My rent is 24.5% of my gross. I could pay less in another neighborhood, though.

I don't usually consider my student loans in my debt tally. Or rather, I do, but it's a sort of separate category. I've paid off most of my accumulated cc debt though, and now my priority is cleaning up stuff from long ago when I was young[er] and [more] irresponsible.

My review is in March and there will be a serious talk. If they don't cough up the dough, I am finally in a place to say, "Take this job and shove it."

Good for you! Seriously, I know it's not that easy to just say "well, get a new job!" but this coworker was wack, staying like she did.

my salary is public record I make about 21,500 a year - part time. i guess what I find scary is that at full time - I couldn't make it out here on my own, at least not by staying in our house.

In general, I don't talk about money we make or debt. We hve the morgage, the car and the credit card debt. only the cc debt bothers me. I can't pay the cc down fast enough to make me happy. I could throw the saveings at it. ( that would deplete savings by 1/3 to 1/2), but our savings is right at the 6 months level. I have promised myself that if we make it to july with out dipping in to the savings - one or two credit cards will be paid off with savings.

This job was an entirely new field for me so I never had any idea what was fair pay. But noticing that everyone who found out what I made tended to respond with the drop of their jaw kinda clued me in.

The last guide I looked at said that rent should be 12.8% (oddly specific) of your gross pay.

I've heard 30%, but it was from a friend, and I don't know what his source is. (And it's higher in high-rent areas like NYC, SF, etc, though I'm not sure if the averages for NYC include the outer boroughs.)

My rent is 23% of gross, and I have a flatmate. I would have trouble finding a place by myself for the $700 I pay a month.

23% is higher than this "ideal", but like Jesse, I do all right on it. (The place is smallish, but it's in an area I like a lot and has a driveway.) Even with that percentage of my gross going to housing, I manage to save a lot.

Helped, I am sure, by the Nuttykin terror of debt. The only money I owe is student loans, and that's almost done. A look at my living room is immediate evidence of my ability to be in the right place at the right time for family furniture castoffs. If I really really wanted to be frugal, I would give up my car, which I'm not willing to do now it's paid off.

I am not sure what has kept me from being able to pay off the credit card debt. I think it is just basic lack of discipline at this point, because it is not any of the monthly bills.

For the first 7 years out of college there was just no way, but the pay increase I got 3 years ago should have made more of a difference than it has. I guess the buying a place thing took a chunk and I keep doing things that take 1000 at a time like agency fees and construction. Maybe the beating myself up thing is unwarranted.

oh, it's like self-therapy.

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with people who think it's okay to send me work at 4pm on Friday.

I may smoke the crackpipe of workaholism, but there are limits. When you start pinging my inbox like an IRC bot after 4pm on Friday, you are, my friends, a jackhole.

oh, it's like self-therapy.

What are buffistas for, if not saving money on therapy?

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it, and I bitch about enough in LiveJournal.....

Salary (gross): 34K
Rent: $880/month
Debt: 20K (almost entirely student loan)

However, I am married and co-own a small theater, so if I were to figure our household, it would look like:

Salary (gross): 54K
Rent: $880/month
Debt: 43K (still almost entirely student loan)
Theater costs: 15K

Z's salary is/will be entirely contract-based, and so will fluctuate. We're not poor, and if we stopped producing, we'd actually be able to pay off our debt pretty quickly. However, if we stopped producing, our quality of life would diminish drastically. So it's a trade-off, and one we are lucky enough to have the luxury of making.