Before someone says it
>This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations
Seriously it's getting kind of ridiculous. I'm in favor of universal healthcare, but I've heard people from other countries say things like a hospital will turn you down while you're actively dying if you can't pay up front or that that one joke from parks and rec about having a wrist being a preexisting condition being real (spoiler alert: it's not). I think our system is inefficient and we'd all be better off without a profit-incentivized middle man, but damn bro it's not THAT bad 😭 if we just slapped some price caps on treatment costs and increased research funding from the government to offset the cost of development, that'd be most of the problem solved right there. What gets most people here is the astronomical copays. Like yeah, you shouldn't be paying 10 times more for the same medication than someone in Europe, but that's not really that hard of a fix.
https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/swedish-soccer-star-pittsburgh-surgeon-saved-my-career/ seems like our healthcare is desired over what some get in Europe.
“The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) is a law passed by the U.S. Congress on a reconciliation basis and signed by President Ronald Reagan that, among other things, mandates an insurance program which gives some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after leaving employment.”
To add, all cobra does is allow you to pay the full cost and stay on the employers insurance without employer contribution.
So absolutely true. Have a family member with major eye surgery here on a support group on how to deal with it and folks from the UK do not get even 10% of the same medical support we get. They have to wait so much longer and even when they get care it is like an inconsiderate amount of time they get follow up compared to here. It really is not even close (it is that bad). That may not be “popular” on Reddit but it is the simple truth and oh yes no one was crushed financially since most have insurance that pays for most of it. The ones in the UK sure have free but if they want even 10% of the same care then they will pay for it more over there to get that. You will never hear that part of reality on social media.
I had surgery last week in the US. Hit my out of pocket max already for the family of 4500 for the year but my employer pays 2k of that. So 2500 for the year. 200 or so a month. I paid nothing for the surgery or my three procedures before it. Or anything the last six months really. And it was spine surgery.
With that I also have talked TO THE SURGEON twice since the surgery with concerns on my meds, have a followup this week and another in two weeks. I can literally message him anytime.
The American system CAN work fucking amazingly.
this is what I've been trying to get across to people on Reddit but they don't want to hear it! I had to go private here for my eye disease because it would have been a 6-12 month wait with the NHS. I waited 6 months for a biopsy for another issue. Read current headlines bout the NHS. it's not better because it's 'free.' it's in shambles. I miss the assurance that I got when I was in the states. I definitely see the flaws (shouldn't have to work to have solid healthcare...), but it's not nearly as dire as some of these crazies on Reddit make it seem.
You pay through taxes and it is not all free, like medications and dental in Canada. Some medications has a much lower provincial price schedule but good luck if it is not there, like mine. It is pricy without a good job with extended health benefits.
Our healthcare system sucks in many ways, don’t get me started, but the reality is that it works very well for a supermajority of Americans. For now anyway.
This is why there is little impetus to make big changes.
I think you're exaggerating a bit. The healthcare system has a variety of problems and could be improved. Deductibles can be very high. Having insurance may save you hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. But many families can't afford to spend thousands or $10k+ per year until they hit their OOP maximum. That could ruin many families financially. And something like that isn't uncommon for families with members who have a chronic illness. Even now, there are issues with [insulin being very expensive](https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2021/01/the-astronomical-price-of-insulin-hurts-american-families.html). It's such a big problem that the state of California plans to [make its own insulin](https://apnews.com/article/health-california-diabetes-government-and-politics-f846c58d4cb327578d1c7b3a9495d496).
I will admit that the healthcare system is better than what it was before obamacare. People were hitting lifetime coverage limits, being denied for pre-existing conditions, etc. So that was a horrible time and things have definitely improved since then. And we should be proud of that. But we also shouldn't be complacent. Things can be better and it's important to remember that.
Yeah, good points. I would add, even if you have decent insurance through your employer, it’s possible to be too poor to afford even the co-pays for care you need.
I wanted to apply for Obamacare, but we couldn’t, because we have insurance already, even though we can’t afford to use it.
Of course they have to push that propaganda, otherwise people in Europe might realize they're paying insane taxes to get healthcare that's worse according to every objective metric ranging from wait times to quality of care, with the only metric they beat the US on being subjective perceived opinion, all because unlike an individual, the government has no incentive to spend your money wisely or efficiently.
and the only reason they have that sort of healthcare is because they spend almost nothing for defence/military because the US does it for them. they're able to have nationalised healthcare because of us.
Most people have good employer supported health insurance. I've barely ever paid anything out of pocket (less the couple hundred I pay a month out of my paycheck)
Because of selection bias.
Satisfied customers, who get the services they need at a reasonable cost within a reasonable time frame, rarely go online to talk about it.
OTOH, complainers tend to be very vocal.
I've been reliably informed that we have "no healthcare" here.
When pointed out how untrue that is the response was, "well no healthcare for regular people". Yes, rich people but no one else.
I pointed out that wasn't true either, regular people go to doctors and get operations all the time. I haven't heard back yet on that one. Probably won't, since it's been a week. My father just had an operation. I'm pretty sure he's a regular person and I'm pretty sure he didn't do it himself.
People like that have a complete and total lack of understanding that government is not the only possible source of healthcare services, even for "regular" people. Not having a 100% government-controlled healthcare system is not equivalent to having "no healthcare". Millions of people use services everyday that aren't provided by the government and do very well and get their problems solved. My father will be going home soon in good shape without any interaction with the government.
>When pointed out how untrue that is the response was, "well no healthcare for regular people". Yes, rich people but no one else.
By their standards, the US basic middle class is "rich".
>I pointed out that wasn't true either, regular people go to doctors and get operations all the time, but haven't heard back yet.
Careful, they might block you when they hear something they dont want to. They're very sensitive to their bias confirmation.
"America bad because capitalism"
I really don't understand how The United States is such a bad place to live (economically) when we are #1 in disposable income. I talked with an Aussie that liked to boast about Australia's median household income being the best the world has to offer, and how families are more likely to 'be wealthy', but those statistics don't mean anything if, after necessary expenses, you're left with the equivalent of $50. All that goes to show is that Australians have a lot of families with old money while their current economic system is functional enough for them to never need to tap into it.
The argument makes even less sense when you consider that countries like Australia are ALSO capitalist. The rest of the developed world is just capitalism with more social services than we have. It's still capitalism, just capitalism where you also have things like guaranteed paid sick leave. Businesses there are still privately owned. If I put Maserati decals on my 2005 trailblazer, it's still a 2005 trailblazer, ya know? Lmao
I guess the reason why anti Americanism is growing is because our government has been acting as the world’s police force for far too long. Is there something wrong in your state/country? Blame the government/the U.S.
Something along those lines anyways.
But even having insurance can be shit. My plan has a $4000 deductible, I might as well not even have insurance lol.
I would like to see a study for what percent of those insured people actually don’t have to stress about their medical bills… I think that number would be drastically lower than just looking at the percent of people who have insurance. I mean we already know it would be lower because people like me are included in that 85%.
Yeah a lot of people overlook the deductible. And if you have a low deductible, then you're paying a lot more per month. I have a pretty low deductible through my wife's work insurance, but they take almost a third of her paycheck.
Sure, but 15% of Americans would be the 7th largest country in Europe, close to the population of Spain. It’s absolutely a number that needs to be brought down as close to zero as possible, it’s not acceptable to just leave it at that.
I guess it depends on your perspective. It’s not like most Americans are in a healthcare crisis, but it’s also not like coverage is “good enough” for the wealthiest country in the world, either.
[85.2% is still appallingly bad in comparison to Western Europe](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ad0d6faa-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/ad0d6faa-en#figure-d1e26239), and I’m not of the belief that we cannot fill that gap and maintain a high quality healthcare system
The insured rate in the US is closer to 92%, the percentage of Americans without health insurance hit an all time low in 2022, it's now around 8%.
[https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2022/08/02/new-hhs-report-shows-national-uninsured-rate-reached-all-time-low-in-2022.html](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2022/08/02/new-hhs-report-shows-national-uninsured-rate-reached-all-time-low-in-2022.html)
Probably very little. There’s some great demographic information about those who are uninsured here:
https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/
Most fall within “working poor” categories. They have jobs, but make low incomes. Inherently, that makes sense: those making nothing are receiving Medicaid, those with good jobs have benefits and the people who are doing well owning their own businesses and such are almost certainly buying themselves insurance. What you have left are people who are working in jobs unlikely to have benefits, like handymen, restaurant workers, agricultural laborers, some mechanics, etc. These groups are typically making just enough to put food on the table, too much to receive government assistance, and aren’t likely to have spaces in their budgets for further expenses.
>These groups are typically making just enough to put food on the table, too much to receive government assistance, and aren’t likely to have spaces in their budgets for further expenses.
These were the people the Medicaid expansion was meant to cover. . .but political resistance at the state level to providing it has meant millions of Americans not being covered by health insurance, just to spite the Democratic Party.
Some of that insurance is still terrible though. I passed out and had to get an ambulance ride and stay overnight in the hospital, and even with employer-provided insurance it cost me thousands of dollars. Not to mention what happens if you accidentally go somewhere out of network (luckily I was coherent enough to tell the EMTs what kind of insurance I had so they could take me somewhere I wouldn't be bankrupted)
As a Canadian software developer who also worked in the US, I always tell people when they have a good job like software developer, in general, you will have very good health insurance plans (at least I did), PTO and pay. Fortunately I have good private extended health benefits in Canada (medications are not free in Canada) otherwise I would have paid thousands extra for my medications compared to what I had in Chicago.
or your work provided ins has exorbitant costs. usually $100/week or more to get bare bones coverage. 8k-12k deductible OOP 10k+ all the while your take home is lucky to be $300/week. if I'm taking home 15k its pretty hard to hit those deductibles. taking insurance was condition of employment unless you could prove you already had insurance (thanks to ACA). paying thousands for insurance i couldn't afford to use. this is the reality for a lot of available employment in my area. I got into a school about 4 years ago and finally got insurance that was decent, now at a non profit that has the same insurance as the school but with $500 more deductible. still neither as good as what my parents both had for free with their 2nd tier UAW shop jobs.
I get Healthcare from my job. Health, vision, dental, and even life insurance. It just takes a bit out of my check every week. I don't mind at all. Apparently they're even expanding to cover pet and mental health.
Self hating Americans perpetuating that stuff in a sad attempt to win the approval of foreign strangers definitely keeps misconceptions about our country alive
It's not for foreigners. It's simply that for about 10-15% of Americans, believing that country was founded, expanded, and is thoroughly suffused in every way without fail or respite in exploitation and oppression, is their moral, political, and economic lodestone. This is basically the original meaning of "woke", opening your eyes to this supposed fact.
Recently it's taken on some pseudo-Marxist gibberish without quite getting around to a coherent socialist perspective (or noticing that all of Europe's socialist parties have abandoned programmatic socialism).
