Woman draws a budget she needs to live comfortably in 2024 and is shocked at the results

How much money is enough money? How much does an individual need to live comfortably in present times? Rebecca Snowden—who goes by @rebecca.snowden on TikTok—creates budgeting and financial advising content on the community, and made a video to figure just that out for herself. Snowden describes herself as a "recovering super spender" and she decided to draw a reasonable budget that she will need to lead an ideal life. In the video, she opens her journal and a pen to jot down the important areas where her money will be invested.

She starts by talking about saving enough to set up a retirement fund. "Maxing out your 401k, whatever type that may be requires $23,000," she speaks to the camera while writing the numbers down. "Then I put $7,000 for maxing out a Roth IRA. Like, if you make too much money, you can't have a Roth IRA anymore. Next, let's think about getting a car." She calculates that she might be able to pay off a brand-new car in 40 years. That means she needs to start putting $10,000 into her car funds regularly for 4 years including the tax, interest and other fees.

"The next thing would be travel," Snowden continues. "I want to be able to travel a couple of times a year. One international travel would be nice to do once a year. So I'm going to put $8,000 down for the travel budget because it's for me and my husband." Then she moves on to the stuff that she doesn't want to pay for while she lives. Snowden doesn't want to put her money into rental and mortgage but she still decided to keep $5,000 aside in case it is for mortgaging a house that includes utilities, gas and water bills. Then she moved on the Wi-Fi, Spotify, Netflix and phone bills and made a round figure of $450 that she will be needing for them.

"Next we have the food and transportation budget, which is 200 dollars," she pauses a bit and continues. "We're gonna do a thousand bucks. Twelve thousand for being alive and then we do wanna put money into other investments. How much is enough, though?" Snowden plans for a "quintessential emergency fund" as well where she won't be able to put more than $10,000. "After tax, I need $155,400. How much does that need to be in the state of California?" she hops onto Google to find her answer on a site that calculates what she was looking for. "To be left with 155,000 bucks, my income needs to be $215,000. I'm priced out of the Roth IRA. I can't have a Roth IRA if I'm making $215,000," she mentions.

Snowden admits in the end that when she was in school, she thought making $60,000 a year would be enough to live her dream life. She didn't buy a new car though or any luxury items. "I factored in nothing else. The highest things on here are the cost of living and a new car and like, the rest is just retirement and savings and travel. I need to sit with this for a minute," she concludes, making her viewers ponder about her calculations as well.

People in the comment section lamented about their financial situation and budgeting as well. Many others argued that the cost of living expenditure greatly depends on where a person lives. @densyty commented, "Personally I don’t see a livable future by the time I retire at the pace climate change is on so I personally just don’t see a point to save for retirement." @mercywritesbooks revealed, "My husband and I did the math and with $250K a year household we could live our best lives and save to retire early." @morgan.nelson1 wrote, "I swear when I graduated high school, you could do this with 80k a year. I don’t know what happened."

You can follow Rebecca Snowden (@rebecca.snowden) on TikTok for more videos on budgeting.