Posts by Anthony Wood75

Steven Barnes112 said:I just consolidated all my debts into one single payment. How can I really start making headway now that I've moved from juggling loans, car leases, credit cards, and personal loans to just facing one monthly bill?

You've just traded five different bills for one single payment that happens to be exactly the same amount you were already paying.

Roger Castillo9 said:So, regarding actual wages—which seems to be where the real debate is heating up lately…

Look, you can always go with that "everyone I know makes this much" logic, but honestly? You should probably stick to official government statistics. Sure, they aren’t perfect—they don't catch under-the-table cash or all those executive bonuses and stock options that sit on top of a base salary—but they're still going to be way more accurate than just guessing based on your friends.

Anyway, you can dig into how pay is distributed across different industries (most of which line up pretty closely with the public versus private sector stuff we were talking about earlier) and see how things have been trending over the last seven years or so.

For instance, you can see that the tech sector pulls in some of the highest numbers—about $107,990 for the whole sector (including media and broadcasting), and if you look specifically at software engineering, it's around $116,600. But get this: commercial aviation actually sits higher at $122,020, even though the broader transportation and warehousing sector averages out closer to $72,720. It varies wildly.

And when you look at the growth over the past seven years—we're talking an average jump of 38%—healthcare actually saw a bigger spike than general tech (+54% for healthcare alone, excluding social assistance), and specialized programming shot up by 61%, while info services jumped a massive 74%.

On the flip side, the lowest paychecks are coming from security services and garment manufacturing. And the slowest growth? That's happening in mining and extraction.

There's also data on hourly rates, total compensation, and a bunch of other metrics.

You can even break it down by quartiles or deciles... For May, the average was $7,690 and the median was $2163, with the bottom 25% making less than $1653, while the top 25% cleared over $2944.

So, if anyone's interested…

https://www.bls.gov/data/tables/pay-distribution.xlsx

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/wage-trends.xlsx

https://www.bls.gov/newsrelease/archives/wage-report-may.html

We can all agree that statistics are essentially useless.
A family member of mine works for a small private security firm with about 30 employees.
$1500 Only $1000 get paid via direct deposit, while the rest get their money under the table, sometimes more and sometimes less depending on the hours worked, especially considering the day and night rates are exactly the same.

People tend to overlook how many small business owners out there pay themselves and their staff nothing more than the legal minimum. I see it all the time with local contractors, restaurant owners, or guys working the docks.
A paycheck might show about $3,500 hitting the bank, but any decent contractor is pulling in at least $200 in cash daily.
Most restaurant owners just pay themselves and their families the bare minimum year-round to keep the books looking a certain way.
The fishermen usually take a commission of maybe 10-12% on the catch, taking the minimum on paper and pocketing the rest in cash.
And don't even get me started on the security guards.
It creates this massive illusion of a gap between public and private sectors, when in reality, the situation is often the exact opposite.
On top of that, plenty of people work under the table simply because they have collections hanging over them and can't afford to be officially on the payroll.