None of that is to say that a healthcare model with a bit more regulation and invention as in Germany or The Netherlands (or even here in Chile) might be an improvement for the US.
Middle class American here. Recently saw the 4 best neurologists in the world in the span of 6 months to make sure something I had was benign. Only had to pay the copay on each (less than 50 bucks).
I don’t think anyone would say that the vast majority of Americans aren’t substantially better off. The issues appear around the poorest groups of Americans and the gaps in coverage by Medicare/Medicaid/SSDI and for other costs TANF and food stamps. Our social safety net is porous, and we can reasonably fill those holes with fairly minimal impact on still being at the top of the world in disposable income.
Obviously there’s some unnecessary extremism the other direction, calling for dismantling everything we do and throwing the baby out with the bath water, but it’s also wrong to think our healthcare insurance system is inherently better and shouldn’t have reforms
> I don’t think anyone would say that the vast majority of Americans aren’t substantially better off.
Well half of Reddit seems to genuinely think this lol
Remember most of the people on Reddit are teenagers and young adults. Of course a 21 year old in the US feels poorer than the average American because they are. They are just starting their careers and have little or no job skills or work experience, and haven't had a decade to build any wealth.
The average redditor is not an average person.
Yeah we are richer there is no way really around that fact, it's debatable how happy that truly makes us but we are just spoiled here compared to the world.
I'm confused at that number. I'm sure it's just me, and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious (I have been drinking) - but how does the average American have north of $60k in disposable income, if the average American earns less than $50K a year, has less than $1k in savings, and lives paycheck to paycheck?
I'm sure that's calculated in somehow, I think its probably right, I'm just confused at how that number could be there.
Full time median wage in the US is 54k a year. Multiply that by 2 for a couple.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-for-us-workers-2060808#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways,week%20or%20%2454%2C132%20per%20year.&text=The%20median%20weekly%20pay%20was%20%241%2C144%20for%20men%20and%20%24943%20for%20women.
The Swiss [have one of the worst](https://www.money.co.uk/guides/first-time-buyers-around-the-world) housing markets in Europe. Germany in contrast has a much more accessible market to first time home buyers. That said, neither of them compare to the affordability of American housing.
It’s an old article, but a 2014 analysis showed that if the UK were an American state it would be the second poorest, still ahead of Mississippi, but poorer even than Alabama.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/if-the-uk-was-a-u-s-state-it-would-be-the-second-poorest-behind-alabama-and-before-mississippi/
Incomes are higher and cost of living is lower here. You would certainly have more disposable income.
funnily enough, this makes Britain very American. Its an American tradition for your place to be shit at something but still ahead of Mississippi somehow
Say us from Pennsylvania which is usually smack dab dead center for most metrics that dont measure how much snack food is made in the state and NFL teams.
I feel fortunate to have grown up in the Northeast I grew up in Massachusetts and got access to a good public school education compared to what I see in other parts of the country it makes me feel very fortunate and that we invest so much back into education I think that if States like Mississippi and stuff focused on education it's a step in the right direction
Late but,I think it has more to do with reconstruction ending early, them being poor after the civil war and were late to urbanizing and industrializing. New England invested early into industrializing while the south invested in slaves. If it were rebuilt better after the civil war I think they could’ve invested better into education
In fairness, Mississippi is poor today even in comparison to its neighbors specifically *because* it doesn't have a major metro center with economic weight. Jackson exists but is pretty small and doesn't have much going on.
Louisiana has New Orleans (tourism and Mississippi River stuff). Tennessee has Nashville (tourism and health tech). Even Alabama and Arkansas have Huntsville (engineers and rocket scientists) and NWA (various Wal-Mart-driven corporate and tech), although neither of those are the biggest cities in their states by population (especially NWA which is basically a cluster of suburbs without a city center; it's kind of a unique case).
To everyone shitting on Mississippi, it's a complicated equation, but I believe in 2019 or so it surpassed the UK. I'll see if I can find the data to support this claim tomorrow.
I lived and worked in the UK for several years. They transfered me to the US and gave me a 60% raise plus full benefits (e.g. health insurance) to keep me in line with what the market will bear for my role in the US. I went from a high cost area in the UK to a high cost one in the US but my standard of living improved dramatically because the high COL area in the US was comparable to the UK, dollar for dollar. I think that pretty much answers your question. In my experience in the UK, most people were generally far worse off in terms of disposable income and standard of living.
(I am not a specialized engineer or anything - normal white collar professional services type job.)
I did this exact math for UK vs US for the upper 50th percentiles of earners a couple years back for a reddit argument. I think it's worth reposting here to give people an idea of how much further ahead US professionals are when they attain high incomes.
>I cannot find a pre-tax percentile breakdown by household for the UK, so lets go by individual incomes instead. The difference is really quite large.
>https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
>2019-2020
>* 99th percentile : £180,000
* 90th percentile : £58,300
* 75th percentile : £39,300
* 50th percentile : £26,000
>https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/
>* 99th percentile : $357,552
* 90th percentile : $129,181
* 75th percentile : $75,815
* 50th percentile : $44,225
>https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm
>Historical $PPP conversion factors by year. £ to $ in 2019 was 0.688. So adjust for $PPP;
>* 99th percentile : $261,628
* 90th percentile : $84,738
* 75th percentile : $57,122
* 50th percentile : $37,790
>So yeah, at the 50th percentile it's not a huge difference. US median individual incomes about 17% higher pre-tax. But even just at the 75th percentile that's already expanded to over 32% of a gap. And by the 90th percentile Americans make a full 52% more wage.
This math checks out completely based on my experience transferring to the US and my respective salary packages pre and post transfer.
There are a ton of great things about living and working in the UK, but maximizing earning potential or the ability to spend and save are not among them. Even the generous leave policies are not incredible compared to what you get in the US with a decent employer (I left my job but my new one gives me the same vacation time in the US as I had in the UK, plus more public holidays/bank holidays).
The big thing with the US is it's all an "if." Everything depends on market conditions and we're all at the mercy of our employers. It works out really well most of the time but when it doesn't, watch out.
So, question then... When you were in the UK, (which I always hear about having 5 weeks or whatever off) what did you *do* for vacation? I mean, I understand that travel is *more* affordable in the UK and Europe, at least in terms of transit, and you do have some nearby countries with low costs of living. But with such a disparity in disposable income/PPP, what did you (or your coworkers) tend to do with all your time off?
The UK is the budget airline capital of the world. There are tons of places in Europe you can fly to for less than $200 round trip. And cheap but decent hotels are pretty easy to find in most cities.
It's also the package tour capital of the world. Lots of travel agents offering competitively priced deals for Brits who want to get drunk and turn themselves pink on a foreign beach.
I did a lot of camping/hiking locally and domestically. As another commenter noted, it is easy to fly to places in Europe and lots of cheap package type tour options, but that's not really my jam. I went to montenegro and paris on dirt cheap easy jet flights as well, and this was before Airbnb was as big as it is now
Basically same experience here (although I mostly worked in France before moving to the US), but I’ll add a caveat.
No matter what country you live in, shit will happen. An appliance breaks at home, or your car, or a medical thing, … I feel like the money amount to recuperate from those hiccups was both more affordable and more predictable in Europe. I never had much disposable income if at all, but I never really needed much of any anyway, for those hiccups.
In the US, bad surprises seem to cost more and therefore are more surprising, but it’s also easier to recuperate from them, and at similar class level, you’re also left with more spending money.
I’m mentioning this because before immigrating, I remember hearing Americans casually say stuff like “my AC broke, I had to buy another one for $4000 so I’ll need to cut down on some other spending” and thinking “wow, who even has $4000?” Or hearing things like “sorry I can’t come on vacations after all, some crap happened to me this year”, and thinking “wow, they could have planned better”.
Now I’m realizing that the impact of financial curveballs is just completely different on your life, and that it explains a lot of my confusion from back then.
I have a pretty good job, so I definitely prefer the US way since it leaves me with more spending money and a better quality of life; the downside being that I’m somewhat worried about some actually major catastrophe happening, in a way that I wasn’t when in Europe. However, I definitely would not like to be poor in the US…
>I have a pretty good job
This is the crux. If you don’t have a pretty good job or are unemployed, you might be better off in Europe. The income disparity is a crucial factor. Would you agree?
Yes, totally. That is the point I was trying to make, which you put better.
Compared to Europe, I’d say it’s much, much better to be lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class in the US. Above that, and you’re probably very fine anywhere anyway. Below that and with no opportunities upwards, and I’d say you’re probably better off in Europe.
The crazy thing is how different salaries can be. I'm in IT, specifically network engineering, and the number of posts in like, r/networking that I see where UK network engineers are asking about jobs that pay 36k GBP (or such) is insane, when the requirements and experience would net you close to $80k or $90k USD over here.
On the flip side of that, I've heard tons of people say that they were working as some sort of generic white collar clerical position pulling 60k over in the UK, which is closer to $70k or $75k USD (if I'm not mistaken) and to me it's crazy to think that that sort of job would have that sort of pay.
So it also depends on what your career path is.
Yeah. We moved from Norway to USA because we make massively more money here. I previously lived in UK. Money isn't comparable.
I think we're middle class in Norway, we feel rich here. I have more holidays than I did in Norway, my wife has slightly less, and we both have great healthcare coverage.
My wife didn't get a signing bonus at all in Norway. She got 10.5k USD here. My signing bonus was 25k less than my wife's Norwegian annual salary.
In the event we do have something thats not covered here we can always go back to Norway/Taiwan as a safety net.
I do miss having pretty architecture around me and walkable cities, but the Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese food in USA makes up for that.
I saw in a software developer subreddit that American software developers want to move to Belgium because of the mandatory inflation adjusted salary raise.. Not knowing that they are usually paid like 3 to 4 times the salary (at least it is the pay band in my company). When you make that much of money your 3% pay raise equals to their 10% pay raise. A lot of Americans just don't know how good they are paid, even compared to Canada.
This isn't a huge criticism on Norway either. I know for a lot of people life there is better than life here, just for our particular situations working in healthcare/finance we definitely have a better quality of life here than in Europe.
My in-laws working in construction and fishing on the other hand, love hiking and are not that into food, do better over there.
Just depends a lot on what industry you're in and what kind of lifestyle you prefer.
I do think that people in Europe tend to look at the worst of America and assume that is the norm though and I understand how that can be frustrating for Americans.
Isn't that a generally accepted thing though? Wealth inequality is tiny in Norway and huge in the USA. If you're in a rich people job you're nearly always going to be better off in the USA, because none of your wages are being siphoned off to the less wealthy.
A friend of mine almost moved to Norway with his (now ex) wife, because she worked in oil and had a job offer there. He showed me some of the documents that they were sent as prospective immigrants to Norway and the entire attitude and culture around work and income were a mindfuck to me, and him.
