By Skyler Seybold

When I was young, my family lived paycheck to paycheck. My mom and dad seemed to work constantly to support our family of five. Every month was a struggle, but they made what most people would consider a pretty decent wage, certainly above minimum wage.

I never worried about being without a home, and I never gave much thought about what went into our monthly finances. Recently, though, I have been learning about how to manage my money in my personal financial literacy class. Specifically, what it’s like to manage money when you don’t have much to work with. We started a project this semester about living on minimum wage. This project taught us about opportunity cost, wants versus needs, and budgeting money. At first, I didn’t think it would be too difficult an assignment. But by the end of this project, I realized it is extremely difficult to live on minimum wage.

There was a film series done a few years ago by Super Size Me’s Morgan Spurlock, 30 Days: Minimum Wage, where the couple lives on minimum wage for a month to see how their lives would differ. The two regularly reviewed the budget originally set. For them, the biggest challenge came when both needed medical attention, and they had to decide whether it was worth it to go way over budget and go to the hospital, or to try and deal with it on their own. The couple decided to invest in their health, and the price of both of their medical appointments was more than their monthly salary. This meant they would have no extra money for anything else. This scenario would be especially challenging for a couple with children because they would have to decide between their child’s health or paying their rent. Rent should account for about 30 percent of a person’s paycheck, which leaves many of us with very little for the rest of our basic needs like food, water, healthcare, etc. I learned that budgeting isn’t as easy as it seems and that it’s almost impossible to support a family living on minimum wage.

Also for this project, we read an article about the hourly wage needed to afford a two-bedroom rental apartment around the U.S. A report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that in an average two-bedroom unit in the U.S, meant an individual should make $19.36 an hour, which is $8 more than Colorado’s minimum wage. Additionally, the average monthly utility bill is $150-200, and the cost of cable and internet averages between $65-150. This means a person earning minimum wage probably cannot afford to spend 30 percent of their income on a basic apartment.

For the last part of our project, we searched for affordable housing in our hometown. Researching available rentals in Longmont, I was unable to find anything that was 30 percent of my monthly budget. After trying many different towns throughout Colorado, my classmates and I looked at Colorado’s overall statistics and found only 10-20 houses within the budget, where the average cost was still about $500 a month. Most of these were in the middle of nowhere, in very unsafe neighborhoods, and with few job opportunities.

It’s no wonder that homelessness is on the rise all over America; there is a lack of affordable housing, and this makes it extremely challenging for families that live on minimum wage. This creates poverty cycles; children will grow up in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities and are less likely to gain a college education or get a good-paying job.

This assignment got me thinking. How do we create opportunities for people in a world where housing makes up such a large percent of our monthly budgets that we are forced to put basic human needs into the category of wants instead of needs? It also made me wonder how many people I know that live just on the edge of homelessness every day. ■

Financial Literacy Class Reveals Affordable Housing Costs More Than 30 Percent of Minimum Wage Earner’s Budget

The VOICE is proudly sponsored by: