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Being frugal is for the rich

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Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#231

Post by estebank »

overeater wrote: post #133
tjpaudio wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

City-based salary adjustments are really something only educated professionals get, low-wage earners are screwed in big cities. I think also it will shock you how much every day items are compared to Europe. For one, public transportation is not available to most of America. So you have to have a car and car insurance, thats hundreds of dollars more per month right there. Cellphone service costs 3x as much as anywher…

Cell phone service in the US can be cheaper than Europe. I have had Project Fi for over a year now, and it's $24/month including taxes. This includes voice, text, international texting, data, and international data. You pay per MB so I don't watch videos on my phone, but use it for everything else.

That doesn't sound right to me. Both UK and Netherlands' most expensive plans are cheaper than most plans in the US I've seen. Looking at Three, now it costs £15 for 12GB (reduced speed afterwards), but 4 years back I had an £8 unlimited (or maybe I just never hit the limit) plan.

Now I spend ~$80 with Google Fi, but I could rely exclusively on wifi and reduce that to ~$20/30. Every other american company seems to want to extract >$80 per month from you.

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#232

Post by technofiend »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #54

The word missing from this discussion is "structural" - there are deep structural changes to how the job market and economy now works that limit the economic prospects of millennials (as a group) in ways that can't readily be overcome with thriftiness and hard work. Here's an excerpt of the article that really clarified this for me: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in…

What's amazing to me is the IRS severely cracked down on contractors to the point where it was nearly impossible to get a contract in IT. Now we see employers abusing the contract system again but where's the IRS this time?

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#233

Post by antisthenes »

nck4222 wrote: post #189
state_less wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote for candidates who will make healthcare a right and college affordable. While young people are bleeding out financially, rich people are getting a tax cut and they're running up the debt on the younger generation.

This is nitpicking a bit, but college is affordable, it's just very expensive. A side effect of the government guaranteeing student loans is that universities could charge basically whatever they want, knowing that students would still be able to pay it. It funded massive expansions, but instead of universities taking on the debt, students did.

Everything is affordable if you live forever.

Unfortunately, most of us only ever work 40 years (if we're lucky), so the budget of a life is, in 99.9% cases, zero sum.

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#235

Post by bzbarsky »

dvtv75 wrote: post #223
mod wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter-anecdote, my grandmother is still alive: she was born in 1918. She just voted for Trump, to give you an idea of where she stands politically. She coped with it by scrimping and saving every penny. She literally washes saran wrap to reuse it, despite having enough pension these days to get by. She saves grocery-store bags. She eats every crumb on her plate. She never wastes leftovers, ever. She went to co…

> He traded to get a 5-cent raise. A five cent raise in today's currency or back then? Per hour or week? Assuming it's hourly, if it's from "then" could you convert it to modern currency, or present it as an percentage increase so we can understand what kind of relative increase that was? Five cents sounds like nothing today, but 70 years ago it would have been significant.

According to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $0.05 in 1930 works out to $0.73 today.

Figuring out a percentage increase is a bit complicated without knowing how much mod's grandfather earned. According to https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/1... in the 1940 census average (yes, not median) annual income was $1368, which works out to $24,505 in 2018 dollars, or $12.25/hour assuming 40 hour weeks and 2 weeks of vacation.

So at a guess, $0.05/hour was less than a 10% raise, but more than 1%. I expect it was /hour, not /week, because weekly wages would have been in the ballpark of tens of dollars.

Disclaimer: I am not mod, and this is not my grandfather we're talking about.

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#236

Post by jpindar »

logfromblammo wrote: post #123
artimaeis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're discounting the utility of an extremely wealthy person's capital as a vehicle for greater change. That is, Warren Buffet probably can't move the needle much through consumption of goods. Even if he replaced his $3 breakfast with a $300 breakfast it's just not going to have a huge net effect. Instead if he manages his finances carefully and leaves himself capital for investments then he's able to influe…

Musk is being far more productive with his accumulated wealth than Buffett (my opinion). Once he can buy his breakfast sandwich for $3 at a restaurant on Mars, I will revise my opinions on how he chooses to spend his money. Until then, I will continue to believe that thrift and frugality are the domains of the poor, and when the rich dabble in it, they are essentially forcing the truly frugal to become more so.

What do you think Buffet does with his money? Do you think he has a warehouse filled with hundred dollar bills?

