Livable wage

PC do you live in the east or west of Aus. I live in the west.

It's strange how money works because most think if they could somewhere in life make a million dollars then they would be okay,,but. If you take a million dollars and divide it by twenty years then if you make 50,000.00 a year then you did make a million dollars? But that's not the median average income in the US it's between 65-70 thousand a year so most make over a million dollars across their lives in the US https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-average-income-in-usa-family-household-history-3306189

So it's not how much you make that gives anyone a "livable wage" it's what you can buy with a million dollars after you make it. Since we(most/median) do make a million dollars in our careers then what it buys is how to measure a "livable wage". That's the problem if you think about it(I think) it's that a million dollars in the US only buys us a used mobile home or a used car. Their trying to get us all to live in "tiny homes" that are made by a portable building manufacturer instead of having a real house on land we paid for like in the old days.

$11 p/h... I can't believe how amazingly low that is...
Here in Australia the minimum wage for a full time employee working a 38 hour week is $19.84 p/h.
And even at that rate i cannot see how it is at all possible for somebody to one day own a home.
Even at $1,000 a week it is still impossible to one day own a home on your own.

In regards to your last sentence: I think maybe it is more that people are turning to tiny and mobile homes (which have been a go-to for many years, with the people who live in the latter being called such things as "trailer trash") as a viable option due to the outrageous cost of real estate, which has sky-rocketed in recent years. Many people who can afford homes now tear down the existing domicile and reconstruct to the max of city bylaws limitations. In perhaps the last twenty years where I live, housing costs have multiplied by at least ten. A two bedroom condo in a three story house will set you back a million dollars. Mind you, that is in a nice area of town. A house in the same area may be 3-5 million. For rentals (which are scarce), in comparison, because of rent controls, my rent has not quite doubled in thirty years, but if I were to move, my new rental rate would be 50% more than it is currently, and the rent on my suite would also be raised by at least that much. It's nuts

Hi. I live in this hell hole known as Melbourne... Im assuming your in Perth. Howz life over there?
In the 25 years iv been working ive seen the median house price go from under 200K to over 800K.
However i have seen no changes to peoples wages.

This graph illustrates exactly what i was talking about.
View attachment 223931

This thread is about a livable wage.
Owning a home is not necessary. Sure we all would like to, but not necessary.
If people would stop paying these ridiculous home prices, they would be much lower.
Most people buy more house than they really need.

No doubt everything is much more costly where you live than where I live.
It is possible to find a 3 bedroom, 1500 sq. ft. home in my area for less than $150,000.
A 2 bedroom 1000 sq. ft. apartment can be rented for less than $600 a month.

$11 per hour at 40 hours a week = $440, about $415 after taxes. That is over $1600 per month.
A single person can live on on $1600 a month in my area. Not many extras, but a livable wage.
A couple would be making $3200 a month and could have money for extras.

I left California in 1972 and moved to NW Arkansas just because of the different lifestyles.
Got away from unions that allowed me to make MORE money without worrying about strikes and work stoppages that cost me thousands of dollars in lost wages every year.
The cost of living was also about 50% lower.
Best move I every made.

When I was growing up, things like milk and bread were home delivered regularly. We would go through maybe 20 loaves of bread a week, mostly white, because only the adults would eat the whole wheat. My mother never learned to drive, but she always did the grocery shopping because she was the one who knew what was needed, and the driver, whoever it was, would be the helper. My dad, aside from working full time factory swing shifts, was also an entrepreneur: we would go to weekend farmer's markets and sell produce, mostly apples and potatoes and other seasonal produce as well, especially peaches in the summer, so we always had produce for the table from that. One of my sisters would complain that we always got the seconds, but she was almost on a mission always to discover whether we were eating real butter, or margarine, real orange juice, or Tang, and/or real milk, or powdered skim milk. My mother also pickled and jammed and canned all sorts of things (we had a real earthen-floored fruit cellar in the basement), and we loved helping out with the grinding of the fruit and boiling/sterilization of jars etc. We baked almost all our own goodies: pies, cakes, and cookies, and coming home to large bowls of cinnamon bun dough rising on the heating vents was always a treat. I was an expert fudge maker As a teen, I would come home from working at the farmer's market after school and make fudge every Friday night. None of us eleven kids know how our mother did it. LOL. Only one of my siblings who had children had more than two (she had four) and her house was a mad house all the time while they were growing up, ha.