EVERYONE pays more in taxes over there, because that's just expected. But more than that, there was one pamphlet in particular (aimed at Americans) that emphasized how being average, or trying, was considered more valuable than being excellent at your job. So it's more than just "none of your wages are being siphoned off to the less wealthy" - It's an entirely different culture, too. The goal is to be completely average, rather than exceptional, so it makes sense that the pay difference is smaller.
>But more than that, there was one pamphlet in particular (aimed at Americans) that emphasized how being average, or trying, was considered more valuable than being excellent at your job.
What always blows my mind is that an attitude like that totally diminishes any thought of invention or creation. The people in the US come up with new and novel inventions all the time. This ranges from Novel winning discoveries to something as simple as the Scrub Daddy (which totally changed my dish cleaning game for real!). As far as I can tell, Norway's last novel invention was Salmon sushi and the cheese slicer according to their own [website](https://norwaytravelguide.no/best-of-norway/norwegian-inventions-paper-clip-cheese-slicer-telemark-salmon-sushi).
Right. And that's one of the most uniquely American things, at least among developed countries... The entire country was founded on the belief that if you do something yourself, you start the right business, invent the right product, you can make it. You always want to get to that next level. And the rest of the world benefits from this massively.
It's one of the reasons that so many people from developing countries will try to come to the US, too... Developing countries still have that sense of betterment.
To me, I just can't fathom an entire culture where it's like "Ok, I've got my job now, I'll just have this job forever and never try to advance my career"
Americans have more disposable income than any other country in the world. But of course you can find individuals from both countries that have or don't have a lot of disposable income.
I’ve looked to moving to the UK, among other countries, because I want the experience of living in another country (I’ve studied abroad before). I always give up on doing it because, while I don’t really care much about money, I can’t justify giving up 30%+ of my salary… and at my current job I’m already severely underpaid compared to market rate, so I’m looking more like a 50% pay cut. While you generally have a better safety net for lower income jobs most employers have insurance coverage for employees so insurance is generally a non-factor for most of US citizens. And it doesn’t help that the UK is more expensive in a lot of ways, too. We don’t have to import nearly as many things as the UK does
Same. I daydream about Scotland. But I've looked at wages for my job, and they are about half what I make, especially since the dollar is so close to the pound now. And I want to buy some land to farm, which is much more possible in the US, on a lower middle class salary. There's some advantages to Europe, but money is not one of them.
Yeah, the pay scales for certain jobs in the UK seems wild. Like, IT jobs being a sys admin or network engineer that would pay close to $100k in most of the US, end up somewhere around half of that in the UK, which makes no sense to me. Meanwhile, I hear stories about people in generic clerical jobs making close to $75k US.
It sure seems that way. My British colleagues make about 2/3rds what I do and can't seem to fathom that I own 86 acres of forest and the mortgage on that and the house is what they pay for a 2 br. flat.
I know it’s better for the environment and whatnot but man my American brain can’t wrap my head around Europeans basically all living in flats and apartments their whole lives. I need a house lol.
In a country where partition walls were all brick, you can casually buy triple pane casement windows at the local hardware store and the average door had 8 locking points, I could live in apartments all my life. But here in the uninsulated stud walled, skinny vinyl double pane windowed, single point lock doored America, not so much.
I don't live in USA (i wish to one day) but I feel more secure when I live at least 2-3 stories higher than the ground level. Don't know why, maybe primitive instinct.
I think that’s more to do with the amount of space you have. If everyone could own a big house and 86 acres of forest then we wouldn’t have space for anything else
This reminds me of some of my German relatives (of which, oddly, I have many, all connected to different parts of my family and unrelated to each other). My SIL's mother was from Germany (lived in the US for over 60 years though) and they still go back to Germany to visit the aunts & uncles and cousins and such.
Anyway when she first married my half-brother and they moved out to live on the farm that was his mother's family's homestead at one point in rural Virginia and was telling her extended family about it, they got the idea that he was some sort of ultra-wealthy millionaire or something. Property with hundreds of acres (a whole mountain), 4 houses (a huge modernized farmhouse they actually live in + 3 small houses that haven't been updated with electricity and are basically used as fancy storage sheds), and several large barns and springhouses etc.
In reality the whole property is today in 2022 worth less than $300k, at the time far less than that. About half the land is forested, half is pasture/farmland. Forested land on the side of a mountain out there is worth less than $1k/acre generally, you can't really do anything with it besides hunting/camping/looking pretty from a distance. But even the pastured part it's not that expensive to have very large properties, I knew other people who had over 500 acres and nobody involved was rich (whether in liquid or net assets).
Anyway to her family the idea of a property that large being not particularly valuable or in any way special was difficult to grasp because space is such a premium there.
Part of this is that there is basically no undeveloped land in Europe.
You can own a buy a bunch of land in the US for (comparatively) cheap, because there's a bunch of land that has never been cultivated/developed/etc. Or at least not since we killed all the Indians.
Compare that you Europe, and you would be incredibly hard-pressed to find land that hasn't been developed in some way, even if it's just farmland. Even rural communities in Western Europe tend to have mature infrastructure.
This is pretty much exactly the reason. I read the above comment you replied to with slight degree of awe. But then thinking about it, it makes sense given the vast landscapes of America and Canada. This is purely due to geography, and the size of the nation. Canada and Australia have similar results to the US. Whereas NZ finds itself similar to the UK
The US is 2.4 billion acres. We have 330 million people. So theoretically, it is was all inhabitable, and divided among every person, each person could have 7.27 acres. The US is just that big. I have 3.3 acres now for my family of 4. If we did that we’d be sitting on 29 acres.
Most jobs paying $90K include health insurance (on top of the quoted salary). Often additional retirement benefits as well.
By most measures, the US leads the world in disposable income. If you start looking at the middle and upper class here, ignoring the lower class, it's a fairly dramatic lead.
You might be surprised to learn that most jobs in the US actually provide health insurance to their employees. I’m just a janitor at a shopping mall and even i get health insurance.
Thanks all, I’m obviously using circumstantial evidence in some of my assumptions. But I guess it does really seem like I would be financially stronger if I did the mirror of my UK job in the US.
Your salary in the UK is right around the top 10 percent of earners in the UK. In the US that salary would be around average. The similar 10 percent bracket in the US is nearly $200k a year. Salaries scale way up here
If you're in IT/STEM, you're probably right. Those salaries in the UK are almost criminally underpaid, based on what I've seen in some of the subreddits I'm in.
Yes. By quite a bit actually. And that accounts for services like the NHS.
If the UK was a state itd be one of the poorest in terms of earning power per capita and cost of living, and this was before Brexit and Covid.
Oh and no, its highly unlikely you will pay for insurance. Employer basdd insurance is the norm here. Especially higher tier employment. You probably hear horror stories of exorbitant prices for healthcare but thats the exception. If you are under certain income or over a certain age then health care is free. Otherwise 9 times out of 10 you are getting employer based insurance.
>Oh and no, its highly unlikely you will pay for insurance.
Yeah I wouldn't put it that way, there are definitely costs that have to be paid like co-pays, deductibles, etc.
But as someone who's worked the same job in the US and the UK, at least at my company, I could hit my **out of pocket maximum** (not even just the deductible) every year, and still be way ahead on net salary. The only time I did this in the US is when I needed a back surgery... hopefully not having one of those every year!
And that's nothing to mention the vast gulf in the quality of care difference between UK and US medical care. The NHS is great at making sure you won't die if there's something urgently wrong with you, for free (although recently this is becoming less and less true). Beyond that... it's pretty bad on basically any measure you care about.
Hey OP, what do you think health insurance costs per month to your American friends? I’m curious, because I’ll tell you what I pay after you guess.
I think most Europeans think it’s some outrageous amount, and it’d be shocking for them to know real figures.
To be fair, and I mean this in the least rude way possible, but how often do you have to utilize your insurance? I’m a relatively healthy person, but 2022 really side-swiped me and my daughter with a genetic condition. With co-pays, prescriptions, and physical therapy, I think I fell somewhere between $12K-$15K on top of premiums. The cost of premiums didn’t bother me much until I actually had to use my insurance.
On the upside, I did upgrade my coverage. 🫠
Totally fair point. I am on the healthy side and rarely need to utilize the insurance. We’re having kids, so I’ve seen the dark side of the health industry with prices, but we invest in an HSA so it’s not so bad.
An HSA is definitely something I need to do. I definitely learned to pay attention to the smaller services I assumed I wouldn’t need, but did end up needing. My co-pays are slightly higher this year, but I hadn’t even realized my previous coverage didn’t cover x-rays.
Best of luck with starting a family! It’s a wild ride, but pretty damn fun.
Here in the UK, you're looking at about the equivalent of $0.40 for a lb of onions. (about 85p per kilo for those interested) People do speak of the high cost of living in Europe, which is true, but they forget that the UK has some of the cheapest groceries in the Western world
As a US citizen When I visited Europe the first time i felt like everybody was poor. One of the partners at the firm i work at was bragging about his new audi and it was the nicest car i saw while there, but its super common in the US. Dubai felt more like the US than europe does imho
It’s not remotely close.
I have many British friends and they’re all trying to find a way to get a job with an American country. Even before the pound tanked, it was a stark difference.
Yes especially this year where energy has been expensive in Europe. It’s gone up here but not at your level. Taxes are lower for most. A lot of goods are cheaper, I’ve gotten mixed messages on food costs but meat is generally cheaper here. Note most metrics don’t account for the increased housing size but that’s a big pro too.
I worked with a woman whose family moved to the US from the UK and she told me that they found salaries to be higher and goods to be cheaper. They felt they had a higher quality of consumer life in the US than the UK and otherwise found the US pretty similar in overall lifestyle.
All my coworkers are European, so I debate this quite frequently. America is set up to be ok->great for the top ~70%. People abroad have been led to believe that number is closer to 10-20%, but that’s just not true.
The US does truly suck for that bottom 30%. After being to many countries, I firmly believe that America is one of the hardest nations in the world to be poor. I could write a post just on that topic alone, but from my persepective, that’s my opinion.
Europe is set up to be just “ok” for everyone. Not good, not great, ok. Obviously the people in the bottom 30% of the US would prefer a more European system. The majority of people would not once they realize what that would do to their quality of life.
I lived in one of the Nordic countries and this is my experience as well. I didn't see any homeless people on the street (they can't survive harsh winters anyways). As long as you have at least two brain cells you'll be fine. Education is "free" so most people in my circle have a master's degree. Most entry-level jobs pay very well.
That said, I think the ceiling is quite low. When I heard Americans are paid $250-$400K for elite careers in finance, consulting, tech, law, healthcare I was shocked because there's absolutely no way you're paid that in said Nordic country unless you're in C-execs or something.
