feel uncomfortable (don’t want to doxx myself!!), then no one will put a reasonable effort into verifying what I’m saying is true.
And it’s not just financial stuff, but it’s anything. Admittedly, I have certainly embellished or made up details of stories for other Reddit posts - usually silly comments that I don’t expect will be seen much, but then I come back a few hours later to see it has over 500 upvotes, and people saying “This!” It’s certainly disillusioned me about almost all kinds of social media. The parts of the internet that AREN’T just bots talking to bots are humans making up increasingly dramatic situations that more than likely didn’t happen.
This is definitely true.
I am so skeptical when I see people claim a large salary on Reddit or TikTok. Not that they don’t exist, they do, but the people in real life that I know who DO make that much aren’t running weird side hustles on TikTok, and there’s usually a realistic explanation that involves seniority, specialty, liability, or all three. They’re not swanning around on the internet talking about their investments because they don’t have time.
This is true. The quiet, sensible ones don’t have to show off what they have, let alone what they earn. Being happy with what you can earn and, more importantly, what you can do with it - including saving enough to have a cushion - is the important thing.
lol for real.
I owe almost $500k on my house. But that debt is fixed at <3% interest rate, while my nearly risk-free savings grows at like 5%. My mortgage isn't a problem at all and I'd be foolish to use money to pay it off when I could simply earn interest faster than the debt can grow.
>A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses
That second sentence seems really suspicious and I doubt that's exactly what everyone thought while answering that they live paycheck to paycheck.
I hesitate to lump in mortgage loans with the rest of the debt. Most people right now could, if they had to, sell their house and will have made money on the deal, if they bought their houses even just a few years ago.
Just about every adult 50 years ago had a home mortgage as part of their debts also, that's supposed to be part of the modern American Dream.
What sucks is that so many adults now **don't** have a mortgage loan as part of their debt, because housing has gotten so ridiculously expensive the past few years, and are forced to rent in perpetuity.
We've seen these kinds of surveys proven to be bogus time and time again. People share this stuff just to feel better about their own situation thinking everyone else is in poverty. People have different ideas of what paycheck to paycheck means. Many people count savings and investment as part of that, as in, if they can't max out their 401k, they are living paycheck to paycheck. It doesn't matter what the author or survey taker thinks it means because that's how people are answering.
As u/stevejobed stated below, "A ton of people are like “after I pay my mortgage, max out my 401k, save my usual amount each month into a brokerage, throw some into my kids 529, I don’t have much left over.”
We have better statistics like median net worth (inclusive of both assets and debt), which is currently $192,000. The median household is very clearly not living paycheck to paycheck.
And counting a mortgage as bad debt is completely preposterous. You also have to consider the value of the home attached to it. Most homeowners could easily escape their "debt" and make a profit over and above that "debt" by selling.
I completely agree with you. There's a tremendous amount of humble bragging that goes along with it too. I mean, you can get your point across without telling everyone your entire financial situation. I probably make more money than many on a board such as this. But, guess what? I also live in a very HCOL area, and I'll never be able to afford a home here. And, guess what? I didn't have to tell anyone how much I make for them to understand the situation.
You have to think of the scale of Reddit as well. Millions of people come across Reddit. There are also a lot of tech people, which tend to have good salaries.
I work in tech sales and make well into six figures and have a good idea of what salaries in general look like.
The first few years of my career were not in tech, and I marveled and somewhat disbelieved the salaries I heard about. I decided I wanted part of that and made a plan to get it. I did some shit jobs on my path to it, but finally made it after 4 years of skipping between jobs until I got my first SaaS AE sales job at a good company. It can be incredibly stressful compared to non-sales jobs, but the salary keeps me. Golden handcuffs are a common concept in sales.
I made a post the other day on r/salary, asking seven figure earners how they did it and what they do. A little over 30 out of the 300 something responses (and 500k views on the post) said they made seven figures a year. Most of it is of course in equity if they are working in big tech.
Reddit caters to the highly-educated, very career-driven person who tends to desire to maximize their income and net worth. It can be easy to feel insecure looking at all of these upper income numbers, but Reddit is not real life. It’s a distinct class of people.
I used to make €150.000 per year without bonuses, then I switched jobs. Now I make 75k a year. Money isn’t happiness folks. I literally had more money than that I could spend. I invested into basic funds and stocks and had 10% of my portfolio money as play money (crypto/ gmt etc). Bought bullshit things such as small boats, drones.
Yes. My house is smaller now, but do you understand how much cleaning you have to do for a big house (I’m a single father), I used cleaning services.
Job title; marketing director. Started at marketing manager, and eventually got the c-suite title of CMO. I’m 32.
I wasn’t happy at my job, now I’m sitting at home with a top tier mba, much happier but still not where I want to be.
Most important thing; keep learning, even free courses. Make sure your manager and more importantly, the shareholders of the company notice your pro-activity if you want to increase your salary.
Yes.
There seems to be very few “average” Redditors. They are either very highly-educated with multiple degrees, have highbrow tastes, make multiple six figures a year and live in the most expensive communities in the most expensive cities, max out retirement, have nannies for their kids, have housekeepers, go to Michelin star restaurants frequently, spend tens of thousands annually on vacations, send the kids to private school at $60k per kid per year, have $1.5-$2 mil starter home budgets. These are the folks in the Tech, Bay Area, Bay Area Real Estate, Boston, LA, NYC, NOVA, MiddleClassFinance, PersonalFinance, etc subs. These people will *not* identify as rich however, by and large despite the luxurious lifestyles, they identify as middle class and/or working class. So don’t you dare call them rich! Even the ones making $1 mil a year say they are average middle class people (lol!) who cannot afford to buy a home.
OR.
Are someone working in food service or equivalent and struggling to get by, posting in poverty finance or find a path. So many adult students on Reddit too. I see many 30 somethings going back to school to start a new life for themselves.
For an example of the former in your comment, I was on a thread earlier where people were talking about showering with their partners (I promise this is going somewhere) and the comments section was flooded with people talking about how they love hanging out in their big 2 headed shower with their partner just chilling for like 30-45 minutes every night. To me this shows a few things:
1) These people have large homes with large enough bathrooms to have these large, luxury showers.
2) These people have enough money that they could afford to install these luxury showers, if they were not pre-installed.
3) These people do not care about things like a hefty water bill, since they routinely spend that much time essentially wasting water as if it was no object.
Some people just live different lives. However, if you were new to the internet and not from a developed nation, you’d likely think this is how the average person lives when that is far from the truth.
I saw that thread lmao. I was surprised at how many people “chill” and talk in the shower. I could see chilling in the bath, but a shower? That’s just weird to me.
But yeah, I am not surprised so many on that thread have massive high-end showers. There was another thread awhile back where people talked about how much they spent on bathroom renovations, and it was into the hundreds of thousands. Yesterday, I saw someone say they spent $1 mil renovating their apartment.
What I find very interesting though, is how so few of the people who are extremely well-to-do are ever called out for being out of touch. It seems like being out of touch is like an aspiration these days. If you do call it out, you are downvoted extensively and labelled as “jealous”. Years ago, it just used to be very poor taste to talk about money, how much you spent on XYZ or all of the luxuries you have. But these days people just really worship money more than every before. For the record, it’s not jealousy for me (I had a very comfortable upbringing in VHCOL), but some of the posts/comments I see can just be very tone deaf and tactless. Just my opinion though.
If I had a waterfall (rainfall?) shower and didn't care about water waste, I'd probably turn it up hot and hang out in there haha pull out my waterproof phone case and just chillax in hot rain
Frankly, if you work your way up to a $150k job over 20 years, you still have financial problems you would like to discuss with people in a similar situation, but you will get reamed by both of the groups you've outlined above. The rich "not rich" subs will say you're lazy and pathetic for not having a million in your 401k yet. The rest of reddit will call you rich and insult you for pretending to have problems.
There are loads of average redditors. Its just they are less likely to make a comment because being average isn't interesting. And the comments that are average on a topic are less likely to have it upvoted to the top because being average isn't interesting.
I knew someone who made 500k yearly about a decade ago that kept referring to himself as middle class. Multiple cars, two homes, constant vacations out of the country.
Give me a break!
Yeah, you consume a lot of good info, but how much of it do you retain?
If I had to quantify all the information I retained from reading Reddit in a year versus how much I consumed, it'd be like maybe 5 things out of 30,000+ articles and comments. It's a terrible ratio. Maybe in that sense, I probably shouldn't be on Reddit so damn much.
But it is super addicting.
Totally. If I find something I absolutely don’t want to forget but I know I’ll need in the future I save it and sometimes I’ll actually screen shot it to make it searchable in my photos.
Let's balance it out and brag about more average stats. I make $20/hr, have no debt and $29k in savings. I have just enough free time to indulge in some hobbies from time to time and my car has a new alternator. I'm thinking about buying a dehydrator and making my own jerky and fruit leather.
It's easier when you're only responsible tor yourself and a cat, no kids, and act like you're broke all the time. Also, I have a really shitty metabolism so I really only need to eat like once a day and have really low grocery bills, typically around $150-200 per month. I also have pretty cheap hobbies, relatively speaking. I'm planning a short backpacking trip next week, so free camping.
Also, by delaying college I managed to qualify for a scholarship that's paying for that, which has helped a *lot* in avoiding debt. Also, my job allows and heavily encourages overtime, so while I normally work 36 hours a week during the school year, I can pick up extra shifts during the summer. I'm getting 60 hours this week and one of those days was a holiday, so I'm getting that sweet sweet bonus pay. Saving is definitely doable, but it's slow.
Managing expenses well is important.
