I am a clinical laboratory scientist.
I used to live in suburbs of Flint, Michigan in a very nice middle class area (not what you imagine when you think of Flint).
I owned a 1 bedroom condo that I paid $85,000 for and my 15 year mortgage payment was only like $430 a month or something ridiculous. So I basically had one of the cheapest living situations in all of the USA.
The problem was I was only making around $29+$2 an hour so even though I was debt free, and had dirty cheap housing I still felt like a struggling middle class schlub. I was contributing 15% to my 403b but that was a little bit of a struggle as my take home paychecks were around $1400 bi weekly so after paying everything