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#237

Post by T2_t2 »

iguy wrote: post #115
T2_t2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they also had less. This is the ... I'm not sure of the right word, paradox? duality? ... anyway, the problem/benefit of globalisation, that it leads to cheaper stuff. We all have more today, even on less money. Thought experiment: ask yourself when it was better to be poor: 1950, or 2018. In 1950 you could... go to the library? In 2018, even the very poor likely have a mobile phone, the internet, a games cons…

"Ironically, I think that is pretty much how all cities work since crime went away. The days of the poor occupying prime real estate near a city is pretty much over." This seems backwards. The poor never occupied prime (at the time) real estate, but cities did used to be more compact. The rise of crime (from the 60s) was one of the factors driving suburbanisation, as those who could afford to do so moved to more dist…

> The poor never occupied prime (at the time) real estate

Couldn't agree more! That's the irony. For many cities, crime kept the richer people further away from the inner city, where many jobs are/were. In places like London, Sydney, NYC and SF, it is really hard to find workers for hotels because the people that do such jobs live so far away.

This is the great irony of improving city conditions like reduced crime. In a really scary way, crime was poor people's saviour from long, perhaps even un-profitable treks to work.

Take London. https://www.toptiplondon.com/transport/tickets/underground-t... if you trek in from a zone that is cheaper and further out, the costs as a fraction of income are huge.

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#238

Post by peacetreefrog »

FussyZeus wrote: post #142

I get so tired of these narratives that paint anyone who isn't wealthy as just lazy, and I especially get tired of millennials like myself being derided as just not willing to give up enough in order to succeed. You know what, it's true. If you took a robot and gave it a ground floor job, that robot could work that job 7 days a week, 9 hour shifts, without missing a beat. It would never get sick, it would never need…

The thing is, most humans are not doing those types of jobs for YEARS like robots. Humans can learn on the job and acquire skills and impress their boss and get raises and maybe become the boss and apply to other jobs or find something like better. That's why it's called "ground floor", because you can move up, and most people eventually do.

The % of people making minimum wage at any given time is a snapshot, and it covers people at all stages of their lives. Are there some people working their ass off and not making it a la an Upton Sinclaire book? Sure. But that's not most people. In fact, most people (1) making minimum wage are between the ages of 16-24 and aren't going to be making that forever. And even among those who aren't, most are well above the poverty line.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/who-earns-the...

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#239

Post by T2_t2 »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #150
T2_t2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they also had less. This is the ... I'm not sure of the right word, paradox? duality? ... anyway, the problem/benefit of globalisation, that it leads to cheaper stuff. We all have more today, even on less money. Thought experiment: ask yourself when it was better to be poor: 1950, or 2018. In 1950 you could... go to the library? In 2018, even the very poor likely have a mobile phone, the internet, a games cons…

More entertainment, maybe, but "more" overall? Would you rather live in a world with no smartphones where you afford a house/apartment, or one with smartphones where you can't?

> Would you rather live in a world with no smartphones where you afford a house/apartment

How rich are your poor? That may seem a silly question, but are poor people really buying houses? Did they ever? You seem to be talking about middle class people - perhaps lower middle class at worst.

The question is where is that threshold? At what decile is the world worse? The bottom 10%? The third bottom? Where?

This is not as clear cut as house no technology/no house technology. This is an issue that affects different percentiles of the income curve differently. There are no doubt some parts of the income curve in some specific locations worse off, but I'm not sure people have a full grasp of how much better life is in general in the 1st world today versus 1960, let alone 1920 or worse, during the Great Depression.

Re: Being frugal is for the rich

#240

Post by T2_t2 »

KingMob wrote: post #102
T2_t2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they also had less. This is the ... I'm not sure of the right word, paradox? duality? ... anyway, the problem/benefit of globalisation, that it leads to cheaper stuff. We all have more today, even on less money. Thought experiment: ask yourself when it was better to be poor: 1950, or 2018. In 1950 you could... go to the library? In 2018, even the very poor likely have a mobile phone, the internet, a games cons…

The plummeting costs of technology over time make it a poor barometer for measuring wealth. Instead of mobile phones and TVs, look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education, all of which have gotten more expensive (in the case of education, astoundingly so) even as inflation-adjusted wages have decreased.

> look at bigger items like health care, housing, and education

Indeed. Question is, what will a dollar buy you? We have more treatments for illness, we have more educational options, more and more.

There is no silver bullet to be sure, and there is no universal upside option, but surely now is a better time to be almost any income percentile, in almost any place on the planet.

Where geographically it has gotten worse, e.g. Flint Michigan, I am not sure how we make a world where Roger & Me is released in 1989, and 30 years later, the population is 2/3s what it was then. Part of life is change, and making the world better requires that people adapt with the changes.

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