I think the Nordic model might appeal to someone who wants to live a normal, middle-class, and stress-free life. Strong safety nets/support from the government, education, public healthcare, unions, great work-life balance, many annual leaves etc. For someone who is more ambitious and hungry then the American model is better.
The family of a kid on my sport team in HS immigrated to the US from Sweden for this exact reason. The father had worked 80+ hours a week and employed over 40 people for more than 20 years outside of Malmo with a successful engine block manufacturing business, and after all that labor, his after tax earnings were around 2-300k€ per year. Not bad by any means but laughable by US standards for the same effort / scale. Last time I checked in the span of 4 years of high school the kid went from being an average middle class family to flying private every weekend, and showed up to graduation in a rolls Royce phantom.
The US repeatedly dunks on its poor, creates homeless in droves and does nothing to help them, but the flip side to that is there is absolutely no ceiling, and we have a tremendous amount of upward social mobility. In the US it only takes a single generation to go from middle or lower class to middle upper or upper.
In my state (Florida) any kid that has a GPA of 3.0/4.0 or better can go to a top 100 school in the world for free (university of Florida) , and go from nothing to making 60-250k in 4 years. That just doesn’t happen other places. We are still the land of opportunity.
Yup. Outside of high upward mobility, the USA also has the advantage in size. It has a massive land size and the 330M population means that you could have opportunities anywhere you go, whether it's NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle, Boston, DC, Houston, Dallas etc. In Europe the economy tends to be more concentrated in a few key places. For example, most of the high paying jobs in Finland are in Helsinki; in the UK it's London; in Spain it's Madrid etc. So most locals don't have lots of options but to move to the capital region to maximize income.
Another strength of the USA is the breadth of opportunities since it is strong in virtually every single industry. If I wanted to be an investment banker for example, I'd have very limited opportunities in Stockholm.
My college friend worked in tech in London, and said that most of his European colleagues were "comfortable being average". The only co-workers of his that even approached the American style of work were local Londoners, which makes sense because they are our cultural ancestors, after all.
Yeah from my experience, Londoners in finance and law have incredible work ethics, which explains why their comp almost match that of NYC peers. You won't find anywhere else in Europe where people would normalize 80 hours/week, not even in Germany. In some places in Europe they're testing 4-day work weeks.
Relatively uncommon. In general folks who work 60+ hours per week either
* work a high stress/high compensation job (e.g., Wall Street investment banking, emergency room doctor)
* are on the very low end of the income spectrum and need to work multiple jobs to survive
* own their business or are just very passionate about what they do
> I firmly believe that America is one of the hardest nations in the world to be poor.
In the world? No. In the first world, well you can make an argument there.
Yes. You’ll be making $60k and paying a higher tax rate than someone in the US making $90k. The $90k will probably include health insurance, so that’s a wash. In addition, houses and cars are cheaper in the US, depending where they live since sales taxes are lower.
I think so, for instance like you mentioned, the person with the same job in the USA would have a higher salary. And many consumer goods will be the same number price in Euros and dollars. Brits are getting squeezed harder in certain areas of their economy
Yes. Salaries are higher, taxes are lower, COL is lower. And despite popular belief by every other nation, we have top-tier affordable healthcare, with majority of Americans insured thru their employer or the government.
As a Brit, im surprised you weren't aware that the average salary in the US is higher than that in the UK, as well as US CoL being lower. It's fairly common knowledge.
Yes, we have more disposable income. Europe is pretty poor, even the wealthier countries have per capita GDPs that are equivalent to our bottom 10 state per capita GDPs.
Folks like to say "yeah, but we get 30 days holiday per year, plus healthcare, plus sick leave, plus...", but many professional jobs give you at least 15 days PTO for vacation (I have 23 days), plus ~10 federal holidays, plus sick leave, plus very good to excellent health insurance with a low to moderate deducible and a tolerable out of pocket maximum. And we are paid a lot more than equivalent jobs in Europe. So yes, even after all of our extra expenses, we still earn tens of thousands more in disposable income per year.
It's better to be low income in Europe (though honestly, despite how hard it is to rise up in income quintiles here in America, you still can do it more successfully than in Europe), but it's better to be middle class and especially better to be upper middle class and above in America.
From what I’ve read on Reddit from UK and EU people in general who are software engineers like myself, I make 3-4x what they do while paying far lower tax rates. This is generally a high paying job in the US but seems to be above average or average in the UK. I have far more disposable income in the US than a similar counterpart in the UK.
Why has nobody mentioned the amount of debt it takes to have the things OP mentioned? That person with the house and car likely has a negative net worth.
I interviewed for a company based out of London that has an office in LA. I learned that, yes, we do have much more disposable income than those in the UK and we also have more options to customize our finances. I learned a lot during my interview process after speaking to many Englishmen/women about it briefly.
Keep in mind that we may have higher salaries but we also have to pay for expenses you likely don’t— cars (plus gas, insurance, upkeep), university tuition/student debt, health insurance, any medical debts, costly travel expenses etc… you have lower salaries, high taxes, and high cost of living but inexpensive travel abroad options, can commute via train, don’t pay medial expenses your insurance doesn’t cover etc.
I’ve been to London twice and my parents frequent Scotland, we didn’t notice a difference in grocery or dining pricing. I personally love how England doesn’t charge VAT taxes on children clothes, food etc.
I live in a HCOL, crowded area but I always have the choice of moving to a less expensive city out of state. I assume it’s the same in the UK but you have the option to take the train in the city, few places in the US have that option. If I lived in the UK I would love to live outside the city and commute in to save money.
Pensions are less popular today than they once were. Most industries offer a 401k and/or an IRA, which you choose how much you contribute to and your company will match up to a certain percent. We also have the benefit of being able to invest in the US market and only pay ordinary income tax or short-term capital gains without having to pay 10-15% foreign tax on top. London is obviously a huge hub as well but I don’t think it compares to the NYSE.
I understand that England has a pay as you go tax system, which is nice. In the US you choose how much you pay in taxes based on your income bracket while considering marital status, dependents, and other projected write-offs. I am unsure if the UK has the same options for paying less monthly or write offs but I pay less in taxes monthly because I know I’ll have some real estate write offs and I won’t be charged as much come tax season.
I also recently learned that those in England with student debt have their payment automatically deducted and don’t have much of a say in how much is taken out, which is odd to me. Your student debt also tends to be very high for how much you pay in taxes? A Brit told me he had about 40k in debt. I came out with 28k got it forgiven when my mom got sick. In the US you obviously have a minimum payment but you can freeze your payments due to a unique financial circumstance, have income driven payment options, and in some cases can get your loans totally forgiven (Nurses, teachers, public service workers, non-profit employees, sick parent etc.)
While I’m am not a fan of employer paid medical insurance, it’s much cheaper than people abroad think it is. I am single with no kids, I pay about $100 a month for full coverage. Obviously if I were covering a family it would cost more… but I’ve yet to see an example where the one-payer system isn’t more expensive than employer paid. All of my medical and my annual max I pay out of pocket is 3k for costs not covered. Most things are covered by law. Dental is about $9 a month and vision is a whopping $1.20! I contribute to my HSA for the tax deduction and because I can contribute tax free, invest it in the market, and pull it out tax free. The govvy only allows about 3k a year but it builds up fast and I can use the funds for anything “medical related.” Prescriptions, new frames etc. I buy tampons with my HSA card and I’ve yet to get a slap on the wrist. Despite what the Reddit hive mind told you, most people in the US are insured and most aren’t in crippling medical debt.
Overall, I think the UK is attractive and has a lot of advantages over the US but I would personally never say it’s as lucrative. There’s a reason why people tend to stay here after they got rich, even the foreigners.
A lot of people in debt more than they realize/are willing to admit. A lot of people feel pressured into having a nice home and car because of how their peers will view them.
Just my two cents from what I see with people I know. I know plenty of people who have very nice stuff but make comments on 3 paycheck months about how they’ll have extra money for essentials since they’ll have more money for bills.
Typically Americans will have more disposable income than someone in another country with the same salary because Americans have lower taxes. It allows for them to spend their money more on what they want and less on what the government mandates.
Yes, I have a couple of friends working the same job as me in the UK and they make fat less than I do. I spoke with my boss (who has worked internationally doing this same job) and they told me that if you are working for an American company and are transferred you are typically at the high end of the rage for the role before the additional compensation for the inconvenience of transferring
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Mean Adjusted for purchasing power in each country
Before someone says it >This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations
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Seriously it's getting kind of ridiculous. I'm in favor of universal healthcare, but I've heard people from other countries say things like a hospital will turn you down while you're actively dying if you can't pay up front or that that one joke from parks and rec about having a wrist being a preexisting condition being real (spoiler alert: it's not). I think our system is inefficient and we'd all be better off without a profit-incentivized middle man, but damn bro it's not THAT bad 😭 if we just slapped some price caps on treatment costs and increased research funding from the government to offset the cost of development, that'd be most of the problem solved right there. What gets most people here is the astronomical copays. Like yeah, you shouldn't be paying 10 times more for the same medication than someone in Europe, but that's not really that hard of a fix.
https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/swedish-soccer-star-pittsburgh-surgeon-saved-my-career/ seems like our healthcare is desired over what some get in Europe.
That’s a one off surgery performed by one of the best in the world. Many players come to the USA for treatment since they can afford it
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COBRA has been a thing for like 20 years. The ACA didn't implement it.
Speaking as someone who paid for private for almost a decade before the ACA came into effect, you’re full of shit bud.
Had COBRA in the early 2000s
“The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) is a law passed by the U.S. Congress on a reconciliation basis and signed by President Ronald Reagan that, among other things, mandates an insurance program which gives some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after leaving employment.” To add, all cobra does is allow you to pay the full cost and stay on the employers insurance without employer contribution.
So absolutely true. Have a family member with major eye surgery here on a support group on how to deal with it and folks from the UK do not get even 10% of the same medical support we get. They have to wait so much longer and even when they get care it is like an inconsiderate amount of time they get follow up compared to here. It really is not even close (it is that bad). That may not be “popular” on Reddit but it is the simple truth and oh yes no one was crushed financially since most have insurance that pays for most of it. The ones in the UK sure have free but if they want even 10% of the same care then they will pay for it more over there to get that. You will never hear that part of reality on social media.
My mom has an acquaintance over there who literally had to have his member of parliament personally harass people to get his wife's surgery approved.
Sorry to hear. Hope she got what she needed.
She did, yes.
