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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#421

Post by adkadskhj »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #408
technofiend wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go read The Millionaire Next Door. You'll see that there are plenty of people like yourself who remain frugal after managing to pull themselves out of poverty. I'm suggesting the book to both validate your behavior but also give you some examples so you can perhaps moderate it if you still feel that's needed. I can give a single example from my life: my uncle managed to snag a liquor distributorship after WW II. It w…

I really didn't like that book, for me it missed the point entirely. For the entire length it discusses how you accumulate more wealth by not spending it, but it never discussed why you would be accumulating all that wealth. People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords. This book just assumes the end goal is the number on a bank account.

The number is a goal, for me. Since the moment the goal is hit, is the moment i can live safely. If you save $X, you can retire. You have the rest of your life planned for, and that feeling is worth a lot.

I don't plan on retiring, but i'd feel so, so good if i hit $X tomorrow.

The economy could still go down, but as long as society doesn't collapse retirement-amounts can bring massive QOL, even if you don't live like you're rich.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#422

Post by blackshaw »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #391
blackshaw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a bunch of things in this article strike me as very American (I'm British). No-one in the UK worries about not being able to afford healthcare if they're poor, nor do they need a car to get to the grocery store in under an hour (unless they live in an isolated home out in the countryside, which probably means they're rich, not poor.) There are many, many places you can live in the UK without needing a car to ge…

The US is a large and very diverse place, and very frequently you will find that there are very clear laws about what a landlord is and isn't allowed to charge for, as well as what proof they need to take a deposit. For example, Seattle has its own set of rules which are quite clear and don't allow contracts that would override them, in other places there are no rules, and what is in the contract is what you must abi…

> I have never heard a Canadian ask for US style healthcare.

I've never heard anyone of any nationality say they wish their country had US-style healthcare.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#423

Post by foolinaround »

I was reading a post from etsy folks on 'blameless portmortem' and thats something places I worked in never did, but it would helped so much!

Reading this post, I could'nt help but think what if a person who was on hard times (quite often there is some role to be played by him, but also actors around him ) - if social orgs could come around, analyze the situation, encourage him to make better choices, or work around some obstacles, etc, it would make such a difference...

A new re-think of what our social services would be -- a mix of help, with a dose of fresh opportunities as well.

Currently, the alternatives seem to be between black and white..

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#424

Post by chrisseaton »

buescher wrote: post #405
offtop5 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas and insurance alone can easily hit 300 of you drive enough. Say you keep it at 200, 100$ a month to fix minor things isn't unreasonable. But that assumes you bought a car cash, from my experience people tend to finance cars just because they can't get three or four thousand dollars together at one time. Then you're paying $400 a month

Middle class perspective: if you can buy a car for cash, but you can get a good interest rate on a loan, you may be better off taking the loan. The opportunity cost of having cash sunk into the car can be greater than your financing costs.

A basic, simple loan like this also is often good for your credit record.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#425

Post by finnthehuman »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #211

I've spanned the economic ladder from making $25k, to having enough money that I could retire before age 35. It wasn't that bad making $25k. I actually moved into my friend's large closet for 3 months. Life was more like the show Friends back then. I definitely made more stories and friends in that time period too. Now on the other side of the spectrum, life is more stressful and kinda boring. Maybe that is part of t…

I've heard that sentiment quite a bit that life is more interesting when you're just getting by and I agree with it to some extent. There's also an element of aging out of it. I'm saving so aggressively that my budget is tighter than when I was just starting out and renting a room at a stereotypical recent-grad party house, but my life is a lot more quiet and boring these days.

I've had a few friends go van life. Some went in head first, but you can always buy the van and just use it for weekends/holidays to see how deep you want to go.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#426

Post by danaris »

dalbasal wrote: post #303

His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues. It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition. If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... l…

> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing. > Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.

And this is a big part of the problem with popular discourse about poverty today: for a large percentage of people, that picture of poverty that you describe in Ireland is the picture of what poverty looks like, and anyone whose life doesn't look like that obviously isn't really poor.

This is especially true of the "not having stuff" part. The popular image of poverty is of a one-to-three-room house with nothing but a sad lumpy mattress on the floor, the children dressed in ragged, dirty clothes playing with a stick and some rocks. These days, "poverty" all too often looks more like someone living out of a car, with a smartphone that's four to six years old and one set of nice clothes (because you have to have a set to go to job interviews) along with one or two sets of ratty ones. Or maybe a too-small apartment (that you can barely pay the rent on) with a ten-year-old 40" flatscreen TV and an HP desktop that's still limping along for accessing the internet.

Too many people today see the TV, the computer, the smartphone, and the nice clothes, and just assume that these people aren't really poor. Because their idea of what poverty looks like is stuck in the 19th (and, to be fair, first half-to-two-thirds of the 20th) century.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#427

Post by doliveira »

leetcrew wrote: post #265
doliveira wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you can't even browse the web properly with these, though. Not with all those fat Javascript-heavy pages and the whole "RAM is cheap" prevailing development mentality nowadays.

the 80/20 rule still applies. $50 is probably too low of a price point, but the example works if you compare a $250-400 android phone to a $1000 apple/samsung flagship. I could buy those phones if I wanted to, but I'm getting by just fine with my pixel 4a. hell, my pixel 2 was still perfectly serviceable but for the lack of security updates.

$50 to $400 is basically one order of magnitude, though. So the argument changes a lot.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#428

Post by bsanr2 »

swiley wrote: post #342
cwp wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway. Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US…

This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

The liberal approach is to subsidize to maintain that base level, because of an awareness that the social outcomes tend to pay dividends in higher social unity, better health, etc.

Some people would rather pay for private security than for policy that makes muggings less likely, I suppose.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#429

Post by KittenInABox »

old_fart_dev wrote: post #380
II2II wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re-read the objected to line: "I made it and you can too." Note that I emphasized "can" in that quote. "Can", not "will". This isn't a guarantee by throwaway-0987, it's words of encouragement to try. On a forum that celebrates startup moonshots, I find it odd that anyone would piss on the idea that trying is worth while.

I genuinely don't know if even "can" is applicable to allpoor people in this context. A person who has a similar background but ended up with a chronic illness preventing them from working... that dream of working for 200k/yr is impossible.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#430

Post by nikon »

blackshaw wrote: post #15
ImaCake wrote: post #7

>while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back This looks insane to an Australian. I have moved house 4 times in the past 5 years and I have never not got all of my bond back. Some states here have a rule that the bond money is held by the state so that the landowner doesn't just take that money for themselves. How can the poor ever break the cy…

Yeah, a bunch of things in this article strike me as very American (I'm British). No-one in the UK worries about not being able to afford healthcare if they're poor, nor do they need a car to get to the grocery store in under an hour (unless they live in an isolated home out in the countryside, which probably means they're rich, not poor.) There are many, many places you can live in the UK without needing a car to ge…

>>The deposit thing looks insane to me too. My rental deposit is held in escrow by some third party; I've never heard of anyone not getting their deposit back when they move (unless they did something to deserve it e.g. trashing the place). The only issue around deposits is that you usually have to pay a deposit for the new place before you've received the deposit back for the old place, which can cause cashflow issues.

Anecdotal but myself (multiple moves) and most friends in London had to battle for a few hundred quid being attempted to stolen from the deposit before returning for various BS reasons. The dispute scheme was great as a tenant, but did mean months without the funds back.

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