I'm down to living off of 38.9% of my income.  The other 61.1% goes to taxes (income, social security, med), uber-awesome health and dental insurance ($960/yr), Roth 401k savings (25%), Roth IRA (TBD), employee stock purchase plan (15%) and a few other key areas.

40% of my remaining income pays rent, gas, electricity and interwebs, leaving 23.3% of my gross pay to spend each month.  Thus, if I made minimum wage, I could continue to live in my current lifestyle with minimal adjustments, except that I wouldn't be saving anything... I can see, though, that a family with children wouldn't be able to live off of minimum wage*.

Why do I save so much?  I've always wanted to have the choice to retire whenever I want after I'm 35.  The easiest way to be independently wealthy is to keep a low overhead.  While my current living situation - 3/2 with one empty room - is wasting a few hundred dollars a month, I'm surprised that I could maintain it on minimum wage.

*An aside: Last night I watched a (presumably) single mother of three ring up her WIC-approved groceries. You could see her counting up the total the entire time: $99.68, presumably (again) 32 cents less than the $100 figure she had calculated as her children threw each grocery item in the basket.  But then she ran her WIC card through the register and suddenly the figure shrank 10:1 to $9.10.  A solid weeks worth of groceries for less than 2 hours pay.  I haven't honed in on my opinion yet, but that strikes me as quite compensative.