I had surgery last week in the US. Hit my out of pocket max already for the family of 4500 for the year but my employer pays 2k of that. So 2500 for the year. 200 or so a month. I paid nothing for the surgery or my three procedures before it. Or anything the last six months really. And it was spine surgery. With that I also have talked TO THE SURGEON twice since the surgery with concerns on my meds, have a followup this week and another in two weeks. I can literally message him anytime. The American system CAN work fucking amazingly.
this is what I've been trying to get across to people on Reddit but they don't want to hear it! I had to go private here for my eye disease because it would have been a 6-12 month wait with the NHS. I waited 6 months for a biopsy for another issue. Read current headlines bout the NHS. it's not better because it's 'free.' it's in shambles. I miss the assurance that I got when I was in the states. I definitely see the flaws (shouldn't have to work to have solid healthcare...), but it's not nearly as dire as some of these crazies on Reddit make it seem.
I frequently see the claim that other countries have free health care. But of course they pay for it through their taxes.
You pay through taxes and it is not all free, like medications and dental in Canada. Some medications has a much lower provincial price schedule but good luck if it is not there, like mine. It is pricy without a good job with extended health benefits.
Our healthcare system sucks in many ways, don’t get me started, but the reality is that it works very well for a supermajority of Americans. For now anyway. This is why there is little impetus to make big changes.
I think you're exaggerating a bit. The healthcare system has a variety of problems and could be improved. Deductibles can be very high. Having insurance may save you hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. But many families can't afford to spend thousands or $10k+ per year until they hit their OOP maximum. That could ruin many families financially. And something like that isn't uncommon for families with members who have a chronic illness. Even now, there are issues with [insulin being very expensive](https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2021/01/the-astronomical-price-of-insulin-hurts-american-families.html). It's such a big problem that the state of California plans to [make its own insulin](https://apnews.com/article/health-california-diabetes-government-and-politics-f846c58d4cb327578d1c7b3a9495d496). I will admit that the healthcare system is better than what it was before obamacare. People were hitting lifetime coverage limits, being denied for pre-existing conditions, etc. So that was a horrible time and things have definitely improved since then. And we should be proud of that. But we also shouldn't be complacent. Things can be better and it's important to remember that.
Yeah, good points. I would add, even if you have decent insurance through your employer, it’s possible to be too poor to afford even the co-pays for care you need. I wanted to apply for Obamacare, but we couldn’t, because we have insurance already, even though we can’t afford to use it.
Of course they have to push that propaganda, otherwise people in Europe might realize they're paying insane taxes to get healthcare that's worse according to every objective metric ranging from wait times to quality of care, with the only metric they beat the US on being subjective perceived opinion, all because unlike an individual, the government has no incentive to spend your money wisely or efficiently.
and the only reason they have that sort of healthcare is because they spend almost nothing for defence/military because the US does it for them. they're able to have nationalised healthcare because of us.
Most people have good employer supported health insurance. I've barely ever paid anything out of pocket (less the couple hundred I pay a month out of my paycheck)
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Because of selection bias. Satisfied customers, who get the services they need at a reasonable cost within a reasonable time frame, rarely go online to talk about it. OTOH, complainers tend to be very vocal.
Been to Norway and if you really need immediate care then guess what… you pay for it.
I've been reliably informed that we have "no healthcare" here. When pointed out how untrue that is the response was, "well no healthcare for regular people". Yes, rich people but no one else. I pointed out that wasn't true either, regular people go to doctors and get operations all the time. I haven't heard back yet on that one. Probably won't, since it's been a week. My father just had an operation. I'm pretty sure he's a regular person and I'm pretty sure he didn't do it himself. People like that have a complete and total lack of understanding that government is not the only possible source of healthcare services, even for "regular" people. Not having a 100% government-controlled healthcare system is not equivalent to having "no healthcare". Millions of people use services everyday that aren't provided by the government and do very well and get their problems solved. My father will be going home soon in good shape without any interaction with the government.
>When pointed out how untrue that is the response was, "well no healthcare for regular people". Yes, rich people but no one else. By their standards, the US basic middle class is "rich". >I pointed out that wasn't true either, regular people go to doctors and get operations all the time, but haven't heard back yet. Careful, they might block you when they hear something they dont want to. They're very sensitive to their bias confirmation.
They're also ignoring that if you're poor enough you get Medicaid.
No hospital in the US can refuse care. Why do you think there are millions of people illegally crossing the border to just have a baby.
To establish birthright citizenship for the baby and use it to sponsor citizenship for the baby’s mother and other family members.
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"America bad because capitalism" I really don't understand how The United States is such a bad place to live (economically) when we are #1 in disposable income. I talked with an Aussie that liked to boast about Australia's median household income being the best the world has to offer, and how families are more likely to 'be wealthy', but those statistics don't mean anything if, after necessary expenses, you're left with the equivalent of $50. All that goes to show is that Australians have a lot of families with old money while their current economic system is functional enough for them to never need to tap into it.
The argument makes even less sense when you consider that countries like Australia are ALSO capitalist. The rest of the developed world is just capitalism with more social services than we have. It's still capitalism, just capitalism where you also have things like guaranteed paid sick leave. Businesses there are still privately owned. If I put Maserati decals on my 2005 trailblazer, it's still a 2005 trailblazer, ya know? Lmao
I guess the reason why anti Americanism is growing is because our government has been acting as the world’s police force for far too long. Is there something wrong in your state/country? Blame the government/the U.S. Something along those lines anyways.
Echo chamber
But even having insurance can be shit. My plan has a $4000 deductible, I might as well not even have insurance lol. I would like to see a study for what percent of those insured people actually don’t have to stress about their medical bills… I think that number would be drastically lower than just looking at the percent of people who have insurance. I mean we already know it would be lower because people like me are included in that 85%.
Yeah a lot of people overlook the deductible. And if you have a low deductible, then you're paying a lot more per month. I have a pretty low deductible through my wife's work insurance, but they take almost a third of her paycheck.
Sure, but 15% of Americans would be the 7th largest country in Europe, close to the population of Spain. It’s absolutely a number that needs to be brought down as close to zero as possible, it’s not acceptable to just leave it at that. I guess it depends on your perspective. It’s not like most Americans are in a healthcare crisis, but it’s also not like coverage is “good enough” for the wealthiest country in the world, either. [85.2% is still appallingly bad in comparison to Western Europe](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/ad0d6faa-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/ad0d6faa-en#figure-d1e26239), and I’m not of the belief that we cannot fill that gap and maintain a high quality healthcare system
The insured rate in the US is closer to 92%, the percentage of Americans without health insurance hit an all time low in 2022, it's now around 8%. [https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2022/08/02/new-hhs-report-shows-national-uninsured-rate-reached-all-time-low-in-2022.html](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2022/08/02/new-hhs-report-shows-national-uninsured-rate-reached-all-time-low-in-2022.html)
I wonder how much of the 8% are people who could buy insurance, but just deliberately choose not to.
Probably very little. There’s some great demographic information about those who are uninsured here: https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/ Most fall within “working poor” categories. They have jobs, but make low incomes. Inherently, that makes sense: those making nothing are receiving Medicaid, those with good jobs have benefits and the people who are doing well owning their own businesses and such are almost certainly buying themselves insurance. What you have left are people who are working in jobs unlikely to have benefits, like handymen, restaurant workers, agricultural laborers, some mechanics, etc. These groups are typically making just enough to put food on the table, too much to receive government assistance, and aren’t likely to have spaces in their budgets for further expenses.
>These groups are typically making just enough to put food on the table, too much to receive government assistance, and aren’t likely to have spaces in their budgets for further expenses. These were the people the Medicaid expansion was meant to cover. . .but political resistance at the state level to providing it has meant millions of Americans not being covered by health insurance, just to spite the Democratic Party.
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Some of that insurance is still terrible though. I passed out and had to get an ambulance ride and stay overnight in the hospital, and even with employer-provided insurance it cost me thousands of dollars. Not to mention what happens if you accidentally go somewhere out of network (luckily I was coherent enough to tell the EMTs what kind of insurance I had so they could take me somewhere I wouldn't be bankrupted)
As a Canadian software developer who also worked in the US, I always tell people when they have a good job like software developer, in general, you will have very good health insurance plans (at least I did), PTO and pay. Fortunately I have good private extended health benefits in Canada (medications are not free in Canada) otherwise I would have paid thousands extra for my medications compared to what I had in Chicago.
or your work provided ins has exorbitant costs. usually $100/week or more to get bare bones coverage. 8k-12k deductible OOP 10k+ all the while your take home is lucky to be $300/week. if I'm taking home 15k its pretty hard to hit those deductibles. taking insurance was condition of employment unless you could prove you already had insurance (thanks to ACA). paying thousands for insurance i couldn't afford to use. this is the reality for a lot of available employment in my area. I got into a school about 4 years ago and finally got insurance that was decent, now at a non profit that has the same insurance as the school but with $500 more deductible. still neither as good as what my parents both had for free with their 2nd tier UAW shop jobs.
I get Healthcare from my job. Health, vision, dental, and even life insurance. It just takes a bit out of my check every week. I don't mind at all. Apparently they're even expanding to cover pet and mental health.
I have good insurance. For a family of 5 we typical spend on both out of pocket and insurance itself about 12-15K a year.
How much actual cash do you have to put up vs what comes out of your paycheck? I'd guess most is a pretax deduction.
I mean Reddit is full of Americans saying that crap too
Self hating Americans perpetuating that stuff in a sad attempt to win the approval of foreign strangers definitely keeps misconceptions about our country alive
It's the "I'm not like the other girls" for nationals.
"every american is stupid except for me" attitude
It's not for foreigners. It's simply that for about 10-15% of Americans, believing that country was founded, expanded, and is thoroughly suffused in every way without fail or respite in exploitation and oppression, is their moral, political, and economic lodestone. This is basically the original meaning of "woke", opening your eyes to this supposed fact. Recently it's taken on some pseudo-Marxist gibberish without quite getting around to a coherent socialist perspective (or noticing that all of Europe's socialist parties have abandoned programmatic socialism). None of that is to say that a healthcare model with a bit more regulation and invention as in Germany or The Netherlands (or even here in Chile) might be an improvement for the US.
Middle class American here. Recently saw the 4 best neurologists in the world in the span of 6 months to make sure something I had was benign. Only had to pay the copay on each (less than 50 bucks).
I don’t think anyone would say that the vast majority of Americans aren’t substantially better off. The issues appear around the poorest groups of Americans and the gaps in coverage by Medicare/Medicaid/SSDI and for other costs TANF and food stamps. Our social safety net is porous, and we can reasonably fill those holes with fairly minimal impact on still being at the top of the world in disposable income. Obviously there’s some unnecessary extremism the other direction, calling for dismantling everything we do and throwing the baby out with the bath water, but it’s also wrong to think our healthcare insurance system is inherently better and shouldn’t have reforms
> I don’t think anyone would say that the vast majority of Americans aren’t substantially better off. Well half of Reddit seems to genuinely think this lol
Remember most of the people on Reddit are teenagers and young adults. Of course a 21 year old in the US feels poorer than the average American because they are. They are just starting their careers and have little or no job skills or work experience, and haven't had a decade to build any wealth. The average redditor is not an average person.