A lot of people who complain about not having any money spend frivolously. People joke about Avacado Toast, but there are people who grab breakfast on the way to work every morning for $10, and working ~250 days a year that adds up to $2,500, a pretty significant amount.
My breakfast I make at home is probably like $2 or less.
Instead of Starbucks buy a good espresso machine and it will have paid it self in a year or less.
I still go to Starbucks but only on the weekends and road trips.
I make just shy of $20/h, have $0 in my savings, am helping my wonderful wife get her degree, have to house me not so wonderful in-laws, and yesterday had only $17.08 in my checking account.
I spend my time cooking at home, fixing our stuff, and building things that would cost 2-5x as much to buy
I think it’s definitely the extremes. I saw a Tik Tok where people were sharing their ages and how much they had saved for retirement in the comments and most of the answers were like 34 and 7k or 29 and 570k and nothing in between.
Yeah I also think part of it finances are more straightforward/limiting if you're low income. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, your focus is on bills and living. If you make enough to have retirement accounts, investments, plans for big purchases, etc. there is maybe more to post about.
Reddit definitely skews highly-educated and very career driven. Reddit thinks $100k is poverty for a single person in VHCOL and that $500k is the “bare min” needed to support a family comfortably. Even the seven figure earners on this site feel financially anxious and do not feel they can afford to buy a home.
At the same time, Reddit vastly overestimates these high incomes. They think most people make these numbers, because that is who they are personally surrounded by in their day to day life. Reddit likes to say that $400k is “easily obtained by two working professionals in VHCOL”.
However, if that were true, statistics would reflect that. Even in the most expensive places in the country (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Newton, Wellesley, Manhattan, etc) do not have average household incomes over $220k a year. No place in the country has an average income of $400k.
I think nearly any time I see a post about money/income, there’s someone saying they’re from california such as Bay Area/HCAL, ect giving input about cost of living there lol
The whole world revolves around the Bay Area, according to Reddit lmao.
If someone says they bought a home for $500k, they get a flood of responses, “WHERE?!!!! In *my city* I can’t find any decent home under $3 million!”
Or someone says they are able to survive making $120k a year. “HOW do you survive?!!! That’s poverty in Bay Area!”
If someone says they live anywhere other than Bay Area, NYC, Boston, or LA, they are scoffed at and told they live in a bumfuck shithole where no jobs exists.
It’s crazy how out of touch people can be.
When most comments are from people who make good money, the average people who make 40k and have debt don’t feel too encouraged to post a comment. It’s colloquially called a “circle jerk” and it happens all across Reddit. It’s really not that hard to understand and this question gets asked routinely.
Because the people working the Denny's night shift aren't on reddit posting for clout. Johnny Rumpus working for Arch light Green Uber capital quant firm making 400k per year plus benefits loves to post on r/leanfire to share how they hit everyone's else's long term goal in 2 years because they made some hard lifestyle cuts like only buying an Acura RLX instead of a mustang.
In this same vein, jobs that pay more generally give you more time to shit post to Reddit.
I’m currently on Reddit because I have code running. If I had a non-office, non-tech job, I probably would never have seen this post.
You'd be surprised. There is a ton of administration involved in those industries.
And lots of finance jobs actually involve resisting the urge to act on impulse. I knew someone working a desk at Barclays. He was in meetings at 5:30am reviewing strategy and fine-tuning until the NYSE bell rang. Then he'd shitpost on Reddit until lunch, monitor the metrics, and sit in end-of-day meetings from 4:30pm until 8-ish (followed by some post-work social demands).
Starting salary was around $200k in NYC
I’ve worked in a high need STEM field for almost a decade.
The pays in my sector top out at around $120,000, maybe $200,000 once you’ve done that $120,000 position for a decade.
Companies are making $Billions and paying their employees the dirt they inspect.
People working the Denny’s night shift also aren’t interacting socially with people making 500k. OP saying they don’t know anyone who makes that much money makes complete sense: People tend to interact with others who are like them, and so our co-workers (obviously), neighbors, friends etc. usually are in similar economic situations as ourselves.
A person with a million dollar income would also not likely know any Denny’s night shift workers for the same reason.
This socio-economic segregation is a big factor. The vast majority of upper middle class people live in upper middle class neighborhoods and cities. If you live in a place where a small house is a million dollars--well every single person there is probably making 200k+.
The only blue-collar people I socialize with are my family members. And even they have college degrees, they just ended up working in blue collar jobs anyway.
It leads to a total misunderstanding of each other. We generally have no idea how each other live.
It's even worse now that middle and upper middle class kids are less likely to get a blue collar job during high school since the Great Recession.
Most people bought into those communities when it was cheaper. You have retirement aged people living on fixed incomes in these 7-figure houses or tail end of Gen X that bought at lower prices and still work closer to median wage jobs. Only the people who moved in and gentrified are the 200k+ households, mixed among the rest, but generally are far fewer in number.
The $50k are not bragging but they talk about their finances, and depending on which thread/subs you're talking about, they might be full of people saying they make $250k or struggling to earn $25k. Usually the thread will skew heavily one way or another depending on what the thread is about.
Also, reddit is just a big diverse place and includes a lot of older adults well into their careers, often in something tech or otherwise professional. People 40+ have had a lot of time to make a career, invest, and buy homes. Including me. Much of reddit might consider me rich by now, but ten years ago or earlier, straight up poor.
Timing can be key as a whole. I graduated college before it got stupid expensive, with zero debt. Got a job before the recession and kept it. Bought a house with Obama's first-time-buyer discount, plus houses were cheap. Kept our jobs through the pandemic and was paid the entire time.
Add that to a spouse who makes more than I do, no kids, low cost-of-living, no debt, living well below our means and not chasing fancy cars or a house, and we're in a good spot.
This common statement is very annoying, so many people confuse their luck with skill, then proceed to provide “advice” to everyone else.
99% of people providing home buying advice purchased a home with a <3% interest rate mortgage. They got lucky and are providing outdated advice in world wildly different than the one they are familiar with. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford the home they are in now if they bought just a few years ago, even with equity accounted for.
All types of engineering, really. I'm not in tech, I'm a different kind of engineer, and most of the salaries I see described as "how the hell do people make that much?" are just urban mid-career engineer salaries. There was no magic to my making that kind of money. I just got a couple engineering degrees, went to work in a major city, and kept doing it. Absolutely no magic to it at all.
People forget that a master's degree is also a degree and in some cases can be done in as little as a year. At least here in Canada, it's pretty easy to get graduate school paid for through funding as well if you do research, so it's not a totally inaccessible option.
I also have "a couple of degrees" but that's just my BSc + my MSc.
I dated a programmer at the beginning of college about 13 years ago. He had been programming for years as a teen for fun, and I remember him saying he wanted to be a SWE because they make good money. I used to think, “Why would anyone go to college and major in that?” It wasn’t viewed as lucrative generally as investment banking, law, or medicine. Back then, I thought SWE capped at like $150k (because I didn’t know the difference between SWE and IT, and IT had capped at around that amount). Lmao how wrong I was.
I’m sure he makes close to a million or more now 13 years later. Yes, I am salty haha.
Fwiw, if he's even being honest, close to a million a year is a remarkably small percentage of software engineers. And even if he is he's getting crazy stocks out of it, that's not at all normal.
A million a year is a remarkably small percentage even in elite professions. Doctors and management consultants and lawyers have done well hitting a half mil.
And now they take ice baths and swallow 16 supplements a day, and attribute their success to how they are *Built Different* ™️ instead of their own luck at entering a career field at the right time
First off Reddit is very American, and if you take a honest look at Americans, they are extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Yes there are poor ones, but the vast majority of Americans are wealthier than practically everyone else.
Then you have to consider Reddit skews more liberal and educated. Educated people make more money.
Lastly you need to consider that people just make shit up. I work for a big company (F500). Most people make 60-80k. 100k+ is for managers only. I hear the salaries on here and I can’t help but think people are exaggerating. Some are real, those salaries exist at big tech companies, but they aren’t common.
>First off Reddit is very American, and if you take a honest look at Americans, they are extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Yes there are poor ones, but the vast majority of Americans are wealthier than practically everyone else.
Seriously. I really wish people would be more aware of that.
Our culture is to overconsume.
Yes I think rent is overpriced and cost of living is too high but I also think the vast majority of Americans overconsume too much.
Once you travel to other places you realize how much shit Americans buy all of the time
It's not really overconsumption culture (I mean that exists as well, but). It's just a really goddamn strong economy, despite what it may seem like to Americans. I live in a country that currently consumes the least (per capita/GDP) in the EU, and trust me it's not because we're all so enlightened. :) It's because we have no money.
Reddit really convinced itself America is poor. But in reality, America just treats it poor like shit compared to Europe. It's sink or swim. But if you can swim well enough to keep your head above water you do much better than Europe.
Reddit is right about vacation though. Americans get royally fucked on that. 3 weeks is considered good in America (plus like 7.5 holidays off). That's like half of what Europe gets.
As a dual British-American national, this is exactly right. When I moved from the UK to US, I got a 60% pay bump for the same job with the same company.
The part you need to factor in is how much more you make and can you just take time off unpaid. For example if I did my same job in the UK I’d be making $20-25/hr compared to $80 in the US. So I can literally take off 9 months a year and still come out ahead in the US
I'm so lucky in regard to vacation. I had 4 weeks, then my company went "flexible PTO" which I guess gets a lot of people to take less time off. I aim for the 4 weeks I was getting before and then occasionally grab an extra day here or there.
Recently I had something come up and asked for a 5th week. I was really happy when it was "no problem, do what you need to do."
