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That's crazy. A gallon of 2% is $3.49 at the supermarket where I shop. Maybe a grocery store would be a better choice than CVS?
Yeah, groceries at CVS (unless they're on sale) are convenience store pricing. The only one I ever saw that wasn't and had prices in line with a traditional grocery store is in Ocean City, MD.
What I'm trying to say is $100k used to be considered a great salary, a magic number that most people strive for. Nowadays, with salaries so inflated, $100k isn't difficult to achieve so it feels like $200k is the new $100k target salary that gets you into upper middle class.
$200K is upper-middle-class in NYC, coastal California, and Hawaii. Of course, that doesn't account for family size.
maybe it should be, asked wife to pick up a gallon of milk when she went to CVS this morning, it was $6.99 a gallon. Inflation is just getting worse and worse. Fed may need to raise rates to 10%.
Going to CVS for milk is like asking your attorney a plumbing question.
Or, going to Home Depot for Pepsi. Or
Going to Office Depot for Yuban coffee.
Feds raise the rate to 10% there's gonna be a lot of "Brother, can you spare a twenty?"
A friend of mine lives in NJ and works (from home) for a big accounting firm. He spends a lot of time in FL. However, if he officially changed his residency his company would reduce his salary by 40%. The point being that he is the same person, with the same firm, doing the same job. If he makes $200,000 living in NJ and changes his residence his salary would be reduced to $120,000. Needless to say he maintains his NJ residency. Even though he has to pay income taxes he still does better. His company is nearly 100% remote and they have employees all over the country (and world). The salaries vary widely from place to place for the same positions.
The work from home, and especially remote working opportunities, are redefining classes in many communities. If a large population of remote workers making much more than the median income moves into a previously low cost area where $100,000 was considered upper middle class and significantly raises the cost of living in that area then those who previously were among the upper middle class would see an erosion in their standard of living.
This also flips the other way.
I live in a small city in northeast TN. Median HHI is in the $40k-$45k range. I make a very slight nose over $100k (and I mean by hundreds of dollars). My mortgage payment (which I bought in 2019) is a bit under $700/month. Water/sewer/trash is around $50/month combined. FttP gig internet is $99/month (I have 100 mbps). Verizon has 5G (not UW) service here. Instacart, UberEats, DoorDash, etc., are all available here.
I make a lot more money than I could command in the pre-COVID market. There are a lot of remote IT jobs for which I'm qualified. Local employers have had to up IT pay scales because key talent bailed out to major metro, better paying employers. If my current job vaporized, I might (though not necessarily likely) be able to find something remotely, instead of having to move to the first major metro to where I got a job.
I first reached 100K in 1993 and with inflation it would take more than 200K today to match it. A real notable salary today is in the 250 to300 range.
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