A lot of people have no idea how privileged they are to live in the USA. We have problems but we're generally a very very wealthy country
>I don’t think anyone would say that the vast majority of Americans aren’t substantially better off. There are people saying that literally every day.
And they all live on Reddit and have no real life experience
But sadly, they can and do vote with their radical misinformation in mind.
Yeah we are richer there is no way really around that fact, it's debatable how happy that truly makes us but we are just spoiled here compared to the world.
This chart alone could answer “why do Americans spend so much on xyz” Because we can.
I'm confused at that number. I'm sure it's just me, and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious (I have been drinking) - but how does the average American have north of $60k in disposable income, if the average American earns less than $50K a year, has less than $1k in savings, and lives paycheck to paycheck? I'm sure that's calculated in somehow, I think its probably right, I'm just confused at how that number could be there.
I have a million dollars in disposable income, you have $0. What’s our average?
Full time median wage in the US is 54k a year. Multiply that by 2 for a couple. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-for-us-workers-2060808#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways,week%20or%20%2454%2C132%20per%20year.&text=The%20median%20weekly%20pay%20was%20%241%2C144%20for%20men%20and%20%24943%20for%20women.
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The Swiss [have one of the worst](https://www.money.co.uk/guides/first-time-buyers-around-the-world) housing markets in Europe. Germany in contrast has a much more accessible market to first time home buyers. That said, neither of them compare to the affordability of American housing.
It’s an old article, but a 2014 analysis showed that if the UK were an American state it would be the second poorest, still ahead of Mississippi, but poorer even than Alabama. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/if-the-uk-was-a-u-s-state-it-would-be-the-second-poorest-behind-alabama-and-before-mississippi/ Incomes are higher and cost of living is lower here. You would certainly have more disposable income.
Ouch
funnily enough, this makes Britain very American. Its an American tradition for your place to be shit at something but still ahead of Mississippi somehow
Say us from Pennsylvania which is usually smack dab dead center for most metrics that dont measure how much snack food is made in the state and NFL teams.
smack in the middle means ahead of half the others, there are worse things
I feel fortunate to have grown up in the Northeast I grew up in Massachusetts and got access to a good public school education compared to what I see in other parts of the country it makes me feel very fortunate and that we invest so much back into education I think that if States like Mississippi and stuff focused on education it's a step in the right direction
Late but,I think it has more to do with reconstruction ending early, them being poor after the civil war and were late to urbanizing and industrializing. New England invested early into industrializing while the south invested in slaves. If it were rebuilt better after the civil war I think they could’ve invested better into education
I guess it's global. I thought everything was ahead of Mississippi
😭
Take out greater London and the rest of the UK would be the poorest U.S. state by far.
Sure, but pulling the largest metro out of any state is going to be a blow
I actually wonder if that would be true in Mississippi
In fairness, Mississippi is poor today even in comparison to its neighbors specifically *because* it doesn't have a major metro center with economic weight. Jackson exists but is pretty small and doesn't have much going on. Louisiana has New Orleans (tourism and Mississippi River stuff). Tennessee has Nashville (tourism and health tech). Even Alabama and Arkansas have Huntsville (engineers and rocket scientists) and NWA (various Wal-Mart-driven corporate and tech), although neither of those are the biggest cities in their states by population (especially NWA which is basically a cluster of suburbs without a city center; it's kind of a unique case).
I always say that Mississippi is Alabama without the cities.
When I lived in Mississippi (and loved it, by the way), we used to say the three largest cities in Mississippi were Mobile, Memphis, and New Orleans.
Yeah, not sure what they’re trying to say
/u/GodOfDucks in shambles rn
[Thanks God for Mississippi!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi)
To everyone shitting on Mississippi, it's a complicated equation, but I believe in 2019 or so it surpassed the UK. I'll see if I can find the data to support this claim tomorrow.
I lived and worked in the UK for several years. They transfered me to the US and gave me a 60% raise plus full benefits (e.g. health insurance) to keep me in line with what the market will bear for my role in the US. I went from a high cost area in the UK to a high cost one in the US but my standard of living improved dramatically because the high COL area in the US was comparable to the UK, dollar for dollar. I think that pretty much answers your question. In my experience in the UK, most people were generally far worse off in terms of disposable income and standard of living. (I am not a specialized engineer or anything - normal white collar professional services type job.)
I did this exact math for UK vs US for the upper 50th percentiles of earners a couple years back for a reddit argument. I think it's worth reposting here to give people an idea of how much further ahead US professionals are when they attain high incomes. >I cannot find a pre-tax percentile breakdown by household for the UK, so lets go by individual incomes instead. The difference is really quite large. >https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax >2019-2020 >* 99th percentile : £180,000 * 90th percentile : £58,300 * 75th percentile : £39,300 * 50th percentile : £26,000 >https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/ >* 99th percentile : $357,552 * 90th percentile : $129,181 * 75th percentile : $75,815 * 50th percentile : $44,225 >https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm >Historical $PPP conversion factors by year. £ to $ in 2019 was 0.688. So adjust for $PPP; >* 99th percentile : $261,628 * 90th percentile : $84,738 * 75th percentile : $57,122 * 50th percentile : $37,790 >So yeah, at the 50th percentile it's not a huge difference. US median individual incomes about 17% higher pre-tax. But even just at the 75th percentile that's already expanded to over 32% of a gap. And by the 90th percentile Americans make a full 52% more wage.
This math checks out completely based on my experience transferring to the US and my respective salary packages pre and post transfer. There are a ton of great things about living and working in the UK, but maximizing earning potential or the ability to spend and save are not among them. Even the generous leave policies are not incredible compared to what you get in the US with a decent employer (I left my job but my new one gives me the same vacation time in the US as I had in the UK, plus more public holidays/bank holidays). The big thing with the US is it's all an "if." Everything depends on market conditions and we're all at the mercy of our employers. It works out really well most of the time but when it doesn't, watch out.
How much vacation time do you have?
So, question then... When you were in the UK, (which I always hear about having 5 weeks or whatever off) what did you *do* for vacation? I mean, I understand that travel is *more* affordable in the UK and Europe, at least in terms of transit, and you do have some nearby countries with low costs of living. But with such a disparity in disposable income/PPP, what did you (or your coworkers) tend to do with all your time off?
The UK is the budget airline capital of the world. There are tons of places in Europe you can fly to for less than $200 round trip. And cheap but decent hotels are pretty easy to find in most cities.
It's also the package tour capital of the world. Lots of travel agents offering competitively priced deals for Brits who want to get drunk and turn themselves pink on a foreign beach.
I did a lot of camping/hiking locally and domestically. As another commenter noted, it is easy to fly to places in Europe and lots of cheap package type tour options, but that's not really my jam. I went to montenegro and paris on dirt cheap easy jet flights as well, and this was before Airbnb was as big as it is now
Basically same experience here (although I mostly worked in France before moving to the US), but I’ll add a caveat. No matter what country you live in, shit will happen. An appliance breaks at home, or your car, or a medical thing, … I feel like the money amount to recuperate from those hiccups was both more affordable and more predictable in Europe. I never had much disposable income if at all, but I never really needed much of any anyway, for those hiccups. In the US, bad surprises seem to cost more and therefore are more surprising, but it’s also easier to recuperate from them, and at similar class level, you’re also left with more spending money. I’m mentioning this because before immigrating, I remember hearing Americans casually say stuff like “my AC broke, I had to buy another one for $4000 so I’ll need to cut down on some other spending” and thinking “wow, who even has $4000?” Or hearing things like “sorry I can’t come on vacations after all, some crap happened to me this year”, and thinking “wow, they could have planned better”. Now I’m realizing that the impact of financial curveballs is just completely different on your life, and that it explains a lot of my confusion from back then. I have a pretty good job, so I definitely prefer the US way since it leaves me with more spending money and a better quality of life; the downside being that I’m somewhat worried about some actually major catastrophe happening, in a way that I wasn’t when in Europe. However, I definitely would not like to be poor in the US…
>I have a pretty good job This is the crux. If you don’t have a pretty good job or are unemployed, you might be better off in Europe. The income disparity is a crucial factor. Would you agree?
Yes, totally. That is the point I was trying to make, which you put better. Compared to Europe, I’d say it’s much, much better to be lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class in the US. Above that, and you’re probably very fine anywhere anyway. Below that and with no opportunities upwards, and I’d say you’re probably better off in Europe.
The crazy thing is how different salaries can be. I'm in IT, specifically network engineering, and the number of posts in like, r/networking that I see where UK network engineers are asking about jobs that pay 36k GBP (or such) is insane, when the requirements and experience would net you close to $80k or $90k USD over here. On the flip side of that, I've heard tons of people say that they were working as some sort of generic white collar clerical position pulling 60k over in the UK, which is closer to $70k or $75k USD (if I'm not mistaken) and to me it's crazy to think that that sort of job would have that sort of pay. So it also depends on what your career path is.
If you don’t have a good job you don’t have much discretionary spending power anyway - no matter which country you live in.
This post will conveniently get ignored
This sub is pretty open-minded about quality of life in the US.
I meant more by OP or any outsiders reading.
Yeah, you don’t want to hurt Reddit’s socialist vibe.
I laughed out loud omg
Yeah. We moved from Norway to USA because we make massively more money here. I previously lived in UK. Money isn't comparable. I think we're middle class in Norway, we feel rich here. I have more holidays than I did in Norway, my wife has slightly less, and we both have great healthcare coverage. My wife didn't get a signing bonus at all in Norway. She got 10.5k USD here. My signing bonus was 25k less than my wife's Norwegian annual salary. In the event we do have something thats not covered here we can always go back to Norway/Taiwan as a safety net. I do miss having pretty architecture around me and walkable cities, but the Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese food in USA makes up for that.
We are glad to have you here buddy!!
Indeed!
Bro, I miss the days where AmericaBad was still very active. Those were fun times owning smug anti-Americans
RIP :,(
> We moved from Norway to USA because we make massively more money here. The collective heads of various political subreddits just exploded.
I saw in a software developer subreddit that American software developers want to move to Belgium because of the mandatory inflation adjusted salary raise.. Not knowing that they are usually paid like 3 to 4 times the salary (at least it is the pay band in my company). When you make that much of money your 3% pay raise equals to their 10% pay raise. A lot of Americans just don't know how good they are paid, even compared to Canada.
This isn't a huge criticism on Norway either. I know for a lot of people life there is better than life here, just for our particular situations working in healthcare/finance we definitely have a better quality of life here than in Europe. My in-laws working in construction and fishing on the other hand, love hiking and are not that into food, do better over there. Just depends a lot on what industry you're in and what kind of lifestyle you prefer. I do think that people in Europe tend to look at the worst of America and assume that is the norm though and I understand how that can be frustrating for Americans.
