The federal poverty line is $15, 650 per year for a single person. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has been since 2009. If you work 40 hours per week, every week of the year (no sick days, no holidays etc), you will make a grand total of $15,080 per year (gross, meaning before taxes are taken out).
If you are a single person, and you make double the minimum wage (which is roughly what big box stores like Walmart, Target pay) you might still qualify for SNAP benefits. What does this say? This says that double the minimum wage is still not a living wage. Remember, these figures don’t account for sick days, store closures for holidays, etc.
That is for one single person working full time.
Let’s say you make $15 per hour. If you work 40 hours per week, you’ll make $2400 for the month if you don’t miss any days due to illness, etc. (40 hours per week, 4 weeks in the month – keeping figures simple here).
Your tax rate will be somewhere between 18-22%, so for the sake of math, let’s say 20%.
So your take-home pay will be $1,920.
If you live in downtown Allentown, you MIGHT be able to get an apartment for $1000 a month. Where I live you are unlikely to find a place for less than $1500.
That leaves you with $920. You need some utilities: internet, electric, phone, and some sort of heat source. If you use Mint Mobile, you can get some slightly sketchy internet and cell phone service for about $45 per month. Your electric will likely be $100 and more if you have electric heat.
Now you are down to $775. But you still need insurance and transportation.
My cheap car insurance on an old, paid-for van and a clean record is $75 per month. Car maintenance can easily cost $100 per month (just think how often you need routine items like tires, brakes, oil change, etc). The average amount spent on gas is around $150 per month.
If you go to the USDA website and look at their food plans, a 20-50 year old male would need at minimum (the cheapest food there is) $310 a month for food.
If your employer sponsors your health care, you might be able to get a basic plan with minimum coverage for $110.
Now you are left with $30 in the month, as long as you haven’t had any sick days, flat tires, you don’t have any credit cards, school loans, or a car payment.
That $30 has to cover everything else – toilet paper, laundry soap, shampoo and conditioner, and an occasional bottle of Pepto Bismal or Draino.
Or say a $10 per month rental insurance plan which might be required by your landlord. A new pair of sneakers once in a while, since you’re probably on your feet all day if you work for $15 an hour. This budget doesn’t include water, sewer, trash pickup – hopefully that’s all included in your rent, but it might not be.
You can’t afford to go to McDonald’s even once, get a parking ticket, give to your favorite charity, or buy your mom flowers for Mother’s Day. No Christmas presents. No new clothes. No Netflix. No extras to make you feel better about life. Your apartment doesn’t have a washer and dryer – so off you go to the laundry mat. How much does that cost?
This doesn’t give you room to save for an emergency fund, retirement, or a new car. If you do any of that, you’ll need a second job. You won’t have time to go to school to get a better job because you’re working so hard already.
And even if you have health insurance, you can’t afford the copay. You can’t even afford to be sick since you can’t take any days off of work. Dave Ramsey says skip the latte, eat rice and beans and you’ll build the American Dream. Dave Ramsey is dead wrong because wages haven’t kept up with the cost of housing, and this is our problem.
The reason SO MANY people in America – like 42 million – need SNAP and medical assistance is because they cannot make a living wage. Meanwhile, profits for the shareholders of large companies like McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, just to name a few – are raking it in on the backs of people just trying to get by. I’m not anti-capitalism here, but it absolutely needs to be bridled if we don’t want people needing more government assistance.
Someone making $15 an hour as a single person MIGHT quality for SNAP – at about $24 a month. Less than $1 a day. Maybe they get some extra protein for that, or a bag of apples and some salad. But they aren’t getting rich. They’re barely getting by. A can of chicken is $3.99, a bag of apples is about $4.99. It doesn’t cover much.
People can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps – the don’t even make enough money to afford the boots! We need to seriously consider what is a living wage and who deserves to earn one. (Hint: it’s not just the people at the top).
By the way, if you make $15 an hour, at the end of the day, you’ll bring home $96 max after taxes. Congress, on the other hand, gets $79 for lunch every day they show up to work. And that isn’t their paycheck. That’s just their lunch.