IRAN SANCHEZ, Laveen, Ariz.

Trains call-center workers for a department store. Lives with her daughter; her ex-husband, a systems engineer; his wife, a probation officer; and their two children. Household income of $120,000-$200,000.

When I started my new position, I went from making $60,000 a year to making $52,000. It’s been an adjustment, for sure. Even to stay in the house I was living in, it was going to be tight. I would need a roommate. So when my ex-husband and his wife, Xavier and Alex, proposed, ‘Do you want to live with us?’ it made sense. I would be able to be with my daughter much more. And this gave me a chance to catch up on all the debt, the credit cards I owed. We have a combined family, a blended family. It’s a village. We all take care of each other.

I’ve had to scale back, mostly on entertainment, going out — none of that. Dinners, too — I’m eating at home a lot. Now I’m putting more into my 401(k) and educational account for the kids.

My schedule is really crazy. It’s technically a retail job because I’m training people to do over-the-phone retail, so there’s times my classes start at 7 and end at 3, and then sometimes back to back, 11 to 7. And because we’re a call center and it’s a 24-hour cycle of work time, they want us to work as close as possible to the call-center shifts. If I lived on my own, not close to Xavier and Alex, I would have had to find something else. Because I don’t have a normal job with normal hours, I’d have to pay extra for child care.

I feel middle class, in the sense that I’ve been able to do a lot of things my parents couldn’t: being able to travel, being able to enjoy vacation. My parents never had that. At my daughter’s age, and I tell her this all the time, we — my brother and I — had to take a paper route. It wasn’t because we wanted our own money; it’s because we had to contribute to rent. We had to pay the phone or light bill because we’d get overdue notices or notices that they’d cut the utility.

That right there, the sense of almost having to leave, of your home being in peril, of not making the mortgage or losing power or eating just bean tacos for the rest of the week — my daughter now, she has no worry in the world. She’ll never know the feeling of growing up that way.