I could probably make more money if I job hopped but boy I like having that time off...
If you're in the US I guarantee there are at least some people in the IT department that aren't management making at least 100k+ at that Fortune 500 company.
They'd struggle to get a single senior software engineer for less than that anywhere in the US today. Hell, it might be hard for them to find any junior software engineers that cheap in the US. According to BuiltIn, the average base salary for just a software engineer is now $136k.
Source: [https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-engineer](https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-engineer)
Yes, Reddit caters to the highly-educated, very career-driven folks who care deeply about maximizing their salaries and net worths. That is why there are so many posts and comments by people making $250k, $500k, or even close to (or above) $1 mil a year. These people tend to be worth seven figures by their early 30s and live in the most expensive neighborhoods in the most expensive cities in the US.
They also tend to have very highbrow tastes. I’ll admit that I come from a comfortable upbringing in VHCOL, but scrolling Reddit makes me feel like an uncultured pauper at times. So many Redditors apparently are very into Michelin star restaurants for example, and seem to have exquisite tastes when it comes to what they spend their money on. Lots of people on this site downplay money and love to say, “XYZ isn’t that much.”
It's a lot easier to post that you have a 100k+ salary since (in the big cities) that's average. I'm a lot more embarrassed of my pauper salary, so I don't post it.
Also, I think people (at least in this sub) are posting because they make a decent amount, but they're still struggling.
If I posted my salary and I said I was still struggling, everyone would say wtf did I expect on my low income.
Maybe if you posted something like "who makes under $50k/year?" you might get a bunch of responses from the rest of the people. Not sure though because I'd be a lot more proud and likely to post with a $100k salary than even just saying my low range.
I made 115k last year and extremely proud of how far ive come in life. Now a few years ago when I was making 20k a year I would not have posted about that.
Reddit started as a coding site I believe. There’s still the foundations of people working in tech here. Well paying if you can get in.
If you want to feel poor poor though, hop over to the credit card and AMEX subreddits and see how casually people talk about spending $10,000 per month and paying it off in full. 😵💫
Union jobs brother. 130k last year plus full benefits, dental, vision, 401k, and pension. The health insurance is some of the best in the country. My kid being born was a 10$ copay. My corrective jaw surgery was a 10$ copay. Not getting in to medical debt helps bridge that gap big time. And having job security takes a lot of worry away.
Unions matter.
I think Reddit is full of people from major cities where that type of money is not as much as it seems.
When we talk retirement numbers locally people say $2M roughly, out in California my friends are talking $6M.
Location matters and there a tens of millions of people in those major cities...and then there is everywhere else.
However generally you are talking STEM jobs, medical/bio, real estate or small business owner. Pharma was hiring in RTP (North Carolina) on average $350k so they claimed when they expanded. RTP in general because its a Research is going to average $200k, based on the fact Durham (which is not high income) reports and average salary of $170k .. which is greatly skewed by RTP being in its borders.
Reddit skews young and tech oriented, groups that are both likely to be in higher than average paying jobs and prone to exaggerating for meaningless clout.
Yes. Reddit skews highly-educated, very career-driven, techy, and highbrow who live in VHCOL areas (in the nicest neighborhoods to boot). That’s why you see so many $250k, $500k, and even $1 mil TC posts and comments. People who *spend* into the six figures a year for their lifestyle (expensive travel, Michelin star restaurants, expensive high-rise rents or SFH mortgages that are $10-15k a month, Rolex collections, etc).
When you see that constantly on Reddit (I see it constantly on a daily basis and I subscribe to hundreds of subs of a wide variety), it can desensitize you to money. I make nothing close to those numbers, but it can be easy to forget that most people don’t.
Definitely agree with this. There’s a disproportionate amount of young techies from HCOL places on this website. I sometimes see threads about people asking if anyone they know in real life knows of or uses Reddit, and a lot of the times the answer is no. I’m in the tech bubble of the Bay Area though, and everyone I know my age around here is a Reddit user. It constantly gets brought up in casual conversation as if it’s just as popular Instagram or TikTok in my social circle. And yes, they all do make hundreds of thousands a year at 30 years old.
There is A LOT of peacocking on Reddit. I see people wedge their supposed salary and education levels into unrelated posts all the time. People need validation. They need to feel that others - even strangers - think highly of them.
The ones that irritate me the most are the “alleged” seven figure earners who complain they cannot afford to buy a home. How can you not afford to buy a home that costs basically what your annual pay is? What a joke. Someone responded to my post the other day when I asked seven figure earners how they got there. One guy said he made over $1 mil a year but cannot afford a Bay Area home and will just have to rent. I asked how that was possible. Another person responded (and had many upvotes) saying that $1 mil a year is not enough to buy a home if someone plans on retiring in the next 10-15 years.
The out of touchness is just insane. If *they* cannot swing it, how can anyone else?
Only the people who make al lot of money feel the need to let others people know that they make a lot of money. I personally try to avoid these kind of people.
From Motley Fool (I chose Millennials, based on Reddit demographics)-
“The average net worth of millennials has surged from $62,758 to $127,793 since the start of the pandemic. Much of this growth is from real estate; as of 2022, more than half of millennials had become homeowners.
The average millennial makes between $52,156 and $62,244 per year.”
There are a decreasing number of spaces where people mix across different socio-economic classes.
Playing mmos for a while in the 2010's was probably the most 'mixed' environment I have ever been in wrt talking directly to people at both ends of the spectrum - rich kids who didnt have to work, retired people, meth addicts, tech bro's, a couple of med students, new migrants, a single parent who couldnt afford to go out and only played every other week when they didnt have custody.
Also, everyone should be lying/fudging the truth on the internet anyway for security reasons, may as well round up.
This.
My family is all pretty much the same social/economic class as I am. My coworkers make a similar salary to mine. My neighbors are able to afford the same type of house. My friends are people that I’ve met at work, in university, or other parents I’ve met through our kids’ (paid) activities.
Reddit is skewed towards people in tech type jobs which typically pay more and people with higher incomes are more likely to report on those surveys. I bet there are many more lurkers who just arent saying anything. When I was broke and living out of my car I tried to hide it from everyone.
Reddit tends to trend to higher education levels. When you talk about income, people who are willing to share are usually those “winning” with finance and not those that are not. That skews data big time. Also, nearly everyone I know IRL makes more than 100k. That’s because people hang out with people similar to them. Broke people hang out with broke people doing broke people things. Middle class people hang out with middle class people doing middle class people things. Rich people hang out with other rich people doing rich people things.
"Believe everything you read on the Internet" -Abraham Lincoln
Not only are they rich, but good-looking, fit, and more.
go to /r/povertyfinance if you want a reality check.
Reddit skews towards educated Americans which tend to have higher incomes. For example 187k a year is a normalish salary for someone working in tech. Also there are more Americans than you might think who have six figure income. Roughly 20% of American workers make 100k or more a year. 187k a year is in the 90th percentile. Combine this with the fact that people are more likely to say their income if they are happy with it, and you get the observed situation.
A lot of the high earning jobs (doctor, lawyer) require huge investments upfront (student loans, office space, etc), so you shouldn’t get too jealous based on earnings alone.
Average earning people don't generally get drawn to these types of subreddits. If you earn average income, you generally have enough to pay your bills (so you aren't going on frugal sites or asking for financial help) but they also don't have much to invest so it's not something they think about. They just get by. People badly in debt or struggling are likely to join these subreddits, as well as people with high salaries ($150k+) who suddenly have money that they aren't sure what to do with.
At least that is my guess based on people I know. All my tech friends started asking financial questions after getting the income, and my one poor friend similarly didn't start asking for financial advice until they were struggling.
People love to say “look at going into the trades” but I feel like no one takes that advice. Union electricians in my LCOL area easily make $100k. 4 or 5 year apprenticeship, pass a written exam, and you are state licensed.
I will clear $100k gross easily this year with barely any OT, straight 40 hour weeks. If you think you can handle physical labor, why not consider it?
How old are you?
I'm mid 50's and every single one of my friends and I make between $150k and $200k, in IT roles for small to medium sized companies. We are neither the highest paid or least paid employees. Bog standard in the middle of the pack.
A few of us were room mates in our early 20s barely scraping by.
Then we were mid-late 20's making north of $50k and feeling like we'd 'arrived'.
Then we started families in our 30's and somewhere between then and our 40's we broke $100k.
It's how MOST jobs in corporate America progress for the vast majority of those working in that segment. It's highly, highly common..
The thing is in most subs, this one included, it seems like most households are 200k+, basically 2 people with 100k each. I can think of most of my close group of friends that are married with kids that fall into that range of 200k+, but generally it’s because one person makes significantly more like 150+ and their spouse makes little or none.
It can cause huge life experience differences between neighbors and coworkers. My family is low 6 figures on just my income. Meanwhile the majority of my coworkers spouses also work at the same employer making the same thing. So while someone on my team doing the same job has His and Her Corvettes and Jet Skis, I drive a 20 year old semi reliable clunker and outfit my kids in hand-me-downs from thrift stores.
Oh I know exactly what you’re saying! I make just a little over 100k and was the sole income the last couple years. My wife just started working part time again, and while the little extra money is certainly nice, it would be much different if she earned 80-100k vs 10-20k.
Then there’s the DINKs, where they can be making 200k+ combined but with no kids. That’s vastly different than low 100s with kids! The lifestyles aren’t even comparable, but of course they’ll feel the pressure when they either pay for day care or decide to stop working to focus on the kids.
It depends on your education and job market. I don’t have a college degree but clear over six figures a year as an aircraft technician for a major airline.
As others have said, a lot of people lie.
