Throughout the year, the business wings of various media outlets will put out stories that tell everyone how easy it is to live within your means and save up for that mystical retirement. Predictably, most outlets save their most obnoxious and tone-deaf financial austerity PSAs for the winter holiday season, the time when they, along with their advertisers, are telling you to consume, consume, consume!!!!
On Friday, CNBC entered this stupid fray when it tweeted a very colorful pie chart titled “The budget breakdown of a 25-year-old who makes $100,000 a year and is excellent with money,” along with a link to a companion article.
Let us put aside the fact that the average American household is bringing in a little over half of what this special 25-year-old is making at his avocado toast startup.
Here’s is CNBC’s breakdown of monthly spending:
Health Insurance: $270.
Dining out: $250.
Groceries: $400.
Utilities: $195.
Transportation: $130.
Cell Phone: $40.
House cleaner: $30.
Internet: $20.
Rent: $825.
Donations: $615.
Now, it’s important to note that Trevor Klee is a real 25-year-old Princeton University graduate who makes a living charging quite a bit of money to help aspiring grad students prep for the GRE, LSAT, and GMAT tests. Klee spoke with CNBC Make It and explained that he’s been able to “monetize” his test-taking skills in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over the past three years. It’s a real rags-to-riches story, with Klee struggling for about a year and sleeping on his brother’s couch, before making $90,000 in 2017and pacing to make $100,000 by the end of this year.
Klee seems like a decent enough guy. He says he enjoys teaching for large sums of money, and he donates to homeless charities. His low living expenses are in part due to living with four roommates. His phone is connected to his family’s phone plan, and thus he only has to pay for his line.
The responses to CNBC’s story have been fast, furious, and hilarious.
Pretty much my initial response.
I don’t think the people that run those shows talk to those plebeians!
Probably a PSA that CNBC should learn from.
And maybe most important:
Somebody did the next best thing.
So, you see, America? You’re fucking greedy and stupid. You too could have made six figures if you hadn’t wanted that color television! Or if you weren’t drowning in predatory loan scams, or healthcare debt, or sky-rocketing medicine prices, or rent costs that eat up half your income! All you had to do was be good at standardized tests so that you could make it into an Ivy League school (somehow sans college loans) and then charge over a hundred dollars per hour to teach other people how to take standardized tests that will enable them to go to top schools, where they too can then figure out ways to make $100,000 a year, probably teaching other people how to take standardized tests, so that those people can go to Ivy League schools and ...