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I am currently living in Oregon and the minimum wage is higher here than in most other states. I am not currently paying off my debt because I have not yet graduated. Due to this I was able to work at the minimum wage and still have enough to pay my bills and buy the essentials that I needed for the month. I have affordable rent only because I have roommates, otherwise I would not be able to afford my housing on minimum wage. I also did not opt in for health care because I am still on my parents insurance. I am fortunate to be able to do this because many others are not able to do so. I ended up having about $2,000 left at the year end

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I am from Oregon an the minimum wage is $9.10. At the rate of my living I would be at $19,340 in debt or work 47 more hours a week to break even. Im a student athlete right now so having a job is not in my cards right now. But this is shocking to know that every month is a struggle just to get the essential things paid for. Must be really stressful to know that one can not make enough money and don't have a lot of options to change that outcome.

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I live in Hawaii and the program said the minimum wage was 7.25, but that's recently changed to just over 10.00/hr. and for very good reason. When all was said and done, I was $19,520 in debt per or would have to work 52 more hours per week. That sounds about right, Its a good thing I'm not making minimum wage. I actually make $20 and hour and it's still hasn't been enough, but I'm a lot better off than the outcomes if I was making only 7.25 an hour.

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Given my monthly expenses for a family of three, this is my bottom line for working all year being paid minimum wage. Fortunately for my family, my job pays more than minimum wage and offers paid sick leave and vacation. However, between my husband who is in graduate school, and myself, we are still looking at a significant amount of student debt.

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Oregon's minimum wage is listed on the simulator at $9.10 (the real minimum wage in Oregon currently is $9.75). By using a rough estimate of my expenses now I would have $1400 at the end of the month. And that is without paying for my own health insurance or any debt (I won't have to start paying back my student loans until I have graduated). I work part-time now for minimum wage at two jobs, and I am still not making enough money to really save anything extraordinary. I felt that this simulator was a little difficult to estimate and therefore inaccurate. However I know that instance and debt would be a huge cost, and with only $1400 left a month I certainly wouldn't be able to afford any children

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It was really hard to determine debt per year for me because my husband is in the Army so the house we live in is paid by them, so it should cost almost $1,500 a month. If I lived here on my own, I know I wouldn't be able to afford a house that much so I would find one cheaper. Also, I don't know what my lights or water would be because it is covered too.

I live in Alaska currently, and the minimum wage in Alaska is only $7.75. I would rack up $14,500 dollars a year in debt, or have to work an extra 36 hours a week (which is a whole full time job on top of my other one!). I don't think there are even enough hours in the week to do that.

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I am from Oregon, with a minimum wage of $9.10. I would have to work 6 more hours at a second job, just to make ends meet - or else be over $2,000 in debt per year.

There is no family dependent on me yet, so it is hard to imagine for a single parent. Trips, parties, and life's ruthless surprises also are not taken for account. There is only (barely) room to survive - not thrive.

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I live in Oregon where the minimum wage is $9.10. After entering my expected expenses, I was $2,220 in debt and would have needed to work an extra five hours per week at a second job. I don't pay for my own healthcare right now, so its entirely possible that my estimate was too low compared to how much I'd need to spend if I were in this situation. I also don't have kids and didn't account for having any in this activity which is another reason that my debt is so low compared to that of some classmates. I don't doubt that if I end up in a situation like this, I'd be more in debt than this activity has shown me which is an extremely depressing thought.

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I live in Oregon where the minimum wage is $9.10 an hour and with my current expenses I would accrue $11,000.00 in debt a year or have to work 24 hours extra a week at a second job. It would make it very difficult to make ends meat in the long run. It makes me wonder if there would ever be a possibility to make a livable minimum wage. It seems to me that the more the wage goes up the higher the prices go and we are left exactly where we started off.
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I live in Oregon and the current minimum wage is 9.10 per hour. At the end of the month, after calculating my expenses I would have to work an additional 22+ hours just to make ends meet. If I didn't work all that extra time, I would be 10,300 dollars in debt by the end of the year. I'd like to think that I inputted just the necessities, so it's hard to think that I still ended up in debt at the end of the year, and Oregon ranks in the top 10 countries who have higher minimum wages!