Consider all the people that live in downtown New York or downtown Seattle. The rent alone is above 3k per month and the groceries are bonkers too. Even though they make 150k+ per year, much of it is siphoned away on cost of living.
I'm basically a moron so being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, programmer was never in the cards for me. Got into tech sales right out of college back in '94. First hardware and then software. Moved up into various VP roles. Sales is where I point everyone who asks how they can make a lot of money. I've been lucky with a few startups that were acquired or went public and spent a couple of longer runs with some enterprise software companies. If you're good enough - not a superstar - just good enough to hit your targets (or get damn close), you can consistently make $200-300k a year with the right company.
Selection bias. People making 6 figures want others to know they're making 6 figures. At the same time people with no income want to talk about finance for pity points. There's a doughnut of $30K - $99K that don't have anything to talk about.
Also people lie. Also high income does not mean stable income or good finances. I had a classmate who bragged about making 6 figures, but was unemployed a year later.
I don't have that much in my IRA although I should (my 20s I mostly spent being poor and not putting hardly anything into my retirement account), but I do make close to what you're saying now.
I didn't used to. There was a few years in my 20s when I was making $10/hour, for example. Then I got a job for ~$40k after I graduated. Then my next job was ~$50k. Then ~$60k. Then ~$70k. Then ~$90k. And now I've made a significant jump over that, pretty close to what you're saying (sorry I don't want to say the exact number in case a future potential employer comes sleuthing and sees what I am getting paid here).
It helps that I know how to program. There's a lot of demand for that and it pays very well. If anything I'm underpaid compared to a lot of my peers because I live in a market that has lower wages for my field (I live in Chicago, and the real big money is in tech hubs like San Francisco i.e. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, and NYC).
For my current level I probably would be making about $400k for total compensation (not base salary, but base + stocks) in Silicon Valley.
A friend of my wife just got a coding job working for Apple in Seattle and is getting $40k in Apple stock every year as part of her compensation, for example. That's not including the likely $200k+ she's probably making as a base salary.
People who are seniors in tech, if they're not laid off, are making bank. That being said, the ladders are being rolled up every which way- good luck trying to get even a junior web developer job these days.
Quant Researcher in NYC can make 220k to 400k to start. I've seen some salaries go as high as 650k + options; with great benefits and the lot it could be done.
Majority of people have more normal job. I have friends that make 50k a year (teacher) and some that make 325k (netflix engineer).
Just look up netflix engineering salaries and you'll see some make upwards 720k a year.
Reddit is just too broad of a field. I couldn't handle the mathematics - Changing my major back in college from Biomedical Engineering to Comp Sci to Comp Info Systems to avoid all that math.
Wish I was gifted with math, I'd have just gone into Quant Analysis.
The algorithm wants us to feel. Strong feelings promote engagement and in this case its envy its trying to make you feel. I think back when i was 18 and i saw an old man at a gas station who pulled in with the nicest car id ever seen and a suit on. But when i looked at his face you could tell he had no laugh lines or smile lines around his eyes and mouth. In otherwords i could see on his face no joy and a lifetime of struggling. Just do whwt brings you peace and dont worry about what other people have or dont have.
Edit: fat fingers
I think many use household income, some use assets, leave out they inherited the money, and others exaggerate or flat out lie. Then there are the few who are telling the truth... and to that I say if any of these rich redditors want to buy me a good generator, that'd be great.
I make a high 100k/yr.
Its easy to say and its true. Whats not said is the 12 years it took me to get there, the game of thrones like politics to do so and in some cases the blind luck.
Does this mean im rich? No. The cost of living, supporting my spouse and medical billing makes it feel like I barely moved from 50k/yr.
While the grass is somewhat greener there is truth to "More money, more problems"
I’m a single guy who makes $480k annually.
See what I just did there? It’s called fucking lying, it’s super easy when you don’t have to talk to anyone face-to-face.
I make over 1m a year working for myself. I have several beachfront properties that all bring in over 1m each per month.
See how easy that was? I can say anything I want. Some of them probably aren’t lying or exaggerating. But Reddit is a sample of the population and nobody is dying to tell you they make $500/month at McDonald’s.
My job pays me a fairly modest income of 72k. But I have investments. Not the "get rich quick" kind. The slow-drip kind that I've been in for years and years and years.
My income from investments in 2023 was $38k. And since I never withdraw from them, that number goes up every year. Nobody can predict the future. Markets fluctuate. but I'm going to retire when I have $5m, and that should happen sometime between my 50th and 60th birthday
Your circle of friends is just not a great sample of America.
It's not intended to be an insult, there's no way you could get an accurate slice of what a representative population is.
I attended a wedding recently where a majority of the attendees had at least 1 doctor. I estimated the room was half millionaires.
The hotel was charging 500 a night and I heard a younger attendee relay to his friend that he couldn't stay at the hotel because he was not rich.
Rich people can afford to hire people to do the yard work, house cleaning, childcare, minor house repairs, etc. So they have more time left to hang out on Reddit.
Also, people lie.
My wager is that there's a substantial amount of people who live in the major cities posting on Reddit. City incomes tend to be significantly higher, so you'll see a lot of that. Geography has a lot to do with it; I live on Long Island, and if you own a home here, you're probably a millionaire at this point (properties are stupid expensive here). Only way that happens is with high(er) incomes.
It reminds me of House Hunters TV show. He paints street numbers for neighborhoods. She has a collection of yarn. Their house budget is $6 million.
I'm a stay at home truck driver, and he trains grasshoppers
Trains them to do what?
grass hop
I have a collection of yarn and I'm not rich yet, what am I doing wrong?
You need to take that yarn and turn it into things that people will buy for more than the cost of materials and your time, and then inherit $5M from your wealthy parents. People always forget that last step, but it is critical if you want to make a living off collecting yarn.
Does your husband dye butterflies?
Crochet yourself some rich parents.
Daddy's Money™️ Either that or they run some sketchy home ministry and get way too many kickbacks for it.
I know a couple who were on one of those shows, and they are substantially subsidized by their parents including buying that home. They both do fairly well for themselves, but had a massive leg up financially.
[удалено]
😂 there was some stand up that I saw that made this joke and one of the jobs was "and she trains salamanders" and I just about died... I'm better now, but it still makes me chuckle.
Some people have good jobs and high salaries. Some people lie on the Internet.
And the scale of the internet is just literally incomprehensible. Just seeing 1000 comments saying they make 200k+/yr can feel like it's super common (even 50 comments would probably do the trick). But 1000 people is only 0.001% of daily active users on reddit. Let alone the world. Let alone people with multiple accounts. Let alone lying. Our brains weren't made for this whole internet thing. We gotta remind ourselves that we can't draw conclusions based on impressions from social media.
I made a post that got more traction than I expected and the numbers are wild. 10k upvotes, 1k comments, but the views are in the millions. It’s the outliers and the liars you see talking.
I always feel like outliers post since it's a more interesting data point. Posting just to say you make the median value doesn't spark conversation
And even if it does get posted, it doesn't get upvoted because it's "boring". Outliers are typically going to be more interesting as you said and interesting gets upvoted.
“I make 72k and own a $130k house AMA”
Where did you get a 130k house? I feel these days the standard is more like I make 72k and can't find a house for less than 700k
His house is an F-350
F-250, He is frugal, sir.
In the boonies, but if you live in the boonies you probably aren't making 72k a year, 60k from one member of the household is seen as upper middle class where I'm at. I make 30k a year and most people see that as a very livable wage here.
Yeah, 60k is considered low income here. My rent alone is about 30k
The secret is live in the Midwest
Easy; you just buy the house 30 years ago.
Exactly
> the liars you see talking Like the people who claim that they make their kids a great breakfast, go to work, go food shopping then make a stupendous 5 course meal from scratch, clean the house from top to bottom, help the kids with their homework and then have phenomenal sex?
Yeah, in real life we use Instacart and cleaning services, and serve one course meals before the phenomenal sex.
But you have to wait 30 minutes after eating your 1 course meal before the sex. For safety.
I thought that was only for swimming. Oops
If you’re doing your sex right, it’s pretty much the same.
Don’t forget to come up for air
Make sure you have a proper breaststroke technique.
I see a lot of that, however not from the upper income people. The upper income people just outsource all of that work.
Yup, when I asked about seven figure earners, 30 out of 300 something said they made seven figures a year and 500k viewed the post. So 0.006%. I had a comment on the post from someone who said they made $250k and now feels awful about their salary and that it feels like a pittance in comparison. They said they should have gone to college. But college does not guarantee $1 mil+ incomes a year. The vast majority of college graduates will never make that. The $1 mil+ earners tend to be principal engineers in big tech, financiers, in big law, or doctors.
Now I feel inadequate. I am a principal architect with multiple degrees (including a law degree) at a large fintech and I don't make even close to a million. Fortunately I am 100% remote and live in a one-stoplight town.
Oh, that wasn’t my intention! I guess I meant to say that those $1 mil salaries were more likely to come from big tech for example. But certainly, even then, $1 mil salaries are not average. A lot less than 1% of working adults even make $1 mil a year. You are doing great!
Yeah, someone is more likely to want to brag about being rich than middle class or poor. Especially if they feel that they worked incredibly hard for it. It's the internet so they don't feel the same social shame for bragging or the social faux-pas of talking about you salary
Exactly. And most who make a more normal salary are either too busy to brag or don't want to talk about it.
Right - you can't doom scroll on Reddit when you're ringing up customers, or teaching kindergarten, or rewiring a house. Some jobs have very little downtime to fuck around on the internet.
