Living On The Edge - 67% Of Americans Are Living Paycheck To Paycheck
By Michael Snyder/Economic Collapse Blog September 17, 2025
Share this article:
When two-thirds of all the workers in your entire country are just barely scraping by from month to month, you have got a major crisis on your hands. For a long time, our standard of living has been going down and the middle class has been shrinking. But in recent years, those two trends have accelerated.
We have now reached a point where it takes 5 million dollars to live the American Dream for a lifetime. Needless to say, the vast majority of the population will never come close to making that sort of money. But most Americans continue to strive to live a middle class lifestyle, and as a result most people are teetering on the brink of financial disaster in this day and age.
According to a survey that was recently conducted by PNC Bank, 67 percent of U.S. workers are now living paycheck to paycheck...
A growing share of U.S. workers are struggling to cover expenses as everyday costs continue to weigh heavily on household budgets, according to new survey findings.
PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024.
The report surveyed 1,000 U.S. workers aged 21 to 69 who work full time at companies with more than 100 workers.
There are two very important points that I want to make about this survey.
First of all, it only covers people that actually have a job.
There are vast numbers of other Americans that are not employed and that are deeply struggling right now.
So when you take that into account, this survey is even more shocking.
Secondly, it is clear that we are rapidly moving in the wrong direction.
It was bad enough that 63 percent of U.S. workers were living paycheck to paycheck last year, but now we are at 67 percent.
A four percent jump in a single year is a very troubling sign.
The primary reason why so many employed Americans are struggling financially is due to the rapidly rising cost of living.
For example, the price of coffee has risen by almost 21 percent over the past 12 months...
Coffee drinkers are in for a jolt long before their first sip.
Retail coffee prices in the United States in August jumped nearly 21% compared to the same month last year -- the largest annual jump since October 1997, according to the latest Consumer Price Index, released Thursday. On a monthly basis, coffee prices rose 4%, the most in 14 years.
The vast majority of the coffee that we drink is imported, and Brazil is the number one source...
Coffee, for instance, is largely imported because there are only a handful of places in the U.S. where the beans can be grown, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico. About 80% of unroasted coffee imports are sourced from Latin America, primarily from Brazil, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Products from Brazil that are shipped to the U.S. now face a 50% tariff, according to the White House.
If you drink coffee, you will want to brace yourself, because prices are only going to go higher in the months ahead.
Of course just about everything has become significantly more expensive, and this is pushing many consumers over the edge.
I recently wrote about how subprime auto loan delinquencies in the U.S. have risen to an all-time high, and now we have learned that one of the largest subprime auto loan lenders in the U.S. has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy...
A company that provides auto loans to families with poor or no credit has filed for bankruptcy.
Tricolor Holdings, a Dallas-based car fixing and credit company, has filed for Chapter 7 -- or liquidation -- bankruptcy. The filing typically means the company will quickly go out of business.
The company's demise is a warning sign for the US economy: Americans are racking up a huge amount of debt to keep their cars, while a record amount can't keep up with the payments.
This is just the beginning.
There will be more failures.
At this stage, most of us can feel the change that is in the air. In fact, it is being reported that consumer confidence "dropped sharply in September"...
Consumer confidence dropped sharply in September to its lowest level in four months, according to preliminary data released Friday, as Americans expressed growing anxiety about job security and the persistence of high prices.
The University of Michigan's closely watched index of consumer sentiment fell to 55.4 in September from 58.2 in August, missing economists' expectations and reflecting what survey director Joanne Hsu described as "multiple vulnerabilities in the economy."
And the confidence that Americans have in being able to find a new job has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded...
In the latest sign of trouble for the U.S. labor market, confidence in the ability to move from one job to another has hit a record low, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Monday.
Respondents to the central bank's monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations for August indicated a 44.9% probability of finding another job after losing their current one. The reading tumbled 5.8 percentage points from the prior month and is the lowest in the survey's history dating back to June 2013.
If you are thriving in this extremely difficult economic environment, good for you.
For most of the population, things are very painful at this moment.
The ranks of the middle class are steadily thinning out, poverty is growing all around us, and more Americans are homeless than ever before in our entire history.
In Los Angeles, one homeless encampment has become so enormous that it is now being described as a full-blown "city"...
A sprawling homeless encampment in Los Angeles is drawing ire from neighbors who say the makeshift shelter has grown into a full "city" of its own, complete with working electricity and a recreational area featuring a tennis court, garden and barbecue pit.
The encampment sits on a vacant Koreatown lot surrounded by apartment buildings and other structures, according to ABC 7.
"The reason why people are sleeping here is because you leaders are sleeping on not taking initiative and action to clean this place up," neighborhood resident Daniel King told the station.
Most Americans are just a few bad breaks from losing everything.
In fact, there are already millions of Americans that have lost everything, and those that are on the bottom levels of the economic pyramid are becoming increasingly desperate.
When things really start hitting the fan in this country, vast numbers of extremely desperate people will cause tremendous chaos throughout our society.
Things didn't have to turn out this way.
If we would have made much different decisions over the past 50 or 60 years, we would have gotten much different results.
But we just kept doing things the wrong way, and now we shall reap what we have sown.
Originally published at The Economic Collapse Blog
