Okay, PF bloggers, I’m calling you out. I’m absolutely sick and tired of people talking about living on one income, as though it were a standard metric.
I know people get uncomfortable talking about salary, especially those who enjoy the anonymity of the blogosphere. (Though doesn’t that make it easier to share details like money?) But you can’t keep using the term “one income” as though it conveys a specific value to your readers. It absolutely does not.
Some people are happy to make $30,000 a year, then there’s a guy I knew once who made $70,000 a year working for Microsoft. Another guy back in Washington made $50,000 working for a cell phone company, but he and his wife were both in the Reserves for extra income.
I know one reader who supports herself and her spouse on a whopping $20,000 a year because there are simply no other jobs where they live. And for the first three years that Tim and I were together, our annual income was under $40,000.
Anyone else see the problem here?
Don’t get me wrong: Moving down to one income would be hard for anyone. You have to make changes, give up certain things as available funds decrease. Even if it just means saving less, that can still be a pretty big deal and have a pretty big impact in the long run.
Still, the less you live on, the harder the choices become.
So when I read posts like “How To Support a Family On a Single Income” over at Moolanomy, I get frustrated. The lack of information about salary leads to utterly vague suggestions. Use coupons, shop seasonal clearance, get alternative sources of income, reduce energy costs. How is that any different from what we tell two-income households?
If you can’t bring yourself to divulge your salary, at least give us some basis for comparison. Why don’t we hear about how energy bills increased once your wife stayed home, and how you coped with that? Maybe your changes meant you ended up paying even less than before.
Why not tell us how much you saved with coupons, and what your grocery budget was like before? Whether you already considered yourself pretty careful and how, if at all, your shopping has changed — not just dollars but what you buy.
And why, oh why, aren’t you talking about the things you have to give up? Or ways you avoided giving things up. Did you practice this lifestyle before doing it for real? Maybe you lived on just one income and banked the other, so you were old hands at it once you really were just a one-income household.
Give us something, anything other than banalities that you can find in any frugality post.
As it stands, I pretty much assume that any “Living on One Income” post is coming from someone who makes $60,000 or more a year. If I’m wrong, I’d love to hear about it. It’s just that no one seems to want to tell me one way or the other.