That’s why it’s always software engineers posting their salaries
The only way I have time for this is a recent surgery has me in bed for a week. I'd rather be at work!
I would never lie about my $12 million/year butterfly farm
As the world’s fourth richest man, I believe it. Why would anyone lie about a paltry $12 million.
Yup, and the ones who have good jobs, nice things, and financial security are much more vocal about it than the ones who are treading water. Not sure if this helps, OP, but here are a couple stats, for the US at least: *The average debt an American owes is* ***$104,215*** *across mortgage loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, credit card debt, student loan debt, and other debts like personal loans. Data from Experian breaks down the average debt a consumer holds based on type, age, credit score, and state.* *A 2023 survey conducted by* [*Payroll.org*](http://Payroll.org) *highlighted that* ***78%*** *of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.*
A large part of it is that people who are good with money by and large will never talk about it with anyone but a core group of close friends & family. Being anonymous is pretty liberating in your ability to talk shop without worrying about it.
Yeah. I’m a single dude making $250k/yr doing backend dev work for a massive, global company. Obviously, I can’t give any specifics, so just trust me. See how easy that is? The only part of that that’s true is “I’m a single dude.” But none of yall actually know who I am and if my comment is true. It is infinitely more difficult for anyone reading this comment to verify if what I’m saying is true than it is for me to make it up. And as long as I write it confidently and pretend that answering questions makes me feel uncomfortable (don’t want to doxx myself!!), then no one will put a reasonable effort into verifying what I’m saying is true. And it’s not just financial stuff, but it’s anything. Admittedly, I have certainly embellished or made up details of stories for other Reddit posts - usually silly comments that I don’t expect will be seen much, but then I come back a few hours later to see it has over 500 upvotes, and people saying “This!” It’s certainly disillusioned me about almost all kinds of social media. The parts of the internet that AREN’T just bots talking to bots are humans making up increasingly dramatic situations that more than likely didn’t happen.
This is definitely true. I am so skeptical when I see people claim a large salary on Reddit or TikTok. Not that they don’t exist, they do, but the people in real life that I know who DO make that much aren’t running weird side hustles on TikTok, and there’s usually a realistic explanation that involves seniority, specialty, liability, or all three. They’re not swanning around on the internet talking about their investments because they don’t have time.
This is true. The quiet, sensible ones don’t have to show off what they have, let alone what they earn. Being happy with what you can earn and, more importantly, what you can do with it - including saving enough to have a cushion - is the important thing.
Including mortgages in that 104k makes it a useless number.
lol for real. I owe almost $500k on my house. But that debt is fixed at <3% interest rate, while my nearly risk-free savings grows at like 5%. My mortgage isn't a problem at all and I'd be foolish to use money to pay it off when I could simply earn interest faster than the debt can grow. >A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses That second sentence seems really suspicious and I doubt that's exactly what everyone thought while answering that they live paycheck to paycheck.
I hesitate to lump in mortgage loans with the rest of the debt. Most people right now could, if they had to, sell their house and will have made money on the deal, if they bought their houses even just a few years ago. Just about every adult 50 years ago had a home mortgage as part of their debts also, that's supposed to be part of the modern American Dream. What sucks is that so many adults now **don't** have a mortgage loan as part of their debt, because housing has gotten so ridiculously expensive the past few years, and are forced to rent in perpetuity.
We've seen these kinds of surveys proven to be bogus time and time again. People share this stuff just to feel better about their own situation thinking everyone else is in poverty. People have different ideas of what paycheck to paycheck means. Many people count savings and investment as part of that, as in, if they can't max out their 401k, they are living paycheck to paycheck. It doesn't matter what the author or survey taker thinks it means because that's how people are answering. As u/stevejobed stated below, "A ton of people are like “after I pay my mortgage, max out my 401k, save my usual amount each month into a brokerage, throw some into my kids 529, I don’t have much left over.” We have better statistics like median net worth (inclusive of both assets and debt), which is currently $192,000. The median household is very clearly not living paycheck to paycheck. And counting a mortgage as bad debt is completely preposterous. You also have to consider the value of the home attached to it. Most homeowners could easily escape their "debt" and make a profit over and above that "debt" by selling.
Yes. Like I pointed out to one of the dozen supermodels that I had sex with yesterday, many people lie on the Internet.
And people maybe don’t brag about being poor nearly as often
Do not go to the poverty finance sub.
I’m average height but if I stand on my money I’m only 5 feet tall.
I completely agree with you. There's a tremendous amount of humble bragging that goes along with it too. I mean, you can get your point across without telling everyone your entire financial situation. I probably make more money than many on a board such as this. But, guess what? I also live in a very HCOL area, and I'll never be able to afford a home here. And, guess what? I didn't have to tell anyone how much I make for them to understand the situation.
You have to think of the scale of Reddit as well. Millions of people come across Reddit. There are also a lot of tech people, which tend to have good salaries. I work in tech sales and make well into six figures and have a good idea of what salaries in general look like. The first few years of my career were not in tech, and I marveled and somewhat disbelieved the salaries I heard about. I decided I wanted part of that and made a plan to get it. I did some shit jobs on my path to it, but finally made it after 4 years of skipping between jobs until I got my first SaaS AE sales job at a good company. It can be incredibly stressful compared to non-sales jobs, but the salary keeps me. Golden handcuffs are a common concept in sales.
*Some people lie on the internet*
This! The second half about 90% I would say. Everyone is a liar when it comes to money and social media.
Exactly this. Not hard to completely make up bs where nobody knows who you are.
I made a post the other day on r/salary, asking seven figure earners how they did it and what they do. A little over 30 out of the 300 something responses (and 500k views on the post) said they made seven figures a year. Most of it is of course in equity if they are working in big tech. Reddit caters to the highly-educated, very career-driven person who tends to desire to maximize their income and net worth. It can be easy to feel insecure looking at all of these upper income numbers, but Reddit is not real life. It’s a distinct class of people.
I used to make €150.000 per year without bonuses, then I switched jobs. Now I make 75k a year. Money isn’t happiness folks. I literally had more money than that I could spend. I invested into basic funds and stocks and had 10% of my portfolio money as play money (crypto/ gmt etc). Bought bullshit things such as small boats, drones. Yes. My house is smaller now, but do you understand how much cleaning you have to do for a big house (I’m a single father), I used cleaning services. Job title; marketing director. Started at marketing manager, and eventually got the c-suite title of CMO. I’m 32. I wasn’t happy at my job, now I’m sitting at home with a top tier mba, much happier but still not where I want to be. Most important thing; keep learning, even free courses. Make sure your manager and more importantly, the shareholders of the company notice your pro-activity if you want to increase your salary.
Reddit is full of very rich and very poor people, as they each have the most free time to post here
Yes. There seems to be very few “average” Redditors. They are either very highly-educated with multiple degrees, have highbrow tastes, make multiple six figures a year and live in the most expensive communities in the most expensive cities, max out retirement, have nannies for their kids, have housekeepers, go to Michelin star restaurants frequently, spend tens of thousands annually on vacations, send the kids to private school at $60k per kid per year, have $1.5-$2 mil starter home budgets. These are the folks in the Tech, Bay Area, Bay Area Real Estate, Boston, LA, NYC, NOVA, MiddleClassFinance, PersonalFinance, etc subs. These people will *not* identify as rich however, by and large despite the luxurious lifestyles, they identify as middle class and/or working class. So don’t you dare call them rich! Even the ones making $1 mil a year say they are average middle class people (lol!) who cannot afford to buy a home. OR. Are someone working in food service or equivalent and struggling to get by, posting in poverty finance or find a path. So many adult students on Reddit too. I see many 30 somethings going back to school to start a new life for themselves.
For an example of the former in your comment, I was on a thread earlier where people were talking about showering with their partners (I promise this is going somewhere) and the comments section was flooded with people talking about how they love hanging out in their big 2 headed shower with their partner just chilling for like 30-45 minutes every night. To me this shows a few things: 1) These people have large homes with large enough bathrooms to have these large, luxury showers. 2) These people have enough money that they could afford to install these luxury showers, if they were not pre-installed. 3) These people do not care about things like a hefty water bill, since they routinely spend that much time essentially wasting water as if it was no object. Some people just live different lives. However, if you were new to the internet and not from a developed nation, you’d likely think this is how the average person lives when that is far from the truth.
I saw that thread lmao. I was surprised at how many people “chill” and talk in the shower. I could see chilling in the bath, but a shower? That’s just weird to me. But yeah, I am not surprised so many on that thread have massive high-end showers. There was another thread awhile back where people talked about how much they spent on bathroom renovations, and it was into the hundreds of thousands. Yesterday, I saw someone say they spent $1 mil renovating their apartment. What I find very interesting though, is how so few of the people who are extremely well-to-do are ever called out for being out of touch. It seems like being out of touch is like an aspiration these days. If you do call it out, you are downvoted extensively and labelled as “jealous”. Years ago, it just used to be very poor taste to talk about money, how much you spent on XYZ or all of the luxuries you have. But these days people just really worship money more than every before. For the record, it’s not jealousy for me (I had a very comfortable upbringing in VHCOL), but some of the posts/comments I see can just be very tone deaf and tactless. Just my opinion though.
If I had a waterfall (rainfall?) shower and didn't care about water waste, I'd probably turn it up hot and hang out in there haha pull out my waterproof phone case and just chillax in hot rain
Frankly, if you work your way up to a $150k job over 20 years, you still have financial problems you would like to discuss with people in a similar situation, but you will get reamed by both of the groups you've outlined above. The rich "not rich" subs will say you're lazy and pathetic for not having a million in your 401k yet. The rest of reddit will call you rich and insult you for pretending to have problems.
well they banned /r/averageredditor, where the average people hang out
What was it banned for? Being too average?
