According to a new study cited by the San Francisco Chronicle, a family of 4 needs to make $77,069 in order to “get by” in San Francisco.

From SFGate:

A family of four in the Bay Area with two working adults must earn $77,069, equaling an hourly wage of $18.53, just to pay for basic necessities, a study released today calculates. If only one adult works, that figure falls to $53,075, largely because the family doesn’t have to pay for child care, according to the report by the California Budget Project, a liberal Sacramento research group. But that one wage-earner must make $25.52 an hour.

And a single parent with two children needs to take in $65,864 annually, at an hourly wage of $31.67, to cover expenses, the Budget Project figures.

Statewide, the two-working-parent family needs an annual income of $72,343 to cover necessities; the family with one working adult must earn $50,383.
…
They estimated prices of housing, child care, transportation, food, health care, taxes and miscellaneous, a category that lumps together everything else. They looked at rental costs rather than home ownership and made certain other assumptions that have big effects on living standards.

For example, they included as a necessity individually purchased health insurance, although many families are covered at least partly through work. And, in an effort to figure what it takes to support a family without public assistance, they didn’t consider the help many families get from government benefits such as housing and child health care subsidies.

According to those assumptions, the biggest expense was rent, estimated at an average of $1,312 for a family of four in the Bay Area, higher than the statewide estimate of $1,160. Child care was the second biggest outlay at about $1,216, followed by taxes and health coverage.

It sounds like more of a “worst case scenario” than “everyone with 2 kids absolutely needs this much money,” but even so it’s interesting. We suppose the title of this post could also be, “San Francisco Laughs At Your Measly $77k.”

Hey Bay Area readers, do these estimates sound correct to you?

A Bay Area couple with two kids can’t make it on $50,000 a year [SF Gate]
(Photo:Maulliegh)

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