Almost Half of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

 When gas jumps $1/gallon in 1 day and now it costs an extra $20/week to fill your car or truck, that ends up being about $80/month or $960/yr.  When absolutely everything in the grocery store goes up and costs your small family an extra $50/week that adds up to about $2600 per year.

Clearly, if you are living paycheck to paycheck right now and you just saw all your expenses, for higher priced goods, go up by $5000, your pay is not going to keep up that fast.  

And this is a big problem with inflation.  The liberal elites won't really feel it at all because necessities are such a small part of their expenditures.  But a large amount of Americans could be driven into bankruptcy and hunger by inflation.

Even as some Americans saw their net worth rise over the last two years, 70% found themselves living paycheck to paycheck at some point during the worst of the pandemic, and nearly half are living paycheck to paycheck right now, a new survey found.

The survey found that the long-term health and financial impacts of the pandemic continue to impact communities across the country, according to Real Estate Witch, a research and data firm that, along with its sister company Clever Real Estate, has been collecting data at roughly six-month intervals since Covid-19 arrived on the scene, 

“As the national case count reaches more than 78 million, experts estimate 27% to 33% of those who contract the virus are living with long-term side effects such as fatigue, brain fog and muscle pain,” wrote Taelor Candiloro, lead research analyst on the study. “Meanwhile, rental rates have leapt 17.8% over just this past year, and Americans have quit their jobs in droves.”

There continues to be so much upheaval, she noted, that much of the recovery progress seen in early 2021 has stalled.

“Before the study was done, based on the narratives we’ve all seen in the news, I had a grasp on the health implications of Covid and the fact that contracting the virus can definitely impact your socio-economic situation and your financial situation,” Candiloro said in an interview. “But it’s another thing to then see that in actual numbers. The magnitude of this really hit me.”

The online survey of 1,000 adults, conducted in January, revealed the lengths that Americans have gone to in order to make ends meet as the stimulus checks and unemployment benefits of 2020 and 2021 ended. Survey participants reported that, for the first time in their lives, 28% pulled from emergency funds or savings, 25% added another job for additional income, 23% received food stamps and 22% took on additional credit card debt.

“It’s really significant to see those numbers and to understand what people have been experiencing over the last two to three years,” she said.

These were among the survey’s findings:

• 90% of Americans say they’re stressed about pandemic-related issues, and 32% are even more stressed about the pandemic than they were last year.

• 71% of families still have not recovered financially from the Covid-19 pandemic.

• 52% of parents believe it will take up to five years for their finances to recover, while one in seven don’t believe their finances will ever recover.

• 80% of parents who have children under 18 are struggling to balance work and disrupted schooling, and 22% worry that it’s hurting their chances of earning a raise or promotion.

   -- More than one-quarter (29%) of parents living with long Covid say childcare responsibilities have limited their chances of earning a raise or promotion.

• 41% of Americans have nothing in savings at this time, and another 40% believe they will run out of savings in 2022.

• 75% of Americans have non-mortgage debt, and of those, 41% are stressed about their current financial situation.

   -- Only 22% believe they can pay off their debt within a year.

• 34% of renters have missed a rent payment, while 28% of homeowners have missed a mortgage payment within the last year.

All of this angst against a backdrop of a buoyant stock market.

“The population is dense enough and distribution of wealth staggered enough that the stock market can be doing this well and still lots of people are penny pinching,” Candiloro said. “It’s interesting to see as a whole nationally we’re doing well but when you break that down into individual puzzle pieces, you get a different picture.”

Here;  Nearly Half Of Americans Living Paycheck To Paycheck, Survey Says (fa-mag.com)

We know that not all Americans are hard-working and responsible.  A certain amount of these are playing video games, smoking pot in their mom's basement and waiting to get another "Relief" check from the government.  Others are just lazy and don't like doing anything that isn't fun.  But others might be showing up for work making $20/hour but realizing that $1500/rent, groceries, health insurance and two kids eating in your dining room simply makes you a check to check person.