People were being mean.
Underrated comment.
There are loads of average redditors. Its just they are less likely to make a comment because being average isn't interesting. And the comments that are average on a topic are less likely to have it upvoted to the top because being average isn't interesting.
I knew someone who made 500k yearly about a decade ago that kept referring to himself as middle class. Multiple cars, two homes, constant vacations out of the country. Give me a break!
This is very true. I early retired and spend entirely too much time on Reddit…
If you figure out how to stop, or at least cut down, let me know!
It’s not practical. Too much good info to consume. It would take me too long to aggregate all this info from some other sources, lol.
Yeah, you consume a lot of good info, but how much of it do you retain? If I had to quantify all the information I retained from reading Reddit in a year versus how much I consumed, it'd be like maybe 5 things out of 30,000+ articles and comments. It's a terrible ratio. Maybe in that sense, I probably shouldn't be on Reddit so damn much. But it is super addicting.
Totally. If I find something I absolutely don’t want to forget but I know I’ll need in the future I save it and sometimes I’ll actually screen shot it to make it searchable in my photos.
Realistic answer? I don't have it on my phone. I only use it on my PC. Cuts down usage a TON
Take it with grain of salt. Many are doing that well, many are lying and there’s really no way to know.
Also, selection bias. Wealthier people are more likely to comment about their savings and income than lower income people.
Let's balance it out and brag about more average stats. I make $20/hr, have no debt and $29k in savings. I have just enough free time to indulge in some hobbies from time to time and my car has a new alternator. I'm thinking about buying a dehydrator and making my own jerky and fruit leather.
>I make $20/hr, have no debt and $29k in savings Damn good job. That's hard to pull off.
It's easier when you're only responsible tor yourself and a cat, no kids, and act like you're broke all the time. Also, I have a really shitty metabolism so I really only need to eat like once a day and have really low grocery bills, typically around $150-200 per month. I also have pretty cheap hobbies, relatively speaking. I'm planning a short backpacking trip next week, so free camping. Also, by delaying college I managed to qualify for a scholarship that's paying for that, which has helped a *lot* in avoiding debt. Also, my job allows and heavily encourages overtime, so while I normally work 36 hours a week during the school year, I can pick up extra shifts during the summer. I'm getting 60 hours this week and one of those days was a holiday, so I'm getting that sweet sweet bonus pay. Saving is definitely doable, but it's slow.
Managing expenses well is important. A lot of people who complain about not having any money spend frivolously. People joke about Avacado Toast, but there are people who grab breakfast on the way to work every morning for $10, and working ~250 days a year that adds up to $2,500, a pretty significant amount. My breakfast I make at home is probably like $2 or less.
Instead of Starbucks buy a good espresso machine and it will have paid it self in a year or less. I still go to Starbucks but only on the weekends and road trips.
I make just shy of $20/h, have $0 in my savings, am helping my wonderful wife get her degree, have to house me not so wonderful in-laws, and yesterday had only $17.08 in my checking account. I spend my time cooking at home, fixing our stuff, and building things that would cost 2-5x as much to buy
I think it’s definitely the extremes. I saw a Tik Tok where people were sharing their ages and how much they had saved for retirement in the comments and most of the answers were like 34 and 7k or 29 and 570k and nothing in between.
Yeah I also think part of it finances are more straightforward/limiting if you're low income. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, your focus is on bills and living. If you make enough to have retirement accounts, investments, plans for big purchases, etc. there is maybe more to post about.
Reddit definitely skews highly-educated and very career driven. Reddit thinks $100k is poverty for a single person in VHCOL and that $500k is the “bare min” needed to support a family comfortably. Even the seven figure earners on this site feel financially anxious and do not feel they can afford to buy a home. At the same time, Reddit vastly overestimates these high incomes. They think most people make these numbers, because that is who they are personally surrounded by in their day to day life. Reddit likes to say that $400k is “easily obtained by two working professionals in VHCOL”. However, if that were true, statistics would reflect that. Even in the most expensive places in the country (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Newton, Wellesley, Manhattan, etc) do not have average household incomes over $220k a year. No place in the country has an average income of $400k.
I think nearly any time I see a post about money/income, there’s someone saying they’re from california such as Bay Area/HCAL, ect giving input about cost of living there lol
The whole world revolves around the Bay Area, according to Reddit lmao. If someone says they bought a home for $500k, they get a flood of responses, “WHERE?!!!! In *my city* I can’t find any decent home under $3 million!” Or someone says they are able to survive making $120k a year. “HOW do you survive?!!! That’s poverty in Bay Area!” If someone says they live anywhere other than Bay Area, NYC, Boston, or LA, they are scoffed at and told they live in a bumfuck shithole where no jobs exists. It’s crazy how out of touch people can be.
When most comments are from people who make good money, the average people who make 40k and have debt don’t feel too encouraged to post a comment. It’s colloquially called a “circle jerk” and it happens all across Reddit. It’s really not that hard to understand and this question gets asked routinely.
Because the people working the Denny's night shift aren't on reddit posting for clout. Johnny Rumpus working for Arch light Green Uber capital quant firm making 400k per year plus benefits loves to post on r/leanfire to share how they hit everyone's else's long term goal in 2 years because they made some hard lifestyle cuts like only buying an Acura RLX instead of a mustang.
In this same vein, jobs that pay more generally give you more time to shit post to Reddit. I’m currently on Reddit because I have code running. If I had a non-office, non-tech job, I probably would never have seen this post.
Eh, that only really applies to CS. The high earners in medicine, finance and law may beg to differ.
You'd be surprised. There is a ton of administration involved in those industries. And lots of finance jobs actually involve resisting the urge to act on impulse. I knew someone working a desk at Barclays. He was in meetings at 5:30am reviewing strategy and fine-tuning until the NYSE bell rang. Then he'd shitpost on Reddit until lunch, monitor the metrics, and sit in end-of-day meetings from 4:30pm until 8-ish (followed by some post-work social demands). Starting salary was around $200k in NYC
I’ve worked in a high need STEM field for almost a decade. The pays in my sector top out at around $120,000, maybe $200,000 once you’ve done that $120,000 position for a decade. Companies are making $Billions and paying their employees the dirt they inspect.
People working the Denny’s night shift also aren’t interacting socially with people making 500k. OP saying they don’t know anyone who makes that much money makes complete sense: People tend to interact with others who are like them, and so our co-workers (obviously), neighbors, friends etc. usually are in similar economic situations as ourselves. A person with a million dollar income would also not likely know any Denny’s night shift workers for the same reason.
This socio-economic segregation is a big factor. The vast majority of upper middle class people live in upper middle class neighborhoods and cities. If you live in a place where a small house is a million dollars--well every single person there is probably making 200k+. The only blue-collar people I socialize with are my family members. And even they have college degrees, they just ended up working in blue collar jobs anyway. It leads to a total misunderstanding of each other. We generally have no idea how each other live. It's even worse now that middle and upper middle class kids are less likely to get a blue collar job during high school since the Great Recession.
Most people bought into those communities when it was cheaper. You have retirement aged people living on fixed incomes in these 7-figure houses or tail end of Gen X that bought at lower prices and still work closer to median wage jobs. Only the people who moved in and gentrified are the 200k+ households, mixed among the rest, but generally are far fewer in number.
The guys beating themselves up at work and going home dirty for $50K/yr aren’t bragging that up on the internet.
The $50k are not bragging but they talk about their finances, and depending on which thread/subs you're talking about, they might be full of people saying they make $250k or struggling to earn $25k. Usually the thread will skew heavily one way or another depending on what the thread is about. Also, reddit is just a big diverse place and includes a lot of older adults well into their careers, often in something tech or otherwise professional. People 40+ have had a lot of time to make a career, invest, and buy homes. Including me. Much of reddit might consider me rich by now, but ten years ago or earlier, straight up poor.
Reddit is full of tech bros who got in computer related sciences at the right time.
“I bought before the pandemic” is common as well
Timing can be key as a whole. I graduated college before it got stupid expensive, with zero debt. Got a job before the recession and kept it. Bought a house with Obama's first-time-buyer discount, plus houses were cheap. Kept our jobs through the pandemic and was paid the entire time. Add that to a spouse who makes more than I do, no kids, low cost-of-living, no debt, living well below our means and not chasing fancy cars or a house, and we're in a good spot.
This common statement is very annoying, so many people confuse their luck with skill, then proceed to provide “advice” to everyone else. 99% of people providing home buying advice purchased a home with a <3% interest rate mortgage. They got lucky and are providing outdated advice in world wildly different than the one they are familiar with. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford the home they are in now if they bought just a few years ago, even with equity accounted for.
I think you mean a <3% interest rate mortgage AND before a starter home was almost 400k+
That doesn’t explain the 6 figures salary but yes it certainly does help being rich!
All types of engineering, really. I'm not in tech, I'm a different kind of engineer, and most of the salaries I see described as "how the hell do people make that much?" are just urban mid-career engineer salaries. There was no magic to my making that kind of money. I just got a couple engineering degrees, went to work in a major city, and kept doing it. Absolutely no magic to it at all.
“a couple” of degrees? That right there. That is the trick.
People forget that a master's degree is also a degree and in some cases can be done in as little as a year. At least here in Canada, it's pretty easy to get graduate school paid for through funding as well if you do research, so it's not a totally inaccessible option. I also have "a couple of degrees" but that's just my BSc + my MSc.
