How much do you need to earn a year?

jewcentral · Site Admin Joined: Oct 31, 2002 Posts: 74

According to the results of our survey: How much money does a Jewish family need to earn annually in order to live comfortably? on average you need 100-125k/yr to live comfortably.

According to forbes- What the good life costs: "A nice house, a good education for the kids, a summer place. Forbes looks at the American Dream in the Northeast. Cost? From $215,000 a year to more than twice that." Of course living in NYC is at the upper extreme.

How much do you need to live comfortably?

(Also, Be sure to respond to How did you/will you afford your house?)

Erwin · Guest

For a Jewish Couple, $150,000, a year, in NYC, as a renter. Add $20,000 a child which means more bedrooms. I am including an amount which allows for 10% savings/college education contributions, but no expensive hobbies or extravagant spending lifestyles.

heshy · Star Poster Joined: Sep 06, 2002 Posts: 59

$150,000 for a couple sounds high without kids and house. Then again did you include a summer house? how many cars/what kind?

On the other hand $20k a kid may be too little if your counting that for a bedroom. What about tuition? That can run to almost $20k itself (in ramaz) but can be as "little" as 5k for some of the other schools.

A friend put the numbers like this for 3 kids and a house:
30k tuition
40k house (mortgage+taxes etc)
that is of course after tax. so if your making 100k you aren't eating (or anything else).

yonah · Star Poster Joined: Jun 18, 2004 Posts: 57

This is also an extremely loaded question -> There are way to many variables.

For example, if you have two couples, next-door neighbors, with the same number of kids at the same schools and similar mortgages and taxes. And one couple makes $150,000 on one income while the other makes $200,000 on two incomes - the $150,000 couple might be better off, because the $200K couple has other expenses - such as childcare beyond school hours, and may also be subject to greater taxation - i.e. the AMT.

The amount of money you need will also vary -> depending on the number of kids left in school, the years left in your mortgage, car payments, etc. At some point you will hit the 'Max' - i.e. The point at which your life will be most expensive - i.e. All kids in school, mortgage and car payments, etc. This max will last about a decade - from the time your youngest enters school until your oldest is graduated.

I used to think that if I could get through that max with minimal debt that I would be able to hit my 50's and start saving for retirement. But the way that expenses and tuition costs have been skyrocketing over the past few decades leads me to think that this is more and more unrealistic.

heshy · Star Poster Joined: Sep 06, 2002 Posts: 59

You bring up an interesting case but it's unlikely the 150k couple is better off financially (sanity wise maybe) but the point is taken. Certainly there are always too many variables in everyone's situation- one couple may always eat out, may want lots of jewelry, summer home...

The max is an interesting concept but you are assuming the 5 years premax and 5 years after max are much easier but they probably aren't.

It would be interesting to know what the salary need would be by picking some standard profile- like in the forbes article. Perhaps you'd need four profiles: working class gentile (smiths), working class jew (shwartzes), upper-middle class gentile (jones), upper class jew(goldmans)- then you can compare how the prices are actually rising over time.

I suspect that the shwartzes and jones' need about the same income. this is all because of the jewish tax! further i suspect the jewish tax will cause the jewish profiles to have greater increases over time.