So a friend of mine linked, on facebook, to this page, McDonald’s suggested budget shows just how impossible it is to get by on minimum wage, which itself links to a website where McDonalds and Visa provide advice on how to develop and live on a budget: calculate your monthly income, subtract out your monthly bills (e.g., rent, car payments/monthly transit pass, anything that’s a fixed monthly expense), work out how much you have left, and record how much you actually spend. The page itself, and my friend’s facebook comments, pick apart how realistic or unrealistic the sample budget is. (Biggest sticking point: it implies working 70+ hours at two jobs; surely this is based on the expectation of spouses/cohabitating partners sharing expenses, and not a single individual working that many hours.) Then the comments move on to hashing out whether anyone can really live on minimum wage.
To answer that question, there’s a handy Living Wage Calculator — it’s actually interesting to play around with it, and see that, in many locations, they say that two adults, both working and sharing expenses, can make a go of it.
But the bigger issue is always the complaints that it’s impossible to support a family on minimum wage — and the reality is that no one should expect to be able to start a family if you have no skills that qualify you for anything other than entry-level minimum wage jobs.
[Note to self: later on, look at the methodology and assumptions behind the calculator!]
[Update to self: a quick look showed some flaws with this calculator — to begin with, they amounts budgeted for transportation must be averages, not minimums, which, in large cities, ought to be set at the cost of a monthly bus pass.]
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