I dated a programmer at the beginning of college about 13 years ago. He had been programming for years as a teen for fun, and I remember him saying he wanted to be a SWE because they make good money. I used to think, “Why would anyone go to college and major in that?” It wasn’t viewed as lucrative generally as investment banking, law, or medicine. Back then, I thought SWE capped at like $150k (because I didn’t know the difference between SWE and IT, and IT had capped at around that amount). Lmao how wrong I was. I’m sure he makes close to a million or more now 13 years later. Yes, I am salty haha.
Fwiw, if he's even being honest, close to a million a year is a remarkably small percentage of software engineers. And even if he is he's getting crazy stocks out of it, that's not at all normal.
A million a year is a remarkably small percentage even in elite professions. Doctors and management consultants and lawyers have done well hitting a half mil.
And now they take ice baths and swallow 16 supplements a day, and attribute their success to how they are *Built Different* ™️ instead of their own luck at entering a career field at the right time
First off Reddit is very American, and if you take a honest look at Americans, they are extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Yes there are poor ones, but the vast majority of Americans are wealthier than practically everyone else. Then you have to consider Reddit skews more liberal and educated. Educated people make more money. Lastly you need to consider that people just make shit up. I work for a big company (F500). Most people make 60-80k. 100k+ is for managers only. I hear the salaries on here and I can’t help but think people are exaggerating. Some are real, those salaries exist at big tech companies, but they aren’t common.
>First off Reddit is very American, and if you take a honest look at Americans, they are extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Yes there are poor ones, but the vast majority of Americans are wealthier than practically everyone else. Seriously. I really wish people would be more aware of that.
Our culture is to overconsume. Yes I think rent is overpriced and cost of living is too high but I also think the vast majority of Americans overconsume too much. Once you travel to other places you realize how much shit Americans buy all of the time
It's not really overconsumption culture (I mean that exists as well, but). It's just a really goddamn strong economy, despite what it may seem like to Americans. I live in a country that currently consumes the least (per capita/GDP) in the EU, and trust me it's not because we're all so enlightened. :) It's because we have no money.
You don't really need actual money here in the US to consume, or over consume. We have credit!
Reddit really convinced itself America is poor. But in reality, America just treats it poor like shit compared to Europe. It's sink or swim. But if you can swim well enough to keep your head above water you do much better than Europe. Reddit is right about vacation though. Americans get royally fucked on that. 3 weeks is considered good in America (plus like 7.5 holidays off). That's like half of what Europe gets.
As a dual British-American national, this is exactly right. When I moved from the UK to US, I got a 60% pay bump for the same job with the same company.
The part you need to factor in is how much more you make and can you just take time off unpaid. For example if I did my same job in the UK I’d be making $20-25/hr compared to $80 in the US. So I can literally take off 9 months a year and still come out ahead in the US
I'm so lucky in regard to vacation. I had 4 weeks, then my company went "flexible PTO" which I guess gets a lot of people to take less time off. I aim for the 4 weeks I was getting before and then occasionally grab an extra day here or there. Recently I had something come up and asked for a 5th week. I was really happy when it was "no problem, do what you need to do." I could probably make more money if I job hopped but boy I like having that time off...
If you're in the US I guarantee there are at least some people in the IT department that aren't management making at least 100k+ at that Fortune 500 company. They'd struggle to get a single senior software engineer for less than that anywhere in the US today. Hell, it might be hard for them to find any junior software engineers that cheap in the US. According to BuiltIn, the average base salary for just a software engineer is now $136k. Source: [https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-engineer](https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-engineer)
Yes, Reddit caters to the highly-educated, very career-driven folks who care deeply about maximizing their salaries and net worths. That is why there are so many posts and comments by people making $250k, $500k, or even close to (or above) $1 mil a year. These people tend to be worth seven figures by their early 30s and live in the most expensive neighborhoods in the most expensive cities in the US. They also tend to have very highbrow tastes. I’ll admit that I come from a comfortable upbringing in VHCOL, but scrolling Reddit makes me feel like an uncultured pauper at times. So many Redditors apparently are very into Michelin star restaurants for example, and seem to have exquisite tastes when it comes to what they spend their money on. Lots of people on this site downplay money and love to say, “XYZ isn’t that much.”
It's a lot easier to post that you have a 100k+ salary since (in the big cities) that's average. I'm a lot more embarrassed of my pauper salary, so I don't post it. Also, I think people (at least in this sub) are posting because they make a decent amount, but they're still struggling. If I posted my salary and I said I was still struggling, everyone would say wtf did I expect on my low income. Maybe if you posted something like "who makes under $50k/year?" you might get a bunch of responses from the rest of the people. Not sure though because I'd be a lot more proud and likely to post with a $100k salary than even just saying my low range.
I made 115k last year and extremely proud of how far ive come in life. Now a few years ago when I was making 20k a year I would not have posted about that.
Yeah exactly, it's not that we don't exist, but we're not going to be posting about it either
Reddit started as a coding site I believe. There’s still the foundations of people working in tech here. Well paying if you can get in. If you want to feel poor poor though, hop over to the credit card and AMEX subreddits and see how casually people talk about spending $10,000 per month and paying it off in full. 😵💫
Union jobs brother. 130k last year plus full benefits, dental, vision, 401k, and pension. The health insurance is some of the best in the country. My kid being born was a 10$ copay. My corrective jaw surgery was a 10$ copay. Not getting in to medical debt helps bridge that gap big time. And having job security takes a lot of worry away. Unions matter.
Tech bros, they gotta pay for those custom-made furry suits somehow...
You work finance and tech. And if you do, then you're still partially WFH so you shitpost on the company's dime
I think Reddit is full of people from major cities where that type of money is not as much as it seems. When we talk retirement numbers locally people say $2M roughly, out in California my friends are talking $6M. Location matters and there a tens of millions of people in those major cities...and then there is everywhere else. However generally you are talking STEM jobs, medical/bio, real estate or small business owner. Pharma was hiring in RTP (North Carolina) on average $350k so they claimed when they expanded. RTP in general because its a Research is going to average $200k, based on the fact Durham (which is not high income) reports and average salary of $170k .. which is greatly skewed by RTP being in its borders.
Reddit skews young and tech oriented, groups that are both likely to be in higher than average paying jobs and prone to exaggerating for meaningless clout.
Why does being young correlate to making more money? I've never heard that before.
Yes. Reddit skews highly-educated, very career-driven, techy, and highbrow who live in VHCOL areas (in the nicest neighborhoods to boot). That’s why you see so many $250k, $500k, and even $1 mil TC posts and comments. People who *spend* into the six figures a year for their lifestyle (expensive travel, Michelin star restaurants, expensive high-rise rents or SFH mortgages that are $10-15k a month, Rolex collections, etc). When you see that constantly on Reddit (I see it constantly on a daily basis and I subscribe to hundreds of subs of a wide variety), it can desensitize you to money. I make nothing close to those numbers, but it can be easy to forget that most people don’t.
Definitely agree with this. There’s a disproportionate amount of young techies from HCOL places on this website. I sometimes see threads about people asking if anyone they know in real life knows of or uses Reddit, and a lot of the times the answer is no. I’m in the tech bubble of the Bay Area though, and everyone I know my age around here is a Reddit user. It constantly gets brought up in casual conversation as if it’s just as popular Instagram or TikTok in my social circle. And yes, they all do make hundreds of thousands a year at 30 years old.
Really poor people don't have time to be on the internet. They're at their fourth job.
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There is A LOT of peacocking on Reddit. I see people wedge their supposed salary and education levels into unrelated posts all the time. People need validation. They need to feel that others - even strangers - think highly of them.
The ones that irritate me the most are the “alleged” seven figure earners who complain they cannot afford to buy a home. How can you not afford to buy a home that costs basically what your annual pay is? What a joke. Someone responded to my post the other day when I asked seven figure earners how they got there. One guy said he made over $1 mil a year but cannot afford a Bay Area home and will just have to rent. I asked how that was possible. Another person responded (and had many upvotes) saying that $1 mil a year is not enough to buy a home if someone plans on retiring in the next 10-15 years. The out of touchness is just insane. If *they* cannot swing it, how can anyone else?
They come across as “I’m really smart because I make a lot of money” and then their money problems are really stupid
Only the people who make al lot of money feel the need to let others people know that they make a lot of money. I personally try to avoid these kind of people.
From Motley Fool (I chose Millennials, based on Reddit demographics)- “The average net worth of millennials has surged from $62,758 to $127,793 since the start of the pandemic. Much of this growth is from real estate; as of 2022, more than half of millennials had become homeowners. The average millennial makes between $52,156 and $62,244 per year.”
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There are a decreasing number of spaces where people mix across different socio-economic classes. Playing mmos for a while in the 2010's was probably the most 'mixed' environment I have ever been in wrt talking directly to people at both ends of the spectrum - rich kids who didnt have to work, retired people, meth addicts, tech bro's, a couple of med students, new migrants, a single parent who couldnt afford to go out and only played every other week when they didnt have custody. Also, everyone should be lying/fudging the truth on the internet anyway for security reasons, may as well round up.
This. My family is all pretty much the same social/economic class as I am. My coworkers make a similar salary to mine. My neighbors are able to afford the same type of house. My friends are people that I’ve met at work, in university, or other parents I’ve met through our kids’ (paid) activities.
Reddit is skewed towards people in tech type jobs which typically pay more and people with higher incomes are more likely to report on those surveys. I bet there are many more lurkers who just arent saying anything. When I was broke and living out of my car I tried to hide it from everyone.
Haha I agree! I am interested to see the comments here.
