![]() ![]() Three years prior, Akpan had gone to a seminar on content creation to learn how to monetize her two hobby blogs – the Mom Trotter and Black Kids Do Travel. Next, they needed to replace their income. “Super stressed out and broker than broke”, the Akpans sold their house and bought a RV in January of 2020 to slow their financial hemorrhaging. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see how our debt-to-income ratio has risen significantly – or how a sudden job loss (or, say, a global pandemic) can quickly turn the American dream into a high-stakes nightmare. In contrast, median household income was $67,521, up from $42,148 in 2000. In 2020, the typical American household carried an average debt of $145,000, nearly tripling from $50,971 in 2000. When the paychecks stopped, the Akpans struggled to pay their mortgage, car payments, student loans, and the personal loans they’d taken out to install a pool and solar panels. But if something happens, you can lose it all as fast as you got it,” Kay says. You can continue paying those bills on a monthly basis and have no issue. “Everything is fine if you have a good job in America. Then Kay’s contract as a well-paid clinical research associate suddenly expired in 2019, and replacing it proved harder than expected. The Akpan family on a national park road trip in Utah. ![]() They drove a nice car, owned a rental property, and traveled abroad to France, China and Cuba with their son, Aiden, nine. She and her husband, Sylvester, 44, who emigrated from Nigeria in his mid-20s, owned a luxurious, five-bedroom home in Santa Clarita, California. I thought, if you worked hard, you could have anything you wanted – that beautiful home, that expensive car,” explains Kay Akpan, 33, who immigrated to the US from Cameroon as a teenager.īy her own definition, Akpan and her family were living that dream. “The American dream was the ultimate dream for everyone. Yet, if a fat paycheck and a McMansion full of fancy stuff are no longer tantamount to the American dream, what is? Ten years later, however, in response to the pandemic pause, the ongoing cost of living crisis, school shootings, the climate crisis, and the seemingly infinite ways to monetize content on social media, the internet is filled with families exploring creative ways to bridge the gap between success and happiness.Īs the author Courtney E Martin explains in The New Better-Off: Reinventing the American Dream, today, more than ever, Americans “are stepping off the hamster wheel, either by force or by choice, and examining the value of money with greater scrutiny – in the context of a life well-lived, not just well-earned and well-consumed”. The author’s husband, Tree, and their baby in 2013. To give some context, the vanlife hashtag had been conceived about the same time as our daughter both were in their fetal stages. In our hearts, we both knew what we wanted, but part of what made that choice so harrowing was that, in 2012, there weren’t many role models for alternative living. Why can’t we be successful and happy?” I said. I pictured myself stuck in a cubicle all day, longing for my baby while pumping milk in a bathroom stall, just to collect a check that would barely cover our hyperinflated rent, insurance premiums, and daycare costs. ![]() Now that we’d been on the road for almost three years, lapping up freedom and adventure like stray dogs, we didn’t want to go back to the quiet desperation of 9-to-5 living. To stretch our meager income from Tree’s online business, we headed south to drive the Pan-American Highway from California to the end of the southern hemisphere. On the other hand, despite our financial hardship, we were living our best life. Photograph: Stevie TrujilloĪbove all, after being forced to move into our van to make ends meet, we’d lost our faith in the middle-class bargain. ![]()
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