Again, depends on the area and number of people in your family.
We bought a house because a mortgage, in our area, is waaaay cheaper than renting.

You can only sell a house for what people are willing to pay.
When people start saying NO, the price will come down.

Again, depends on the area and number of people in your family.
We bought a house because a mortgage, in our area, is waaaay cheaper than renting.

I agree. Sometimes buying is the best option but not always.
I did say a single person, not a family.
I will also say this---
$11 is the minimum wage. If a person can not advance and make more, than maybe that is all that person is worth.

But why do people continue to live where it is so expensive and so difficult to make it?
I saw it coming in California in 1972 and found a way to leave.

Have you noticed what many people buy and do not buy when shopping for food?
I see shopping carts full of sodas, chips, cookies, lunch meat (who really knows what it is made of), and stuff that can be heated in a micro wave.
Very few fresh fruits and vegetables or food that takes a little preparation.
Money for cellphones, internet, TV's, microwaves, beer, wine, tobacco, sodas, chips, big macs and the like are not necessary for a livable wage.

What I have noticed is that a very large portion of most people's wages is totally wasted.

I know there are exceptions, and we should help those who can not help themselves, but many are in need because of their own foolishness.

I rarely venture into the interior areas of most grocery stores where all that "crap" is LOL. I mostly stick to the outside edges where the fresh produce, baked goods, dairy and deli delights are Of course I do have to venture into the aisles for certain things, for instance, stevia is now shelved with sugar and baking needs, and because I am at home since being laid off due to covid, I make my own coffee, and like to mix evaporated skim milk with my cashew milk for creamer And chips! Oh boy, the ingredients' list should be enough to put most people off But no, do they even read labels? I moved away from home and began supporting myself as an eighteen year old, and have been reading labels for over forty five years now The chips I might buy have perhaps three ingredients in them: organic corn, oil, and salt. Although I have taken a liking to blue corn chips with flax seeds, so that is four ingredients

I agree. Sometimes buying is the best option but not always.
I did say a single person, not a family.
I will also say this---
$11 is the minimum wage. If a person can not advance and make more, than maybe that is all that person is worth.

But why do people continue to live where it is so expensive and so difficult to make it?
I saw it coming in California in 1972 and found a way to leave.

It was a different time, wasn't it? Honey and maple syrup were market staples also; my dad would travel a fair distance to get the best price for resale, driving from Ontario into Quebec for syrup, and to the Niagara escarpment for peaches, and even compete at the markets with the farmers he bought from I escaped the major weekly household women's work on Saturdays by volunteering (when I was eight) to work with my dad and three brothers without even knowing what it was they did once they departed the house Saturday morning It was an authentic farmer's market, that one, with an old time yodeling auctioneer auctioning livestock off the barn and restaurant. One of the barns was a flea market, and it was very exciting for me as a youngster to see the changes happening in the public sphere in the mid to late late sixties. Our Friday market was in a shopping mall parking lot. My dad also made barrels and barrels of apple cider in the fall to sell at the fall fairs we would go to; the fairs were a lot of fun and quite an adventure for the child I was He would collect and sterilize old liquor bottles, and sell cider by the 40 ounce bottle. It was 35 cents; a cup of apple cider was five cents, same price as a single apple in those days. I do not know what a barrel of cider sold for The cider would ferment after a few days also