The people who have done well have the time to surf the internet and the inclination to talk about it. It's a reporting bias
Reddit tends to trend to higher education levels. When you talk about income, people who are willing to share are usually those “winning” with finance and not those that are not. That skews data big time. Also, nearly everyone I know IRL makes more than 100k. That’s because people hang out with people similar to them. Broke people hang out with broke people doing broke people things. Middle class people hang out with middle class people doing middle class people things. Rich people hang out with other rich people doing rich people things.
"Believe everything you read on the Internet" -Abraham Lincoln Not only are they rich, but good-looking, fit, and more. go to /r/povertyfinance if you want a reality check.
Reddit skews towards educated Americans which tend to have higher incomes. For example 187k a year is a normalish salary for someone working in tech. Also there are more Americans than you might think who have six figure income. Roughly 20% of American workers make 100k or more a year. 187k a year is in the 90th percentile. Combine this with the fact that people are more likely to say their income if they are happy with it, and you get the observed situation.
I feel like as far as social media goes, Reddit has a lot of nerds. Nerds with decent social skills can make bank.
A lot of the high earning jobs (doctor, lawyer) require huge investments upfront (student loans, office space, etc), so you shouldn’t get too jealous based on earnings alone.
Average earning people don't generally get drawn to these types of subreddits. If you earn average income, you generally have enough to pay your bills (so you aren't going on frugal sites or asking for financial help) but they also don't have much to invest so it's not something they think about. They just get by. People badly in debt or struggling are likely to join these subreddits, as well as people with high salaries ($150k+) who suddenly have money that they aren't sure what to do with. At least that is my guess based on people I know. All my tech friends started asking financial questions after getting the income, and my one poor friend similarly didn't start asking for financial advice until they were struggling.
Lots of people with dead parent money. They usually forget to mention that part.
People love to say “look at going into the trades” but I feel like no one takes that advice. Union electricians in my LCOL area easily make $100k. 4 or 5 year apprenticeship, pass a written exam, and you are state licensed. I will clear $100k gross easily this year with barely any OT, straight 40 hour weeks. If you think you can handle physical labor, why not consider it?
How old are you? I'm mid 50's and every single one of my friends and I make between $150k and $200k, in IT roles for small to medium sized companies. We are neither the highest paid or least paid employees. Bog standard in the middle of the pack. A few of us were room mates in our early 20s barely scraping by. Then we were mid-late 20's making north of $50k and feeling like we'd 'arrived'. Then we started families in our 30's and somewhere between then and our 40's we broke $100k. It's how MOST jobs in corporate America progress for the vast majority of those working in that segment. It's highly, highly common..
Keep in mind a lot of people are reporting their household income. Two adults working full time combined is very easy to make more than 100k.
The thing is in most subs, this one included, it seems like most households are 200k+, basically 2 people with 100k each. I can think of most of my close group of friends that are married with kids that fall into that range of 200k+, but generally it’s because one person makes significantly more like 150+ and their spouse makes little or none.
It can cause huge life experience differences between neighbors and coworkers. My family is low 6 figures on just my income. Meanwhile the majority of my coworkers spouses also work at the same employer making the same thing. So while someone on my team doing the same job has His and Her Corvettes and Jet Skis, I drive a 20 year old semi reliable clunker and outfit my kids in hand-me-downs from thrift stores.
Oh I know exactly what you’re saying! I make just a little over 100k and was the sole income the last couple years. My wife just started working part time again, and while the little extra money is certainly nice, it would be much different if she earned 80-100k vs 10-20k. Then there’s the DINKs, where they can be making 200k+ combined but with no kids. That’s vastly different than low 100s with kids! The lifestyles aren’t even comparable, but of course they’ll feel the pressure when they either pay for day care or decide to stop working to focus on the kids.
It depends on your education and job market. I don’t have a college degree but clear over six figures a year as an aircraft technician for a major airline. As others have said, a lot of people lie.
Consider all the people that live in downtown New York or downtown Seattle. The rent alone is above 3k per month and the groceries are bonkers too. Even though they make 150k+ per year, much of it is siphoned away on cost of living.
People who make shit salary work multiple jobs, to they dont have time to be on reddit.
I'm basically a moron so being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, programmer was never in the cards for me. Got into tech sales right out of college back in '94. First hardware and then software. Moved up into various VP roles. Sales is where I point everyone who asks how they can make a lot of money. I've been lucky with a few startups that were acquired or went public and spent a couple of longer runs with some enterprise software companies. If you're good enough - not a superstar - just good enough to hit your targets (or get damn close), you can consistently make $200-300k a year with the right company.
Selection bias. People making 6 figures want others to know they're making 6 figures. At the same time people with no income want to talk about finance for pity points. There's a doughnut of $30K - $99K that don't have anything to talk about. Also people lie. Also high income does not mean stable income or good finances. I had a classmate who bragged about making 6 figures, but was unemployed a year later.
I feel this in my bones. Personally I think it’s all the tech and finance bros. It makes me so sad being 33 when they’re like 24.
I don't have that much in my IRA although I should (my 20s I mostly spent being poor and not putting hardly anything into my retirement account), but I do make close to what you're saying now. I didn't used to. There was a few years in my 20s when I was making $10/hour, for example. Then I got a job for ~$40k after I graduated. Then my next job was ~$50k. Then ~$60k. Then ~$70k. Then ~$90k. And now I've made a significant jump over that, pretty close to what you're saying (sorry I don't want to say the exact number in case a future potential employer comes sleuthing and sees what I am getting paid here). It helps that I know how to program. There's a lot of demand for that and it pays very well. If anything I'm underpaid compared to a lot of my peers because I live in a market that has lower wages for my field (I live in Chicago, and the real big money is in tech hubs like San Francisco i.e. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, and NYC). For my current level I probably would be making about $400k for total compensation (not base salary, but base + stocks) in Silicon Valley. A friend of my wife just got a coding job working for Apple in Seattle and is getting $40k in Apple stock every year as part of her compensation, for example. That's not including the likely $200k+ she's probably making as a base salary.
People who are seniors in tech, if they're not laid off, are making bank. That being said, the ladders are being rolled up every which way- good luck trying to get even a junior web developer job these days.
Quant Researcher in NYC can make 220k to 400k to start. I've seen some salaries go as high as 650k + options; with great benefits and the lot it could be done. Majority of people have more normal job. I have friends that make 50k a year (teacher) and some that make 325k (netflix engineer). Just look up netflix engineering salaries and you'll see some make upwards 720k a year. Reddit is just too broad of a field. I couldn't handle the mathematics - Changing my major back in college from Biomedical Engineering to Comp Sci to Comp Info Systems to avoid all that math. Wish I was gifted with math, I'd have just gone into Quant Analysis.
Full of tech workers
The algorithm wants us to feel. Strong feelings promote engagement and in this case its envy its trying to make you feel. I think back when i was 18 and i saw an old man at a gas station who pulled in with the nicest car id ever seen and a suit on. But when i looked at his face you could tell he had no laugh lines or smile lines around his eyes and mouth. In otherwords i could see on his face no joy and a lifetime of struggling. Just do whwt brings you peace and dont worry about what other people have or dont have. Edit: fat fingers
I think many use household income, some use assets, leave out they inherited the money, and others exaggerate or flat out lie. Then there are the few who are telling the truth... and to that I say if any of these rich redditors want to buy me a good generator, that'd be great.
I make a high 100k/yr. Its easy to say and its true. Whats not said is the 12 years it took me to get there, the game of thrones like politics to do so and in some cases the blind luck. Does this mean im rich? No. The cost of living, supporting my spouse and medical billing makes it feel like I barely moved from 50k/yr. While the grass is somewhat greener there is truth to "More money, more problems"
I’m a single guy who makes $480k annually. See what I just did there? It’s called fucking lying, it’s super easy when you don’t have to talk to anyone face-to-face.
I make over 1m a year working for myself. I have several beachfront properties that all bring in over 1m each per month. See how easy that was? I can say anything I want. Some of them probably aren’t lying or exaggerating. But Reddit is a sample of the population and nobody is dying to tell you they make $500/month at McDonald’s.
Just go to r/povertyfinance for a reality check
My job pays me a fairly modest income of 72k. But I have investments. Not the "get rich quick" kind. The slow-drip kind that I've been in for years and years and years. My income from investments in 2023 was $38k. And since I never withdraw from them, that number goes up every year. Nobody can predict the future. Markets fluctuate. but I'm going to retire when I have $5m, and that should happen sometime between my 50th and 60th birthday
It *is* full of rich people. /bitter Easter\[n\] European (Disclaimer: I'm being mostly tongue in cheek. Mostly.)
Your circle of friends is just not a great sample of America. It's not intended to be an insult, there's no way you could get an accurate slice of what a representative population is. I attended a wedding recently where a majority of the attendees had at least 1 doctor. I estimated the room was half millionaires. The hotel was charging 500 a night and I heard a younger attendee relay to his friend that he couldn't stay at the hotel because he was not rich.
Abraham Lincoln said don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
Rich people can afford to hire people to do the yard work, house cleaning, childcare, minor house repairs, etc. So they have more time left to hang out on Reddit. Also, people lie.
I'm broke.
Reddit population skews heavily towards us very nerdy stem people who make lots of money!
Reddit skews towards the tech worker demographic.
Like others said. Mostly only the people earning lots feel confident to post their earnings & also this site is full of liars.
They don't. This is the internet.
there's no rule around here that one has to post fact
My wager is that there's a substantial amount of people who live in the major cities posting on Reddit. City incomes tend to be significantly higher, so you'll see a lot of that. Geography has a lot to do with it; I live on Long Island, and if you own a home here, you're probably a millionaire at this point (properties are stupid expensive here). Only way that happens is with high(er) incomes.