Commentary: A new round of stories asks us to feel sorry for families living paycheck-to-paycheck on $500,000 a year
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Set us as preferred Ben Franklin was wrong.The certain things in life aren’t only death and taxes, but death, taxes and news articles about how wealthy families are living “paycheck-to-paycheck.”We’re undergoing a new round of this coverage, triggered this time by a survey from Goldman Sachs titled “New Economics of Retirement: Making Every Dollar Saved Work Harder.” Candidly, the “new economics of retirement” described in the survey resemble the same old economics of retirement — families trying to save for college and generally make ends meet find it hard to put money aside in retirement accounts today, just as it always was.
The eye-opening bullet point in this survey, however, is that households with income of $500,000 and more feel as strapped as those at the lowest reaches of the income ladder, say with income of $50,000 to $100,000.More than seven in 10 of these high earners are now being forced to shop at discount grocery chains to save cash.— Fortune, 2025That latter segment encompasses the median household, with income of about $84,000 in 2024.
The highest segment encompasses the proverbial 1%, who average about $700,000 in annual inflow.The survey begat headlines in the media, especially in finance-oriented publications like Fortune and Barron’s, that figuratively wrung their hands over the travails of the upper crust.Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
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I’ve pointed out in the past that articles like these are a genre of financ...