Yet I STILL see people coming on here saying $100,000 is an enormous salary, you should be grind 15+ years in an engineering career to ”earn” the honor of making that much etc etc.
I just cannot fathom how some of you are so unbelievably out of touch. The person that knocks on your hotel door and says “housekeeping” now makes more than your average engineer in 2026.
Ben Felix says everyone should be funneling all of their money into Index Funds, why doesn’t Jane Street do this? Why do they continue to look for gains in high frequency trading?
Does Ben Felix’s advice only apply to those of us that are too low IQ to employ higher alpha strategies?
I just slam all of my money into Index Funds but I can’t help but feel like it’s an enormous bubble that has no justification beyond ”it went up in the past so it’ll keep going up in the future, bro!”
Meanwhile I come on Reddit and people are STILL, UNIRONICALLY telling high schoolers to major in worthless white collar careers like engineering.
Only 4 years after I’ve begun posting about the US turning into a giant nursing home with healthcare being the only sector hiring am I starting to see the halfwits on here catch on.
Meanwhile, as I documented here (https://www.reddit.com/r/Salary/comments/1slpvls/brutalwhere\_on\_earth\_are\_all\_these\_kids\_going\_to/), students are flooding into worthless degrees like Mechanical Engineering in the hopes that they can get a white collar job (it’s super broad, bro!). Even actual Mechanical engineers (besides me) are starting to admit their degree is more or less worthless in 2026, that students have no clue how bad it’s going to be when they graduate https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalEngineering/s/w3Mp03RLem
The US economy doesn’t need or want US white collar workers. This has been obvious for nearly half a decade now, they continue to lay us off and replace any work we’ve done with cheaper overseas alternatives (or AI). We are not wanted or needed in the modern US economy. Almost any time a US company lays off US based white collar workers, their stock goes up. We are a huge drag on the bottom line in 2026.
In contrast to the “$100,000 is good depending on where you live bro, you’ll live like a king on that in LCOL areas bro!” I put together an actual budget using actual 2026 prices for things (not hilariously out of touch and out of date prices from 2004 that most of you use), and it’s not looking good (inb4 “NEBRASKA IS ACTUALLY HCOL BRO!”)
Most of you are comically delusional about how expensive life actually is for those of us that weren’t LUCKY enough to be grandfathered into a lower cost of living by virtue of having a pre-2021 mortgage. The vast majority of homeowners could never afford their current house if they actually had to pay market rate for it, yet they want to come on here and chastise people like me that day $100,000 is a completely mediocre income in 2026 if one wants to attain a middle class lifestyle (the same middle class lifestyle they only needed to earn $52,000 to attain).
Feel free to nitpick the $10 at the margins like I know many of you are going to do (“don’t pay for the gym bro! it’s free to go outside bro! Cut your own hair bro! You don’t need a house bro, I live in a beaver dam and it’s great bro!”)
Also notice this hypothetical person has ZERO dollars budgeted for hobbies, dates, friends, and is putting ZERO dollars into a 401k. But feel free to tell me how rich they are and how $100,000 is an enormous salary.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/many-millennials-over-1-million-210009905.html?guccounter=1
“Nobody has any money, bro! Nobody can even afford a $500 payment, bro! Everyone you see with nice stuff is drowning in debt, bro!”
Meanwhile millennials, who arguably had a better housing market than the boomers, are now seeing themselves become millionaires in their 30s and early 40s.