If losing your job means you won't be able to make rent this month, i'd consider that paycheque to paycheque. Like that is literally what the phrase is saying.

Whether that is because you simply dont have much money, or you spent it all on something frivilous is immaterial.

Well, you threw 401k in there for some reason.

But living paycheck to paycheck to most people definitely does include spending one’s money on non-bill things like lotto tickets, consumer goods, restaurants, and things beyond their means.

I bet paycheck to paycheck like most things has a range of meanings circling around the same essential thing, which is that if you do not get paid next month you cannot afford to live the same next month as you did this one.

You might be able to make ends meet by cutting the 401K and yoga classes, but if that's what you need to cut to eat the next month, what do you cut to eat the month after that?

This guy was obviously not living anywhere near paycheck to paycheck.

I'm not an English native speaker but that doesn't sound correct to me. If you need next month's paycheck in order to survive that month, for whatever reason (even if you gambled last month's money away, much less saved up for retirement or spent it on your health), that's my understanding of living paycheck to paycheck: you miss one paycheck and you're bust. (I assume you can't take it back out of that 401k thing or it wouldn't be a pension fund but a bank account. Correct me if I'm wrong about the mechanics of a 401k)

Dictionary seems to agree, Merriam Webster says: "to spend all of the money from one paycheck before receiving the next paycheck", not specifying that you can't have spent the money on semi-essentials that could perhaps be moved by a few months but you'd need to catch up with sooner or later

Paycheck to paycheck means just that - your income is balancing exactly your expenses. This doesn't mean that you are not living in modest luxury. Having enough money to cover essentials is just definition of - at the edge of poverty. Paycheck to paycheck is about (anti) fragility. They overlap strongly in the bottom part of the income ladder and diverge as you go up. You may be financially vulnerable even if pulling a lot of income. This doesn't mean that you can't get easier out of a hole if you fall with higher income, but paycheck to paycheck evaluate the chance of falling into it.

The problem with that is there are also a large number of people who make a large amount of money and still save very little. So we should maybe put more work into figuring out what is the fault of economic structure, and what is the fault of poor decision making. Perhaps define some metric that’s a measure of what percentage of people would be unlikely to be able to do anything other than live paycheck to paycheck to paycheck in their current setup and where they live.

> you barely have the ends meet for essentials

This exact debate showed up on another thread here the other day. While I agree with you, I was surprised to learn that many people view it to mean that tdon't have anything extra *after* they've done all of their socking away of money each money. Which is weird to me, but hey.

if this is what you think, I highly recommend you watch some episodes of Financial Audit on YouTube. Lots of people out there living paycheck to paycheck because they spend all their money on DoorDash and interest on bad debt, even with good income.

<2 months rent p.m. and no savings basically, is a generous definition

How are you all discussing this question from memory without linking to the source?

Poorly, that's how.

When faced with a hypothetical expense of $400, 63 percent of all adults in 2022 said they would have covered it exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement (referred to, altogether, as "cash or its equivalent")

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2023-economic-we...).

Yep. In the US, I would of course pay for an unexpected car repair (or indeed most any expense) with a credit card. It doesn't mean it won't be paid off at the end of the month in essentially all cases. So one of those meaningless statistics.

YOU would, but a lot of people with credit cards don't even understand that it's a loan, or what compound interest is. They put the expense on the card and then pay the minimum payment, either until it's paid off with insane interest, or they keep racking up debt until they reach their limit and get a worse card, until they're trapped in a cycle of poverty

seriously, everyone in this thread should watch Financial Audit and see how people outside the silicon valley bubble really live. That show has extreme examples to be sure but there are so many people like this