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Steven Jackson

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada and my minimum wage was $8.50 a hour. Once I calculated all my expenses on what I considered a conservative budget, I still needed to work an additional 20 hours a week to survive with my monthly budget. I obviously went into debt and owed over $8,200 at the end of the year. I didn't take into consideration a growing family and the need of childcare with a household raising multiple children and needing childcare for each of the children as well.

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I live in Oregon were the current minimum wage is $9.10/hour. After I put in all my expenses for the month, I ended up being $21,956 in debt per year. I felt this was a lot more than others experienced, however I accounted for everything including tv, internet, phone, school debt, etc. I went kind of higher on rent than normally. While I only pay $625/month, I put $700 in because different parts of my county charge differently for housing. Even so, I still feel that my expenses were high.

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I based my expenses on the minimum wage in Oregon, which is $9.10/hr.  After inputting my expenses, I did not have any money left over.  In fact, I would have to incur $10,840 in debt per year, or would need to work an extra 23 hours a week, on top of my already full time job in order to make ends meet.  Which, if I chose to work the extra hours instead of build up the debt, I would need more childcare, which would make my expenses go up, which means I would have to work even more hours. My expenses were high due to the fact that I have children, but even then I only calculated enough to cover the absolute bare necessities.

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In rural Oregon, the minimum
wage is $9.10, urban Oregon it's $9.25. Based on what I pay for rent on a small house and general bills, not including any extras. I would need to work 19 extra hours a week. In addition, I would accumulate $9100 dollars in debt per year. The price of everything has gone up so much in recent years, rent has almost doubled since 2006. Even with multiple incomes, I struggle at times to make ends meet. That's just getting along with the basics.

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In Washington State, the current minimum wage is $11, but this website still shows our previous $9.32. Based on the old wage, I would have to work an additional 41 hours a week to make up the $19,510 shortfall in my budget. Essentially what this means is that my husband and I would both have to work full time at one job to just keep our heads above water. There would be no way to save or splurge. I did a little math to estimate what all of this would be using our actual current minimum wage of $11, and found that between the two of us we'd have to work 66 hours a week to just pay the bills. At least that would allow us a little extra to save and try to get ahead of our bills, or be able to meet emergencies without losing our home.

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In the state of Wyoming the current minimum wage is $7.25. After putting in all of my expenses I do not have any money left, and I would have to continually go into debt, about 33,000 a year, or work approximately 90 more hours a week at a second job. This didn’t really surprise me for my area. The housing marking and renting situation where I live, are really high right now, so finding an affordable place to live is difficult. The city of Cheyenne just started building a new low income housing development, as the waiting list for the current low income housing is years long. In my previous job when I was working full time I was working a little over 40 hours a week and made a little over double the current minimum wage, and could barely make ends meet with rent, transportation,  food, child care, insurance and all the other things a person needs to survive. I can’t imagine only making minimum wage and having to work several jobs to barely get buy.

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I live in Oregon, where the minimum wage is $9.10 an hour. After calculating all of the expenses for my family of 4, we came out $15,400 dollars in debt otherwise work an addition 33 hours a week to come out even.
This completely surprised me. My husband and I are relatively conservative. We do not have car payments or large credit card payments. We also do our grocery planning ahead of time and shop at WinCo. We even save our older son's clothes for our younger son to grow into.

We do live on one income while I am going through school, so being conservative with our spending has been really crucial to not acquiring unnecessary debt. I am thankful he makes above minimum wage and our family receives benefits.

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I live in Oregon where the minimum wage is $9.10 per hour. After inputting all of my expenses, I was $3,160 in debt and had to work an additional 7 hours a week at a second job. Looking at some of the other posts of my classmates, I'm not sure how accurate this is. Personally, I am not entirely financially independent -- I don't pay for my own healthcare and other bills such as phone or cable. With that being said, some of the values I inputted may be have totally missed the mark, since i just estimated on a couple of the categories. However, I did put in accurate values for the items I do pay for, which I'm sure still greatly impacted the way the simulation turned out. It is interesting that so many of us ended up with so many different values -- it goes to show how slight differences in expenses can go a long way.

