So I've been looking at this subreddit from a distance for months at this point. The short version of this is “Where do people actually get jobs that pay $30,000+ a year?”
Long version because I feel like context is extremely important:
The long version is I've always been poor my entire life due to autism. The most I've ever made in a month is around $2000 as a dishwasher, and even then that was only for 6 months at a time, and the amount of time I've made around that much was a bit over a year in the past 9 years.
I've moved around almost 30 times in the past 20 years due to a combination of parents getting divorced, me being unable to live place, and me leaving abusive households.
Most of the time, I'd be lucky to be hired anywhere. I've never been able to quality for unemployment. The only way I haven't been homeless is from staying with people who ended up not really caring about my well being.
My personal bills outside of rent are less than $200 a month. I never could afford to go to college, and I could never afford to drive. This is a blessing and a curse, cause while my actual cost of living is extremely small due to me only being able to afford rooms at the most. I'm also paying $550 a month for rent, with another $100 for utilities because I'm renting out a bedroom.
After everything, my monthly expenses are roughly $850 a month. I should be doing more than okay considering I live in Portland, OR where the minimum wage is $14.75. I'm on food stamps so I don't pay for food. I literally only need to work about 17 hours a week on minimum wage to support myself. This is nothing compared to how many people who are living paycheck to paycheck but making 6 figures.
Because I don't have any formal training in anything and have spent most of my life in survival mode, I've never worked anything outside of food service or retail.
Another thing is because my mom would always work at places like hardware stores, and my dad would always do stuff like grocery stores, I literally have never met more than a small handful of people who are making more than $30,000 a year, and those are jobs that require formal education (one of my uncles worked as an architect for a while, and now works on a city board I'm pretty sure.)
Because I don't drive, my options for work are severely limited. I specifically moved to Portland, OR because the transit is so cheap. Low income transit fares require you make less than twice the national poverty level, and said transit pass comes down to $28. Portland's public transit is actually really good compared to other cities I've been in (Sacramento is around the same size and has garbage transit in comparison).
A couple of things that make things not easy are that I have horrible anxiety, depression, and a list of other problems. One of the most notable things is that when I get too overwhelmed, 1 of 2 things happens: My whole body goes limp and I collapse, or I start convulsing like I'm having a seizure. I haven't been formally and properly diagnosed for anything because until recently I never had any sort of decent health insurance, and I wasn't taught how to set appointments up (I think a lot of people have this issue).
A couple weeks ago I was working in a certain fast food job (certain job was actually nice and good coworkers, but you know how food service is) and I collapsed because of how intense things were. I put in my 2 weeks shortly after, but now I'm only working about 5 hours a week.
Then about a week ago, I think from all the stress, I just stopped being able to walk or stand up for longer than an hour or two without feeling weak and like I'm gonna collapse.
I've been seeing lots of people going “I left my job for another job and make $20,000 more a year” or something along those lines, and it's extremely wild that people get job hopping raises that are more than I've ever made in a year.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel like jobs that are more than $30,000 a year either don't exist, or are E X T R E M E L Y rare, because most of the people in my life I've met were only making either at or a bit above minimum wage. ($18 an hour is seen as rich to me, go figure.)
I figure that posting here will give me a bit of a bigger perspective when it comes to this stuff, but what sort of jobs do people work that actually make that much?