European pro life tip: if you make 200.000/yr don't let anyone lend you money. Buy your car cash, no cc debt. Mortgage would be the only exception. I honestly find it crazy how most american are ok with living on someone else money and pay the interests just to have a current year car...
On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
381–390 of 920 posts
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the US healthcare system basically means you have to be a multimillionaire when you've retired if you want to have any semblance of a comfortable retirement, because any serious injury or health issue (which will happen at some point) will do a damn good job of sucking up most or all of that money away super fast. If you're younger at least you might get lucky with GoFundMe "insurance", but that requires your st…
> Yep, the US healthcare system basically means you have to be a multimillionaire when you've retired That's just not true. Everyone qualifies for Medicare when they are 65 years old. An extra $150/month gets you supplemental insurance, with a lower deductable than many work plans. Also, and this is significant, medical bills can't collect against retirement accounts. The law is that they can't touch it. Same with yo…
So how come I keep hearing that a significant portion of homeless in the US have lost their houses in a medical-event-realted bankruptcy?
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it and you can too. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's…
As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same? I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people e…
I don't think the point is to belittle their accomplishments, but rather a realistic take on poverty. A lot of people try really hard, and still cannot get out of poverty.
This is something we as a society need to deal with, and not disregard a systematic problem with anecdotal success stories and saying "You can too!"
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE Except that it is very rare for a car to be scrapped because of its engine. IC engines are mature tech. They last forever, longer than the body of the car. Extending the life of the engine further won't extend the life of the vehicle. And for such calculations one must include the battery packs. I think it safe to say that while electric motor…
This might narrowly be true if your definition of engine excludes other ICE-only components like the transmission or radiator (which is technically correct in specialist discussion but not general usage). The most common non-crash explanation I’ve heard people cite for turning cars into write-offs with is a blown head gasket, so I’m not sure about your thesis in general, and it’s certainly not something an electric c…
>> a blown head gasket
That's a one/two-hour job, a thousand dollars at most. I don't think they are selling the car because the engine is bad rather that the car is now worth more in parts than as a complete object. The engine isn't dead, just in need of repair. This happens to electric drivetrains too. Windings break. Bolts shear. Bearings fail. And many/most electric cars (tesla) still have transmission-type things between their motors and wheels.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course luck plays a factor in everything everybody does. The question isn't whether luck plays a role; it's how much salience it deserves. This person made hundreds of good choices across decades to achieve the success they have, so it seems a bit perverse to focus instead on the hundreds of things outside their control.
Luck was not mentioned to diminish what the person has accomplished. It was intended to point out that their story may be difficult to replicate.
I think this is backwards and the opening lines of Anna Karenina get it right. It's "bad luck" that you should look out for, but every (moderate [0]) success story sounds more or less the same. (Said yet another way, success isn't the result of good luck, but it does require the avoidance of bad luck.)
[0] We're talking about routine success here, not Elon Musk. We're talking about avoiding poverty, not going to Mars.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m not quite sure why it works this way. It works this way because people are, rationally, more interested in their own physical safety than they are in the feelings of strangers. Anecdote: I was in San Francisco a few years back. There were homeless folks everywhere. Some were nice, even chatty. We felt at ease even when walking through areas that were full of homeless folks. But a couple of days into our trip, a…
"Rationally"? You mentioned you had all sorts of nice experiences with homeless people and then one bad actor caused you to choose out of all of the attributes of this person, their lack of a home, to be the one for you to blanket-label all people like this as dangerous enough to place them outside of your treat-like-a-human-being sphere. Nah, there is not a rational way to blanket label groups like this from a sampl…
Yeah, it's the trauma. That's the point. The potential cost of a single violent interaction is extremely high. There is relatively no reward for being pleasant to the 99% who just happen to look an awful lot like the one who tried to stab you.
It is the same rationale behind profiling. Which is to say, it is rational, just ineffective and with a number of bad side effects.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#387Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…
Joining the throwaway train here...
> My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.
Do it. This is on the PTSD spectrum and in my own case the habits of poverty have substantially impacted how I've experienced my own life.
10 years of working 2-3 jobs was enough to crawl out of deferred expenses land and pay for a few community college classes. I lucked my way into an unexpected pile of cash and a decent paying job. I bought a house and a car, and savings started piling up. I continued to be hounded by anxiety that I didn't notice, because it was the same pot of anxiety I'd been boiled in to that point.