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I live in Oregon. The minimum wage is $9.10 per hour. After this activity I still had $1,251 left over per year. I'm not entirely sure how accurate this is. I am a college student and don't pay for healthcare, and I haven't started paying back my loans yet so I estimated in both of those. I also think my rent incorporated to getting money back. I currently live with 4 other roommates so my rent is only $560 per month. If I was paying for my own healthcare, paying off loans, had a child, or virtually any other addition I would not be able to comfortably live on minimum wage.

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I live in Oregon and the minimum wage is $9.10 per hour. After inputting all my current expenses my end results were as follows:

With your current spending, you need to work at least an additional 38 hours a week to make ends meet, or you’ll pile up$17,764 in debt by the end of the year.

It is sad in the day and age we live in the cost of living is going up while minimum wage stays the same. This makes it difficult for someone like myself who is a single mother of two boys to make it. Getting a second job and going to school full time is not something I look forward to having to do.

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I live in Oregon where the minimum wage is currently at 9.10. I was in debt of $8,980 in debt per year and would have to work 19 extra hours to make ends meet. This wasn't surprising for me since I had to live like this for awhile only until recently when family has help take some of the burden of the bills off my back. This website did a okay job of showing how diffcult it is to live off of minimum wage and my heart goes out towards others who are doing just that.

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I live in Oregon, where the minimum wage is $9.10 an hour.  Based on my current bills and lifestyle (I even underestimated a bit on spending) I came out to about $1,334 in debt, a month. I would have to work another 30 hours a week at an additional job to make this work. I will say that I share my bills with my partner, but even considering that, we would barely make it through the month, and not be able to save much, if at all. I cannot imagine how anyone is able to save money for a house, or raise children, on minimum wage.

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I live in Oregon and the minimum wage is $9.10 a hour.After completing the "Can You Live on Minimum Wage?" simulation I found that I would be in debt of $528 monthly. Or i could work a second job for two more hours a week. I was surprised how one small change to the overall plan can put me into debt very quickly. I gave conservative estimations and still was in the red. Minimum wage is pretty much allows you to barely get by on on basic needs but doesn't allow for really anything else.

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I live in Oregon, and the minimum wage is $9.10/hour. Thankfully I currently split most living expenses. However, even including my split bills; if I were working full time making minimum wage I would have to work an additional 25 hours a week at a second job. If I did not I would go into over 11 thousand dollars in debt at the end of the year. This scares me. I do not drive a fancy car or live in a fancy place, nor did I budget more than $100/ month on "entertainment". Clearly minimum wage is not sufficient.

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In calculating my living situation now I am $160 in debt per year Or, need 1 more hour a week at a second job for a single minimum wage income home- Whereas when I calculated my living expenses prior to getting a new car and being a single mother with a daughter with medical expenses outside of health insurance coverage,  I still had $980 left.  But lets be real here,  with all my current expenses  I need to work at least an additional 17 hours a week to make ends meet, or pile up $7,600 in debt by the end of the year. Now if I was to look at what would have happened if Obama would have raised the minimum wage to $10.10 in 2014,  With my current spending, I would instead work at least an additional 11 hours a week from 17 hours to make ends meet, or pile up $5,600 in debt by the end of the year.

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So I started looking into Oregon with a minimum wage of $9.10/hour. I based my spending habits off my current state, a college student. I ended the with a yearly income of $3,860. I was unsure of how to enter some of my monthly cost such as health care and taxes because I am on my parents health insurance and also have many medical needs. My reaction to this was startled because at that rate I only have $321.00 a month. Although this is more than enough extra money with my parents assisting me. I already have two jobs and I am not sure how I would support my self independently or if I had a family. There are many things out of necessity that I would have to give up in order for myself to not fall into debt. Things like my sorority, my vanity things like hair dye, and my tabs at impulse with my friends would definitely have to decrease if I were to live on minimum wage without my parents support.

