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Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
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Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#82As someone who didn't learn the very basics of personal finance at the optimal point in life, I feel like it should be part of our standardized education. I'd like to think that would make things at least marginally better. Another thing I'd love to see, would be for banks to fundamentally reorient themselves to be their customer's advocates/financial guardians, instead of being yet another party encouraging people t…
I like it. How would the bank make its money? The standard exploitative practices of other banks, just with smaller fees ($5 overdraft fee instead of $37?, or lower interest rate spreads?) or just charge $50 a year, and do away with those fees? Would that lead to too many people taking advantage of it?
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Why not? Self control isn't some moral, righteousness, trait. Exhibit B. Personal responsibility is increasingly fading from the collective American vocabulary, and articles like these, which normalize nonsensical, narcicisstic decisions, like throwing away a decade pursuing 3 low demand liberal arts degrees, make the media complicit. Self control absolutely is a moral, righteous trait, particularly because those wi…
You don't think that you are lucky to have been born into an upper middle class family, without any serious psychological issues? Someone born with mental problems is automatically an immoral, bad person? > Somehow other cultures tend to place virtue in the development of discipline, a personal responsibility which can mitigate all kinds of external erosions of self control. But what about all of the social safety ne…
>You don't think that you are lucky to have been born into an upper middle class family, without any serious psychological issues?
You know nothing of my psychology or my personal struggles. It is infuriating to hear people tell me how easy I had it simply because now my parents are well off. Kindly take your classist prejudice elsewhere. My parents were lower middle class until about the time I went off to college. For which I took out student loans. Which I am not struggling to pay back because I chose a practical degree and a reasonable city to live in. Like anyone else could have done with due dilligence of researching salaries and demand for various degrees, rather than pursuing whatever they were interested in without consideration of practicality.
>Someone born with mental problems is automatically an immoral, bad person?
Why do you stretch so thinly to paint me as though I am blind with privilege? Mental illness is as irrelevant to this discussion as my personal experiences; unless you want to tell me that >4/10 Americans are mentally ill to the point that they cannot plan and work for stable futures. You seem totally to deny the roles that personal responsibility and self discipline play in societal outcomes.
Look. The point is that when you handwave away every negative outcome with some external cause, and refuse to admit that very often people make bad choices because of poor personality traits, and not mental illness, you do bad to both yourself and society, because you ignore the option of self improvement. And when a large enough proportion of the populace is incompetent because they were taught to blame everything but themselves, your social safety nets will only hasten the erosion of your society as fewer and fewer are capable of carrying the rest. This isn't about being heartless. This is a question of practicality.
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why without tight controls on lending/debt Universal Basic Income will just lead to similarly desperate outcomes subsidized by the state.
UBI was only a small-ish step to a moneyless post-scarcity economy. When rent is taken care of (cause there isn't rent), along with food, water, electricity, communication and more, what is there to 'buy'?
I wager that a limitless supply of "other things to buy" will spring up, just as it already has today.
Clothes, cars, boats, planes, watches, electronics, vacations, fancy meals, you name it...
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#85"They work in big cities and rural towns. They’ve tried to save — but rent, child care, student loans and medical bills get in the way." Yikes. I'm not exactly living paycheck to paycheck, but I can relate to this. It's really funny - my wife and I make quite a bit of money - whatever twisted form of capitalism we currently live in has been designed in such a way to extract most of it away from us. One begins to wond…
The problem is not a "twisted form of capitalism". The problem is us. In the 1950s, a family could live on one blue-collar salary. You could probably live on a single blue-collar salary today, too - but you'd live like people did in the 1950s. You would eat out very rarely. You wouldn't have college debt because you wouldn't have a college degree. You'd only have one car. You'd have only one TV for the whole house. The kids would not have huge numbers of toys, and nobody would have huge amounts of clothes.
The problem is, nobody wants to live like that today. As soon as we have more income, we "need" more - more clothes, more toys, a better car, a nicer house in a better neighborhood. As we get more income, our "needs" change, driving our expenses to almost exactly match out income.