Everything was fine and rosy for a while. Eventually the anxiety burned out enough fuses to start directing choices. What seemed like interests became obsessions. Unpowered hand tools can't run out of gas, work when the electricity's off, and are easy to fix if they break. Gardening replaced more of the shopping list. Wild edibles supplemented gardening. Bicycle commuting saves money and makes scavenging more accessible. Years of anxiety slowly bloomed into delusions, one thing led to another, and quite suddenly I was living out of a bicycle and two panniers. The persisting anxiety of poverty pulled the plug on my success.
Homelessness, poverty, and mental illness are all outcomes of one another. Removing someone from the circumstances of poverty or homelessness is only the first step.
I got lucky again, managing to stumble over housing and a surfeit of income before homelessness made its recognizable mark. Profoundly lucky that by chance I came to know folks who've done social work with others recovering from homelessness, who told me to get some counseling so I could learn to experience the life I had, feel like I own the things I own, and stop alternating between resentfulness and fear of my own success.
Anyway, I'm gonna be that person now and offer the perspective that poverty in the USA is only transactionally similar across lines of discrimination. People of color (and other marginalized persons) do experience a source of trauma and hardship that doesn't go away like poverty does, but does additionally compound the frequency and quality of poverty they experience.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#388I think the biggest threat to poor people, would be the ridiculous housing market. It's not just in big expensive cities, it's pretty much everywhere. Only places that are being spared, are those in destitute areas with some serious emigration problems - but those things happen for a reason (no work). In my country (Norway), the housing market has appreciated around 5.5% ANNUALLY, compared to annual wage increase of…
You can't have an eternally appreciating housing market and affordable housing [0], one has to give. Our current housing market appreciation comes from systematic housing shortage.
Rognlie finds out that the increase in return to capital (vs return to labor) observed by Piketty comes largely from the residential real estate sector [1].
It turns out, Henry George was right. We need to tax the value of land such that we capture all of the economic rent that rightfully belongs to the community and distribute it to the community as a dividend. The same tax will spur a more efficient use of land and, thus, more housing supply. The dividend will serve as a cash-based safety net for the community members.
Additionally, at some point we have to make the switch that Japan did in how we view housing: as a depreciating asset.
[0] Note that the only sustainable way to have affordable housing is if market-rate housing is affordable. Publicly owned/built/subsidized housing is useful for handling exceptions, but not for your main point of supply.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fellow former-poor here. It's the kind of thing that casts a shadow over your whole life. And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires. I hear things get said by people that are so far from the orbit of my reality and I cringe. Reading the article was really eye opening for me because I hadn't thought of all of the life s…
> And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires. This is surprising to me. I’m also a former poor. A lot of people I work with in tech come from generally “normal” backgrounds. Middle to lower class (in excluding h1b and green card holders). It just turned out for them that their passion and hobby (computers) ended up bein…
Ha ha, you and me too. Grew up in a single-parent home where mom was a "secretary" (remember that?).
I've been a blue-collar programmer (not Software Engineer) my entire career.
I think they're finally on to me though and I may have to skip out soon. Code reviews, unit tests and Scrum are not my thing anyway. ;-)
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#390The part about cars is pretty spot on, I'm upper middle class and I've been able to save so much money by getting rid of my car. On the low end you're going to hit 300 to 500 dollars a month for the privilege of driving. The problem here is America simply isn't built for public transit. But since cars are a status symbol, people still go down to Toyota, or Honda and as long as they can make that first down payment th…
> On the low end you're going to hit 300 to 500 dollars a month for the privilege of driving. How is maintaining a car costing you so much?
Add the numbers up and it's pretty hard to get TCO on a car driven 15,000 miles/year in the US much below about $3500/year, even if you do as much work as possible yourself, buy junkyard parts, etc. If you're capable of getting that number down very much, you're probably capable of making enough money that you don't have to.
TCO on a decent and highly reliable new compact, for comparison, is about $5000-$6000/year. (Check Edmunds) At $400-$500/month in TCO you should have no car worries. But if you don't have that extra $100+/month, or can't get into a new or certified used car for whatever reason, that does you no good.
Having been raised to be frugal, and having been broke, I totally sympathize with the car trouble thing. That said, a lot of people make irrational decisions about cars, and that can include trying to be frugal.