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I ended up with $2260 in debt after a year, although I was generous with entering my expenses. We are a family of four so housing, food and special needs expenses I have entered are for our entire household. One would think that working any full-time job would cover basic living expenses for at least you and your children. The reality is different. My husband works full time right now and I work half-time, which gives us the possibility to not accumulate debt to the most part. According to the calculator I would have to work 5 extra hours /week in order to cover our costs.
We are still lucky though: One we can work , and two we have jobs that were flexible to work around daycare & school hours. Many jobs require grave yard shift, after hours, etc. The fact that our economy is not built around the minimum wage, let's no room for social mobility.
I really do appreciate the ability to go to college in order to one day worry less about a possible debt collection agency calling me. Sadly, this ability is still limited to just a few of us.

Raising the minimum wage is a very important step, but at the same time the housing economy needs to be more controlled. If raising our wages will trigger a rise in housing prices it will have no benefit to wage-worker whatsoever.

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I live in Oregon where the minimum wage is $9.10/hour. I entered my general spending habits as they are according to my college lifestyle. I try to be frugal with my spending, while not living anywhere near a poverty status. I do not pay my own health insurance yet, and some costs usually incorporate together, such as food and household essentials, since I get them all at the same place, Winco. At the end of the year, I had a remaining $1,910. This is largely to do with the fact that I do not have to support children in any way.

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I live in Oregon and minimuc wage is $9.10 an hour. After I inputed my expenses I had $2,046 remaining per year. This is due to me not paying my health insurance- but I entered in $200 a month anyway. I also do not have any debt in this point of my life so that helped a lot too. I was modest with what I entered and if I were to be living this way paycheck to paycheck I would not have that much money left over.

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I live in Oregon where minimum wage is $9.10 an hour. After I inputted my expenses which included childcare and after school programs for my three kids I have an average of $2630 in monthly expenses. With the amount I spend a month I will have to work an additional 29 hours a week at a second job in order to pay my bills. Otherwise I will end up with an average of $13,360 in debt a year.

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My results could vary, because my rent and utility payments are probably much lower than most families or other people. I also receive help from my parents when it comes to health insurance, and I also have student loans that were not calculated into the expenses. I wound up having about $5,000 left, however I would not be able to pay for my student loans, health insurance, and taxes if I was only living off of my job that pays minimum wage. Even estimating how much I would have to pay for these things per monthly left me with no money left over, which was very shocking and interesting to think about.

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I know after I put all my current expenses I did not have money left over. I work full time job that pay me 12$ hourly without any benefits. I current don't have health insurance. I think I might qualified but I never applied for Obama Care. My husband is full time student in grad school. His tuition is more than seventy thousand for a year. He have enormous amounts of debts but we don't need pay back until he graduated.

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Because I only provide for myself, have no children, and live with three roommates, my housing and utility expenses are significantly lower than the average individual living in their own house or apartment. After calculating the amount of spending required, I would still have about $4,000 left over after the year to save for emergencies like urgent care visits. However, this doesn't take into account that I am paying my college tuition. This activity alarmed me because if I had my own home and had to pay all of the rent and utilities on my own, and if I had to provide food to a child or spouse, there is no way I could survive working one job.

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This was really shocking for me. I entered all of our current expenses and we not only did not have money left over but if one person, say me for example, was working in my family I would have to work a second job that would be about 40 hours a week on top of my 40 hours from my first job. I'm baffled, I know that the minimum wage has changed since the creation of this program but it is still relevant because different parts of the U.S. have lower minimum wage requirements. It takes two wage earners to support two people on minimum wage and that blows me away. How do single mothers manage, or families where unemployment is prevalent? This program doesn't factor in some elements but overall it already looks pretty bad for those working minimum wage. I remember when both my husband and I worked minimum wage and it was constantly a struggle. We could never get ahead until we both got more experience and a pay raise as well as education. A livable wage is crucial in helping families survive.