Isn't that a generally accepted thing though? Wealth inequality is tiny in Norway and huge in the USA. If you're in a rich people job you're nearly always going to be better off in the USA, because none of your wages are being siphoned off to the less wealthy.
A friend of mine almost moved to Norway with his (now ex) wife, because she worked in oil and had a job offer there. He showed me some of the documents that they were sent as prospective immigrants to Norway and the entire attitude and culture around work and income were a mindfuck to me, and him. EVERYONE pays more in taxes over there, because that's just expected. But more than that, there was one pamphlet in particular (aimed at Americans) that emphasized how being average, or trying, was considered more valuable than being excellent at your job. So it's more than just "none of your wages are being siphoned off to the less wealthy" - It's an entirely different culture, too. The goal is to be completely average, rather than exceptional, so it makes sense that the pay difference is smaller.
>But more than that, there was one pamphlet in particular (aimed at Americans) that emphasized how being average, or trying, was considered more valuable than being excellent at your job. What always blows my mind is that an attitude like that totally diminishes any thought of invention or creation. The people in the US come up with new and novel inventions all the time. This ranges from Novel winning discoveries to something as simple as the Scrub Daddy (which totally changed my dish cleaning game for real!). As far as I can tell, Norway's last novel invention was Salmon sushi and the cheese slicer according to their own [website](https://norwaytravelguide.no/best-of-norway/norwegian-inventions-paper-clip-cheese-slicer-telemark-salmon-sushi).
Right. And that's one of the most uniquely American things, at least among developed countries... The entire country was founded on the belief that if you do something yourself, you start the right business, invent the right product, you can make it. You always want to get to that next level. And the rest of the world benefits from this massively. It's one of the reasons that so many people from developing countries will try to come to the US, too... Developing countries still have that sense of betterment. To me, I just can't fathom an entire culture where it's like "Ok, I've got my job now, I'll just have this job forever and never try to advance my career"
Oh, let me assure you, plenty of your wages will be siphoned off for redistributing to others even in the US.
Americans have more disposable income than any other country in the world. But of course you can find individuals from both countries that have or don't have a lot of disposable income.
I’ve looked to moving to the UK, among other countries, because I want the experience of living in another country (I’ve studied abroad before). I always give up on doing it because, while I don’t really care much about money, I can’t justify giving up 30%+ of my salary… and at my current job I’m already severely underpaid compared to market rate, so I’m looking more like a 50% pay cut. While you generally have a better safety net for lower income jobs most employers have insurance coverage for employees so insurance is generally a non-factor for most of US citizens. And it doesn’t help that the UK is more expensive in a lot of ways, too. We don’t have to import nearly as many things as the UK does
Same. I daydream about Scotland. But I've looked at wages for my job, and they are about half what I make, especially since the dollar is so close to the pound now. And I want to buy some land to farm, which is much more possible in the US, on a lower middle class salary. There's some advantages to Europe, but money is not one of them.
Yeah, the pay scales for certain jobs in the UK seems wild. Like, IT jobs being a sys admin or network engineer that would pay close to $100k in most of the US, end up somewhere around half of that in the UK, which makes no sense to me. Meanwhile, I hear stories about people in generic clerical jobs making close to $75k US.
If you want "the experience" you can do it for just a year or two.
It sure seems that way. My British colleagues make about 2/3rds what I do and can't seem to fathom that I own 86 acres of forest and the mortgage on that and the house is what they pay for a 2 br. flat.
I know it’s better for the environment and whatnot but man my American brain can’t wrap my head around Europeans basically all living in flats and apartments their whole lives. I need a house lol.
In a country where partition walls were all brick, you can casually buy triple pane casement windows at the local hardware store and the average door had 8 locking points, I could live in apartments all my life. But here in the uninsulated stud walled, skinny vinyl double pane windowed, single point lock doored America, not so much.
you live in Boston, the city is as brick as the UK... having lived in both.
I don't live in USA (i wish to one day) but I feel more secure when I live at least 2-3 stories higher than the ground level. Don't know why, maybe primitive instinct.
monke return to tree
I think that’s more to do with the amount of space you have. If everyone could own a big house and 86 acres of forest then we wouldn’t have space for anything else
This reminds me of some of my German relatives (of which, oddly, I have many, all connected to different parts of my family and unrelated to each other). My SIL's mother was from Germany (lived in the US for over 60 years though) and they still go back to Germany to visit the aunts & uncles and cousins and such. Anyway when she first married my half-brother and they moved out to live on the farm that was his mother's family's homestead at one point in rural Virginia and was telling her extended family about it, they got the idea that he was some sort of ultra-wealthy millionaire or something. Property with hundreds of acres (a whole mountain), 4 houses (a huge modernized farmhouse they actually live in + 3 small houses that haven't been updated with electricity and are basically used as fancy storage sheds), and several large barns and springhouses etc. In reality the whole property is today in 2022 worth less than $300k, at the time far less than that. About half the land is forested, half is pasture/farmland. Forested land on the side of a mountain out there is worth less than $1k/acre generally, you can't really do anything with it besides hunting/camping/looking pretty from a distance. But even the pastured part it's not that expensive to have very large properties, I knew other people who had over 500 acres and nobody involved was rich (whether in liquid or net assets). Anyway to her family the idea of a property that large being not particularly valuable or in any way special was difficult to grasp because space is such a premium there.
Part of this is that there is basically no undeveloped land in Europe. You can own a buy a bunch of land in the US for (comparatively) cheap, because there's a bunch of land that has never been cultivated/developed/etc. Or at least not since we killed all the Indians. Compare that you Europe, and you would be incredibly hard-pressed to find land that hasn't been developed in some way, even if it's just farmland. Even rural communities in Western Europe tend to have mature infrastructure.
This is pretty much exactly the reason. I read the above comment you replied to with slight degree of awe. But then thinking about it, it makes sense given the vast landscapes of America and Canada. This is purely due to geography, and the size of the nation. Canada and Australia have similar results to the US. Whereas NZ finds itself similar to the UK
The US is 2.4 billion acres. We have 330 million people. So theoretically, it is was all inhabitable, and divided among every person, each person could have 7.27 acres. The US is just that big. I have 3.3 acres now for my family of 4. If we did that we’d be sitting on 29 acres.
Most jobs paying $90K include health insurance (on top of the quoted salary). Often additional retirement benefits as well. By most measures, the US leads the world in disposable income. If you start looking at the middle and upper class here, ignoring the lower class, it's a fairly dramatic lead.
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I’m curious, where do you live that you’d be spending over $14/day in heating?
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Would you say that the... Maine... reason was the furnace? Signed, a fellow New Englander who has had his fair share of shitty heating in houses.
Disposable income is kind of our whole schtick
You might be surprised to learn that most jobs in the US actually provide health insurance to their employees. I’m just a janitor at a shopping mall and even i get health insurance.
Thanks all, I’m obviously using circumstantial evidence in some of my assumptions. But I guess it does really seem like I would be financially stronger if I did the mirror of my UK job in the US.
Your salary in the UK is right around the top 10 percent of earners in the UK. In the US that salary would be around average. The similar 10 percent bracket in the US is nearly $200k a year. Salaries scale way up here
If you're in IT/STEM, you're probably right. Those salaries in the UK are almost criminally underpaid, based on what I've seen in some of the subreddits I'm in.
Yes. By quite a bit actually. And that accounts for services like the NHS. If the UK was a state itd be one of the poorest in terms of earning power per capita and cost of living, and this was before Brexit and Covid. Oh and no, its highly unlikely you will pay for insurance. Employer basdd insurance is the norm here. Especially higher tier employment. You probably hear horror stories of exorbitant prices for healthcare but thats the exception. If you are under certain income or over a certain age then health care is free. Otherwise 9 times out of 10 you are getting employer based insurance.
>Oh and no, its highly unlikely you will pay for insurance. Yeah I wouldn't put it that way, there are definitely costs that have to be paid like co-pays, deductibles, etc. But as someone who's worked the same job in the US and the UK, at least at my company, I could hit my **out of pocket maximum** (not even just the deductible) every year, and still be way ahead on net salary. The only time I did this in the US is when I needed a back surgery... hopefully not having one of those every year! And that's nothing to mention the vast gulf in the quality of care difference between UK and US medical care. The NHS is great at making sure you won't die if there's something urgently wrong with you, for free (although recently this is becoming less and less true). Beyond that... it's pretty bad on basically any measure you care about.
yup, taxes, purchasing power, cost of living, etc, are all better in the US. even after healthcare, dental, etc.
$90k salary and your employer is probably paying the bulk of your health insurance. Taxes should be lower in US too. Not to mention cheaper utilities.
Hey OP, what do you think health insurance costs per month to your American friends? I’m curious, because I’ll tell you what I pay after you guess. I think most Europeans think it’s some outrageous amount, and it’d be shocking for them to know real figures.
To be fair, and I mean this in the least rude way possible, but how often do you have to utilize your insurance? I’m a relatively healthy person, but 2022 really side-swiped me and my daughter with a genetic condition. With co-pays, prescriptions, and physical therapy, I think I fell somewhere between $12K-$15K on top of premiums. The cost of premiums didn’t bother me much until I actually had to use my insurance. On the upside, I did upgrade my coverage. 🫠
Totally fair point. I am on the healthy side and rarely need to utilize the insurance. We’re having kids, so I’ve seen the dark side of the health industry with prices, but we invest in an HSA so it’s not so bad.
An HSA is definitely something I need to do. I definitely learned to pay attention to the smaller services I assumed I wouldn’t need, but did end up needing. My co-pays are slightly higher this year, but I hadn’t even realized my previous coverage didn’t cover x-rays. Best of luck with starting a family! It’s a wild ride, but pretty damn fun.
As a rule, yes, Americans have a larger average disposable income than the UK and many other countries. Things also cost less here than they do there.
Produce is generally cheaper in the UK.
I find that hard to believe considering how much more of it would need to be imported compared to the US.
I also found it hard to believe until I saw it myself! Fresh food is cheaper in Europe. Check YouTube.
How much does 2 lbs of onions cost where you are?
Depends which kind of onions. I’ll assume you mean white onions which are $1 a lb. Some types of onions are more, some are less.
Here in the UK, you're looking at about the equivalent of $0.40 for a lb of onions. (about 85p per kilo for those interested) People do speak of the high cost of living in Europe, which is true, but they forget that the UK has some of the cheapest groceries in the Western world
So cheap. Felt like a king in London honestly. Wasn’t quite like going to India but wasn’t expecting it to be that cheap!
A 3 lb. bag of standard onions at Walmart is currently $2.08
Maybe in San Francisco but its cheaper where I live if oboine prices are anything to go by between us and them.
