Ok...to the 10 people who replied to this question, the answer is GROSS. You can get out your little calculators now and cry if you like, but 50-30-20 is a guideline, and I write MY OWN budget. Everyone wants something for free nowadays, doesn’t want to live within their means, doesn’t want to move to an area that…

Budget, pay down debt, increase your education level, get a second job...or pick another means by which to get ahead. Crying about it or looking for a handout will never get you anywhere.

Right...so the rest of us can pay off that debt in the form of tax dollars propping up schools with delinquent debtors. How about you suggest a budget and sticking to it. Or a second job. Ugh!

You are either nuts, lazy, undereducated, or a millennial looking for a handout. First, if you want to live downtown in any major city you pay a premium for those spaces and convenience. Second, the Nashville market is 2nd, only to Dallas in economic growth according to Forbes magazine. Try getting more education. Try…

...there are few opportunities to make more than $36,000 a year...

That’s unbelievable. I made 35k/year as a fresh college grad here in San Francisco....back in 1994 working desktop IT support. You can’t tell me that more than 20 years later in Nashville that any person with a reasonably employable skill set can’t make more than that???

Im in Nashville and hiring a person or two. Def more than 36k a year. Come apply!

No income is before taxes. When you are asked “how much do you make” people rarely take 20-25% off to account for taxes.

Are you a new graduate or something? How long have you been working? I find it very hard to believe there are few opportunities for someone with a college degree to make more than 36,000 a year in Nashville unless you literally just graduated from college with a degree that was broad enough to require some time to…

Either the job market in Nashville is horrible or it’s amazing in Kansas City. Because even with only a high school education, if you’re willing to work hard and are moderately intelligent you can find a job paying more than that fairly easily.

I’m sorry, but what? “There are few opportunities to make more than $36,000 a year” is categorically false. Anecdotal evidence and “people you know” means precisely nothing.

1. beware anecdotal experience. There are lots of people you do not know in nashville.

This post was about how much income is needed to live comfortably in these cities, not to just scrape by. The word “comfortably” is in the headline. So: It takes $61,000 annually to live comfortably in Nashville, and apparently $36,000 to just scrape by.

Can’t be after-tax. When we talk about “what we make,” we’re talking about salary/income...i.e., pretax. Also, take the NYC figure. $87K take-home is, like, $125K pretax. No way. That’s, like, top 5% of earners.

For a single person with no kids and no debt, $75k seems perfectly reasonable in LA. People in LA labour under the delusion that they live in an expensive city, but then you go to *actually* expensive places like SF, NYC, London and so on and it’s cheap (and you get way more space) in comparison.