This is especially true when you have kids. If you can afford it, you're tempted to give your kids those ski lessons... that summer camp... that vacation to Disneyland... a car when they turn 16. It feels heartless to say no when you could say yes. But if you say yes to all of it, you'll spend as much as you can afford (and maybe a bit more besides), because there's always something more you could give your kids.
Note well: This is not a criticism of those with low incomes who are struggling to make it. It's a criticism of those of us with fairly high incomes who still struggle to make it.
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#86I'd like to read more about the history of the people in the article. The biggest issue as far as I can tell is that it's easy to 'lose' at any stage. You can make a ton of decisions starting from about age 15-20 that influence your degrees of freedom at age 40 (in the article there's a family of 3 that seemingly have little savings, for example). If you were born to a non wealthy household, the reality is that you s…
I agree with this and that is why we are focusing on funding our child's 529 account to the max without endangering our retirement.
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Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#87Don’t discount the weight of emotional trauma and the self-sabotaging habits it has the potential to engender. Most people are slaves to their limbic systems. Most people don’t have self-education or resources to seek the help they need to fix these underlying problems. Society does them no favors. Media and advertising are designed to promote consumption. And not even healthy consumption. The idea that we are black…
I think the very fact that people in wildly different circumstances are living paycheck to paycheck is a huge flag that this isn't as simple a problem as "they don't get paid enough". Income and expenses are intricately linked by psychology. It's almost irrelevant what your paycheck is, if you're prone to this problem then somehow expenses will always rise to meet it. If expenses weren't actually determined by payche…
That's because all the surplus goes into rents. If your job depends on you living in a big city, then you need to pay a fortune to get a tiny fraction of the quality of life that your parents had and that you had as a child growing up.
A lot of corporate jobs these days force people to live like rats in big cities.
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the very fact that people in wildly different circumstances are living paycheck to paycheck is a huge flag that this isn't as simple a problem as "they don't get paid enough". Income and expenses are intricately linked by psychology. It's almost irrelevant what your paycheck is, if you're prone to this problem then somehow expenses will always rise to meet it. If expenses weren't actually determined by payche…
Huge difference between living paycheck to paycheck because you struggle to afford basic necessities and living paycheck to paycheck because you took out too large of a mortgage. In one case you have an asset to sell if needed.
The majority of people who are living paycheck to paycheck don't have enough assets to cover debts.
Furthermore, paycheck to paycheck living outside of poverty and disability is rarely the result of a one time mistake, it's usually due to an inability to budget and save day-to-day. Which is the reason they end up with more debts than assets.
Not to mention people who can't afford their house can often not afford to take care of their house, which reduces its value.
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why without tight controls on lending/debt Universal Basic Income will just lead to similarly desperate outcomes subsidized by the state.
UBI was only a small-ish step to a moneyless post-scarcity economy. When rent is taken care of (cause there isn't rent), along with food, water, electricity, communication and more, what is there to 'buy'?
There definitely are a huge number of things that will arise to be on the top 50 desired list. However, if everybody has a respectable existence -- rent/mortgage, food, utilities being covered -- then these other things will be truly and for the first time optional and non-crucial. Which I think will be a big win for the mental health of the population.
Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common
#90As someone who didn't learn the very basics of personal finance at the optimal point in life, I feel like it should be part of our standardized education. I'd like to think that would make things at least marginally better. Another thing I'd love to see, would be for banks to fundamentally reorient themselves to be their customer's advocates/financial guardians, instead of being yet another party encouraging people t…
You'll never have banks working in consumers self interest as long as they are profit driven organizations. Public banks tend to work better for actual sensible banking.
Unless you pay upfront for the service rather than having a free bank account.
If your economical model is to take advantage of people going overdraft you can be certain the bank won't try to help clients. If the bank can make more money by having clients with more money that would probably work better, now I'm not sure how that would scale.