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How poverty changes your mindset

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Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#391

Post by leetcrew »

pjc50 wrote: post #297
Simon_says wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, but I'm not sure, that at her income level, the Earned Income Tax Credit will let her get a net refund from the federal government? And Texas doesn't tax income. Savings have to come from the biggest choices in your life. You've already assumed a bunch of poor choices in your model of this hypothetical person. You didn't mention your city, but I found $400-500 2 bedroom apartments on a quick Craigslist searc…

> don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life Often the choice to have kids is at a more stable point and then things go downhill.

sure, and there should definitely be help for this situation, but what fraction of low income parents is this really?

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#392

Post by ythn »

braderhart wrote: post #82
kraig911 wrote: post #69

I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could…

Thank you for sharing your story. I feel so much empathy towards you and your family, and I'm sorry to hear about your father feeling so bitter towards the system afterwards. I don't blame him. When I see people screaming and walking down the streets talking to themselves, I see people that need love. I see people that need to be taken in, not just for a night, but for a year or longer... so they can stop stressing a…

> Unfortunately, you will likely have to go to religious services and pretend to care about religion enough to get the help you need, because that is who America has designated as their community support system.

Ouch, that's kind of an uncalled for jab at religion.

Why don't atheists band together and form communities to show the religious how it's done...?

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#393

Post by fencepost »

hueving wrote: post #205
runako wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this modulo American healthcare means a lot of people who follow this script still end up with nothing. This is especially the case for entry-level jobs and other careers that are more available to the newly arrived. If you work in a median-income job and are miserly for a long time and save up a year's income, you will have around $60k in the bank. Since you don't have a pension, materially all of this will b…

>But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, Useful health insurance existed before the ACA.

So did things like being rejected for coverage due to "unexplained weight loss" when I was dating and trying to get into better shape and had lost a whopping 5 pounds over a few months (as noted in the application).

From my more cynical older viewpoint, I was never going to get decent coverage on the private market and that was simply a viable reason to present for rejection.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#394

Post by sherlockgopher »

I might not belong to "poor" because my parents had money, but the thing was that they were extra ordinarily stingy when it came to spending it on me. This resulted in me going to school in torn pants etc

So now that I have money, I don't spend a dime of it. I use the same clothes, same cycle, the only thing I spend money on is books: I buy lots of it.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#395

Post by wu-ikkyu »

AaronFriel wrote: post #139
wildmusings wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those living on the streets with severe mental issues probably don’t want to be in a mental institution. And unless they’re a danger to themselves or others (and not just in the sense of making bad life decisions), they can’t be held against their will. This is a free country.

It seems you think that either mental institutions are unfixable, or you have a very poor sense of the harms of say, untreated schizophrenia. This may be a free country, but we shouldn't use that to neglect our duty to our neighbors.

What is a more important duty to our neighbors? To lock up and force drugs on homeless people who have no one to talk to but themselves; or preventing them from becoming homeless in the first place?

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#396

Post by sjg007 »

scarface74 wrote: post #113
sjg007 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A house has to appraise at the sales price or else you can't get a mortgage. You can, technically, "over pay" but that would be from savings which most people don't have. Also most first time buyers don't put 20% down so it's even harder to overpay. As for cars you should buy a new car at a low interest rate and hold it or buy a decent used car. You have to figure out the math here b/c after cash for clunkers used ca…

Things might be stricter now, but back when I dabbled in real estate, the appraisal was a farce. The appraiser, the real estate agents, and the loan appraiser could always magically make the numbers work.

Well it's based on comps which is the last 3 houses to sell within your neighborhood. After 2008 things also got stricter. You can also "check" the appraisal by asking your insurance company for the rebuild value of your house. That may have limited utility though but if you have new development of similar sized houses in your area then the rebuild should be close to that and that will set a max prices anyway. Since why buy the old house when you can buy new. Again it's a limited argument but it's another data point.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#397

Post by ythn »

The question I have is: in the ideal society, should anyone have to live with the consequences of their actions without a government safety net to save them? It seems that the liberal answer is "no" and that "nobody is ever at fault for a bad circumstance, and the government should always provide a free solution to get people out of any trouble they are in"

- Examples: health, abortion, addiction, debt, bad money management, etc.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#398

Post by pjc50 »

Simon_says wrote: post #386
pjc50 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life Often the choice to have kids is at a more stable point and then things go downhill.

Of course everyone is going to focus on that sentence when I also mentioned many other poor choices this hypothetical woman is making. Tragedies will occasionally come out of left field, so I believe you can find real hard luck cases where everything was sunshine and rainbows when the couple decides to have a kid. But based on the people I've known personally the people with messed up lives are a subset of the people…

> Does she have a 6 month emergency fund, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a large enough home, home insurance, a stable marriage, stable employment, flex in the budget?

Are you proposing that only the top 10% most economically secure people should have children? Because if you check those critera you'll find it's a surprisingly small minority of people that meet all of them.

(Something like half of all Americans have no emergency fund at all. Is anyone who lives in an "at-will" state truly in stable employment, either? And so on.)

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#399

Post by linkmotif »

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #321
nicoburns wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live somewhere with a social safety net (I'm from the UK) then there isn't the same social imperative to save: saving becomes a luxury for those who are not the poorest in society (which in reality it is anyway) This works because we end up sharing the disproportionate costs which sometimes fall on those who are unfortunate (they lose their job, they get sick, etc). It's much more efficient than everyone havin…

And it sure is difficult for folks to save when they are working their butts off to pay crazy rent/mortgage and sky high medical/dental so they can stay healthy to work...plus college and grad school loans that got them the low paying job in the first place (although they went to school to have an actual profession which would have covered these expenses but doesn't come close anymore) all in a city where there are s…

No one forced anyone into taking loans or living in places with expensive rent. Just because someone—erm, our whole culture—lied to you and you took the bait, doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. That’s how freedom works. It requires individuals to know, to teach their kids not to take loans from creeps (aka basically all loans), not to believe nonsense mantras like the value of higher education. Just because Barack Obama made some pretty speech about going to college doesn’t mean he’s right. It means he’s getting votes by making people feel good. Just because you feel like you “worked your butt off” doesn’t mean you actually did anything or that anyone owes you anything.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#400

Post by pjonesdotca »

Simon_says wrote: post #386
pjc50 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life Often the choice to have kids is at a more stable point and then things go downhill.

Of course everyone is going to focus on that sentence when I also mentioned many other poor choices this hypothetical woman is making. Tragedies will occasionally come out of left field, so I believe you can find real hard luck cases where everything was sunshine and rainbows when the couple decides to have a kid. But based on the people I've known personally the people with messed up lives are a subset of the people…

6 month emergency fund? Have you seen how many people in the US are living paycheque to paycheque? I know many people who make six figures who would struggle to meet that requirement.

Having grown up as a military brat I know about poor and I know that this kind of self-serving look-down-your-nose "advice" is just rationalization for living well in a society that enables sociopathy

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