We always ate all our meals together. When my dad was working nights, our noon meal was a full-on dinner, and the evening meal a lighter supper. If he was home for the evening meal, our noon meal was a light lunch, and the evening meal a full-on dinner. We went to a near-by school and would walk home at noon, and then back to school for the rest of the afternoon, from kindergarten through high school. We would often visit relatives on a Sunday afternoon after church, and stay for dinner. Can you imagine having a dozen people showing up for dinner? It was not always pre-planned/announced, either, and people would likewise drop in on us on a Sunday afternoon and stay for dinner. My mother would just pull an extra roast out of the deep freeze and cook more veggies and potatoes And there were always extra pies in the freezer, also. Apple pie is still my fave

My parents both grew up on farms, and my dad especially was what is known as a subsistence farmer, which means they grew food to feed themselves, plus they fished and hunted game to supplement their diet, or they would have starved. My father plowed the fields walking behind an animal (equine or bovine I do not know for sure), because they were too poor to afford a tractor, even though my dad worked a tractor in a neighbor's fields. I posted some of this before in other threads...

I have been talking quite a bit of late to my twin brother, who has done extensive research into our family tree, giving him lots of stories to share aside from what he remembers. According to him, one time we had over twenty people drop in for Sunday dinner. That would have been multiple families, since none of our relatives' families rivaled ours' in size LOL. We yearly hosted about thirty or so people for Christmas dinner, so more than forty people for a sit-down meal, and possibly also at Thanksgiving and Easter. Huge turkey with all the fixings, mashed, gravy, cranberry sauce, multiple veggie dishes, and the to-die-for dressing, plus multiple home made pie choices and cakes for dessert. For a time we regularly drove about an hour every Sunday afternoon to visit my mother's only sister and her family, who lived on a rural farm north of us. My mother had three brothers as well, and my dad was from a family of twelve children, so we had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins I cannot imagine what feeding such numbers would cost these days.

I watched a bit of the first video you posted You do have to be very organized to pull off that kind of meal planning, and also any canning or jamming and pickling and such, since there is a small window of time to can and jam for most fruits. With eight children you could have a grand time doing something like that as a group project. My siblings and I agree that my mother ruled the roost with an iron fist LOL. She gave up working as a teacher in a one room school house when she married, and devoted her life to raising her family. Once all the kids were grown and out of the house, she volunteered at schools, tutoring students, and libraries. And always had someone to drive her to go shopping

While living in Maine I made various fudges for a hobby. My next hobby that I will start at the beginning of the new year is to learn how to bake various types of bread from scratch. Might get back into the fudge thing too.

For me a fudge has to have a very firm texture and not mushy. Gonna get a copper kettle and a marble slab and start doing it right. Oh, must get a premium candy thermometer too although at one point I was relying on the cold water test. So, my New Year resolution will be to learn to bake bread and hone my confectionary skills. Yeah, another resolution would be to quit smoking too. Maybe I can make nicotine laced brownies. Years ago I developed a chewy cocoa brownie recipe that got rave reviews but can't quite remember it now. It had something to do with the addition of marshmallows.

I'm still on target with my French Toast recipe though. Darlene loves it. I used to make it every Saturday morning for my daughter Jackie as she was growing up. She now makes it the same way that I did for her 5 children and husband.

Since we are still staying at the motel our Christmas dinner will be KFC. We will be moving into our new home early next week. Darlene is planning on either baking a turkey or a ham. She is really into the holidays, so much more that I obviously am.

Merry Christmas to you and your daughter and pray that the New Year brings God's joy and contentment to your life. Looking outside it looks like its going to be a white hard candy Christmas here where we are.

Have you heard of the "Simply" brand of chips? Simply Doritos, Simply Cheetos, etc.
We don't get chips much anymore but when we do those are the kinds we get. You could actually read and understand the ingredients.

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Thanks for sharing such an amazing family history-story-ies - lots of commonalities going on with hub and his family -
if jealously was in my dna, then I would be so much so, but alas it is for sure not a part of my make-up -
but I am so happy for all of the earthy-plain-ole happenings that you have shared, just can't imagine the love and security
that you had while growing up, it's so very precious and has made you the remarkable person that you are and have shared
with all of us on this site...'hugs'