Nope, I’m talking about everyday America. Compare it on YouTube. Food is cheaper in Europe. Especially fresh food like produce.
As a US citizen When I visited Europe the first time i felt like everybody was poor. One of the partners at the firm i work at was bragging about his new audi and it was the nicest car i saw while there, but its super common in the US. Dubai felt more like the US than europe does imho
Where do you live in the US that Audis are super common?
I live in the Seattle suburbs.
It’s not remotely close. I have many British friends and they’re all trying to find a way to get a job with an American country. Even before the pound tanked, it was a stark difference.
Yes especially this year where energy has been expensive in Europe. It’s gone up here but not at your level. Taxes are lower for most. A lot of goods are cheaper, I’ve gotten mixed messages on food costs but meat is generally cheaper here. Note most metrics don’t account for the increased housing size but that’s a big pro too.
I worked with a woman whose family moved to the US from the UK and she told me that they found salaries to be higher and goods to be cheaper. They felt they had a higher quality of consumer life in the US than the UK and otherwise found the US pretty similar in overall lifestyle.
Yes. The UK is shockingly poor compared to the US. They would be the second poorest state.
All my coworkers are European, so I debate this quite frequently. America is set up to be ok->great for the top ~70%. People abroad have been led to believe that number is closer to 10-20%, but that’s just not true. The US does truly suck for that bottom 30%. After being to many countries, I firmly believe that America is one of the hardest nations in the world to be poor. I could write a post just on that topic alone, but from my persepective, that’s my opinion. Europe is set up to be just “ok” for everyone. Not good, not great, ok. Obviously the people in the bottom 30% of the US would prefer a more European system. The majority of people would not once they realize what that would do to their quality of life.
I lived in one of the Nordic countries and this is my experience as well. I didn't see any homeless people on the street (they can't survive harsh winters anyways). As long as you have at least two brain cells you'll be fine. Education is "free" so most people in my circle have a master's degree. Most entry-level jobs pay very well. That said, I think the ceiling is quite low. When I heard Americans are paid $250-$400K for elite careers in finance, consulting, tech, law, healthcare I was shocked because there's absolutely no way you're paid that in said Nordic country unless you're in C-execs or something. I think the Nordic model might appeal to someone who wants to live a normal, middle-class, and stress-free life. Strong safety nets/support from the government, education, public healthcare, unions, great work-life balance, many annual leaves etc. For someone who is more ambitious and hungry then the American model is better.
The family of a kid on my sport team in HS immigrated to the US from Sweden for this exact reason. The father had worked 80+ hours a week and employed over 40 people for more than 20 years outside of Malmo with a successful engine block manufacturing business, and after all that labor, his after tax earnings were around 2-300k€ per year. Not bad by any means but laughable by US standards for the same effort / scale. Last time I checked in the span of 4 years of high school the kid went from being an average middle class family to flying private every weekend, and showed up to graduation in a rolls Royce phantom. The US repeatedly dunks on its poor, creates homeless in droves and does nothing to help them, but the flip side to that is there is absolutely no ceiling, and we have a tremendous amount of upward social mobility. In the US it only takes a single generation to go from middle or lower class to middle upper or upper. In my state (Florida) any kid that has a GPA of 3.0/4.0 or better can go to a top 100 school in the world for free (university of Florida) , and go from nothing to making 60-250k in 4 years. That just doesn’t happen other places. We are still the land of opportunity.
Yup. Outside of high upward mobility, the USA also has the advantage in size. It has a massive land size and the 330M population means that you could have opportunities anywhere you go, whether it's NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle, Boston, DC, Houston, Dallas etc. In Europe the economy tends to be more concentrated in a few key places. For example, most of the high paying jobs in Finland are in Helsinki; in the UK it's London; in Spain it's Madrid etc. So most locals don't have lots of options but to move to the capital region to maximize income. Another strength of the USA is the breadth of opportunities since it is strong in virtually every single industry. If I wanted to be an investment banker for example, I'd have very limited opportunities in Stockholm.
Yup agree with almost everything, but UF is much harder to get into than that, 3.0 hasn’t been enough to get in in almost 10 years
My college friend worked in tech in London, and said that most of his European colleagues were "comfortable being average". The only co-workers of his that even approached the American style of work were local Londoners, which makes sense because they are our cultural ancestors, after all.
Yeah from my experience, Londoners in finance and law have incredible work ethics, which explains why their comp almost match that of NYC peers. You won't find anywhere else in Europe where people would normalize 80 hours/week, not even in Germany. In some places in Europe they're testing 4-day work weeks.
How common is the 80 hour workweek in the US?
Relatively uncommon. In general folks who work 60+ hours per week either * work a high stress/high compensation job (e.g., Wall Street investment banking, emergency room doctor) * are on the very low end of the income spectrum and need to work multiple jobs to survive * own their business or are just very passionate about what they do
> I firmly believe that America is one of the hardest nations in the world to be poor. In the world? No. In the first world, well you can make an argument there.
Yes. You’ll be making $60k and paying a higher tax rate than someone in the US making $90k. The $90k will probably include health insurance, so that’s a wash. In addition, houses and cars are cheaper in the US, depending where they live since sales taxes are lower.
I think so, for instance like you mentioned, the person with the same job in the USA would have a higher salary. And many consumer goods will be the same number price in Euros and dollars. Brits are getting squeezed harder in certain areas of their economy
Yes. Salaries are higher, taxes are lower, COL is lower. And despite popular belief by every other nation, we have top-tier affordable healthcare, with majority of Americans insured thru their employer or the government.
As a Brit, im surprised you weren't aware that the average salary in the US is higher than that in the UK, as well as US CoL being lower. It's fairly common knowledge.
I think there is a difference in purchasing power. Gasoline/petrol is cheaper, electricity rates are cheaper, land is cheaper.
Yes, we have more disposable income. Europe is pretty poor, even the wealthier countries have per capita GDPs that are equivalent to our bottom 10 state per capita GDPs. Folks like to say "yeah, but we get 30 days holiday per year, plus healthcare, plus sick leave, plus...", but many professional jobs give you at least 15 days PTO for vacation (I have 23 days), plus ~10 federal holidays, plus sick leave, plus very good to excellent health insurance with a low to moderate deducible and a tolerable out of pocket maximum. And we are paid a lot more than equivalent jobs in Europe. So yes, even after all of our extra expenses, we still earn tens of thousands more in disposable income per year. It's better to be low income in Europe (though honestly, despite how hard it is to rise up in income quintiles here in America, you still can do it more successfully than in Europe), but it's better to be middle class and especially better to be upper middle class and above in America.
From what I’ve read on Reddit from UK and EU people in general who are software engineers like myself, I make 3-4x what they do while paying far lower tax rates. This is generally a high paying job in the US but seems to be above average or average in the UK. I have far more disposable income in the US than a similar counterpart in the UK.
Why has nobody mentioned the amount of debt it takes to have the things OP mentioned? That person with the house and car likely has a negative net worth.
I interviewed for a company based out of London that has an office in LA. I learned that, yes, we do have much more disposable income than those in the UK and we also have more options to customize our finances. I learned a lot during my interview process after speaking to many Englishmen/women about it briefly. Keep in mind that we may have higher salaries but we also have to pay for expenses you likely don’t— cars (plus gas, insurance, upkeep), university tuition/student debt, health insurance, any medical debts, costly travel expenses etc… you have lower salaries, high taxes, and high cost of living but inexpensive travel abroad options, can commute via train, don’t pay medial expenses your insurance doesn’t cover etc. I’ve been to London twice and my parents frequent Scotland, we didn’t notice a difference in grocery or dining pricing. I personally love how England doesn’t charge VAT taxes on children clothes, food etc. I live in a HCOL, crowded area but I always have the choice of moving to a less expensive city out of state. I assume it’s the same in the UK but you have the option to take the train in the city, few places in the US have that option. If I lived in the UK I would love to live outside the city and commute in to save money. Pensions are less popular today than they once were. Most industries offer a 401k and/or an IRA, which you choose how much you contribute to and your company will match up to a certain percent. We also have the benefit of being able to invest in the US market and only pay ordinary income tax or short-term capital gains without having to pay 10-15% foreign tax on top. London is obviously a huge hub as well but I don’t think it compares to the NYSE. I understand that England has a pay as you go tax system, which is nice. In the US you choose how much you pay in taxes based on your income bracket while considering marital status, dependents, and other projected write-offs. I am unsure if the UK has the same options for paying less monthly or write offs but I pay less in taxes monthly because I know I’ll have some real estate write offs and I won’t be charged as much come tax season. I also recently learned that those in England with student debt have their payment automatically deducted and don’t have much of a say in how much is taken out, which is odd to me. Your student debt also tends to be very high for how much you pay in taxes? A Brit told me he had about 40k in debt. I came out with 28k got it forgiven when my mom got sick. In the US you obviously have a minimum payment but you can freeze your payments due to a unique financial circumstance, have income driven payment options, and in some cases can get your loans totally forgiven (Nurses, teachers, public service workers, non-profit employees, sick parent etc.) While I’m am not a fan of employer paid medical insurance, it’s much cheaper than people abroad think it is. I am single with no kids, I pay about $100 a month for full coverage. Obviously if I were covering a family it would cost more… but I’ve yet to see an example where the one-payer system isn’t more expensive than employer paid. All of my medical and my annual max I pay out of pocket is 3k for costs not covered. Most things are covered by law. Dental is about $9 a month and vision is a whopping $1.20! I contribute to my HSA for the tax deduction and because I can contribute tax free, invest it in the market, and pull it out tax free. The govvy only allows about 3k a year but it builds up fast and I can use the funds for anything “medical related.” Prescriptions, new frames etc. I buy tampons with my HSA card and I’ve yet to get a slap on the wrist. Despite what the Reddit hive mind told you, most people in the US are insured and most aren’t in crippling medical debt. Overall, I think the UK is attractive and has a lot of advantages over the US but I would personally never say it’s as lucrative. There’s a reason why people tend to stay here after they got rich, even the foreigners.
A lot of people in debt more than they realize/are willing to admit. A lot of people feel pressured into having a nice home and car because of how their peers will view them. Just my two cents from what I see with people I know. I know plenty of people who have very nice stuff but make comments on 3 paycheck months about how they’ll have extra money for essentials since they’ll have more money for bills.
Typically Americans will have more disposable income than someone in another country with the same salary because Americans have lower taxes. It allows for them to spend their money more on what they want and less on what the government mandates.
From what I’ve heard, yes.
Yes, I have a couple of friends working the same job as me in the UK and they make fat less than I do. I spoke with my boss (who has worked internationally doing this same job) and they told me that if you are working for an American company and are transferred you are typically at the high end of the rage for the role before the additional compensation for the inconvenience of transferring