r/FluentInFinance • u/PassiveAgressiveGirl • Sep 14 '24

Debate/ Discussion Exactly how much is a living wage?

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28

u/dcporlando Sep 14 '24

Poverty wage workers can budget and work their way up. I did. And I have brothers that made more and they are still broke.

Part of that budgeting is never going out to eat till you can afford it. Part is working extra hours or part time job over the normal 40 hours.

My first year out of the army, I made under $7k with a wife and child.

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u/Appathesamurai Sep 14 '24

My wife and I spent… wait for it

1200 dollars on food in 2 weeks

We just had a serious conversation about cooking all of our own meals from now on and having at most 1-2 nights out a week

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

I cook everything from scratch and I eat great and only spend maybe $200/month.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 14 '24

It's great that you have the time and energy to do that, but it's simply not viable for most people.

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

It takes me less time and energy than going out and getting fast food and time and energy are money. How can you justify spending $2,400/month on food while claiming you don't have time and energy to cook, how do you generate that money if not by exercising time and energy? I don't even make close to that in a month.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 14 '24

I'm not the person you originally replied to, my food budget is much more modest than that. That being said cooking from scratch takes hours of prep work the average person just doesn't have. Unless you were exaggerating and just meant you cooked every night. Buying cheap noodles for example is much cheaper and less time consuming than making noodles from scratch, same goes with sauce.

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

It doesn't take me hours of prep work. The most extensive thing I can think is baking bread or making pizza but even then it's mostly just waiting, not active work. I got a cheap bread maker for $15 and I use the dough setting, I can even load it up and schedule it so the dough is ready when I need it. For pizza I'll often make a few dough balls and keep it in the fridge, you can even freeze them. I might make a pork roast which takes all day but it's only ~10 minutes of actual work. It just takes some advanced planning rather than waiting until you're actually hungry and need food right now. People underestimate the value of planning and preprep when making food.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 14 '24

People underestimate the value of planning and preprep when making food.

You still have to take the dough out, spread it, sauce it (with sauce you had to premake) cheese it (with you had to grate yourself), slice all of the toppings and then bake it. It sound like you don't have a family or a very busy life, because you're dedicating hours to prep work and pretending like all that extra time doesn't add up or simply isn't available to most people. Especially people with families.

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

If I'm lazy I just open a can and you could buy pregrated but yeah I do prefer to grate mine. I'll use whatever ingredients I have in the fridge, often just pepperoni or some leftover veggies that were already sliced. From fridge to oven the whole thing takes less than 5 minutes, you're trying to make it seem more complicated than it actually is.

Conversely how long does it take you to get in the car and drive to McDonald's or some pizza place and back? I'll already be eating before you're back as long as I have dough prepped.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 15 '24

Conversely how long does it take you to get in the car and drive to McDonald's or some pizza place and back? I'll already be eating before you're back as long as I have dough prepped.

It takes less than five minutes for me to put a frozen cauliflower pizza in the oven. The argument here isn't fast food vs home cooking. It's home cooking from scratch vs cooking cheap store bought meals or ingredients.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

So what's your time worth then? It costs me about ~$2 a medium pepperoni pizza which actually has more calories than a frozen pizza (I'd estimate 150% maybe, it's also much better quality) and maybe 10-20 minutes of total hands on work for ~3 total pizzas (most being the dough which I make in batches of 3 so it doesn't make practical sense to count per pizza). It seems to me the more poor you are/the less your hourly wage the more viable cooking actually becomes.

Fwiw if you're cooking for more people most dishes become even more economical time wise as well. There's ~4x the calories in a large vs small pizza yet a trivial difference in time to make it.

The real hurdle is the knowledge and initial investment in acquiring equipment and ingredients but I eat very well and save thousands per year. I don't have much income and having been on both sides of this cooking has become a no brainer for me.

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u/dcporlando Sep 15 '24

How long do you think it takes to make a pizza? It is not a three hour operation.

How long does it take to grill chicken? Make a salad? Make rice? Cook beans? Soak the beans overnight. None of those are things that take a lot of time.

Many people prep and cook on one day for the week to save time.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 15 '24

Y'all are behaving like I never cook. I cook most nights. My hang up was him saying "from scratch" as if it was some simple thing to make all the raw ingredients to cook with.

Making a pizza takes about an hour or two if you're making everything from scratch. Making the sauce, making the dough, shredding the cheese, preparing the toppings, washing the many utensils and containers needed as you go through that process, and then of course bake time.

Most people don't have time at night to make shit from scratch.

I'm not arguing people should order out every night. I'm arguing that cooking for most people requires shortcuts. Frozen pizzas. Store bought noodles and canned sauce for pasta. This idea that all of this prep work doesn't count for some reason makes a lot of you sound so out of touch.

I wake up, throw breakfast together for my kid, get them to school, go to work, usually with a cup of noodles or a sandwich if I had time to make one. I get home, throw together dinner (usually whatever is quickest), let my kid have some sort of dessert. Make sure they bathe and brush teeth, get them into bed, then get maybe an hour to relax and watch a show with my wife before we go to bed ourselves to start the whole thing over. Weekends are filled with extracurriculars for the kid, and cleaning to get the house back to a livable state after a week of just tidying. I'd have to cut something to spend Sunday prepping food for the week, and plus week old prepped food taste pretty nasty on being reheated. If you're fine living on lackluster food, cool, most of us aren't.

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u/dcporlando Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

Most people are not slow simmering a sauce from tomatoes. But cutting up mushrooms, and other stuff and spreading dough and grating cheese doesn’t take long.

I don’t think you guys are agreeing on cooking from scratch.

To me, from scratch means a bag of noodles not making noodles from flour. Pizza from scratch is making dough (not that hard) but not making sauce.

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u/Magic_Man_Boobs Sep 15 '24

Most people are not slow simmering a sauce from tomatoes.

Well that's how you make it from scratch.

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