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What are you doing here? This post is about American spending. Every single post of yours is about China. We get it, you don't like China. Stop polluting threads with offtopic garbage.
Also, it's a free country (that this site is hosted on)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you doing here? This post is about American spending. Every single post of yours is about China. We get it, you don't like China. Stop polluting threads with offtopic garbage.
In Chinese threads, there are always people bringing up America. Why can't it be the same here? Also, it's a free country (that this site is hosted on)
Nice quip though.
I feel like there are some really good core principles that could be extracted from this. There's a really strong tendency to overstate the importance of repeated expenses and understate the absolutely critical nature of strategic expenses. The financial world is littered with bad advice in this area. Maybe it is time for something like a new motley fool to encourage appropriate foolishness.
Maybe it is time for schools to teach exceptionally basic and incredibly useful life skills.
> Our greatest ongoing financial priority is our home, with the average cost of a single-family house totaling $428,700,” the study states. “Americans tend to change residences every 15 years, pushing the average amount borrowed on housing to a staggering $1.5 million in a lifetime.” Why are they counting homes like that? If I sell and buy my investments in my 401k, they don't count it twice.
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I don't think it's very common to work until you are 80 years old though. Also, is the 55K$ figure after taxes?
Sure, but after people stop working it's common for them to replace their working income with Social Security, other pensions, and withdrawals from retirement accounts in which their savings compounded over time. And the median household income is actually $75k now. I'm just saying that $55k is very much in the ballpark for the median person. Does it really matter if that's before or after taxes?
Agreed, but there was no room for savings in your model as you used the whole income as spending (median income * 60 years). Taxes makes a big difference too since it doesn't count as spending. E.g. someone that earns 55K$, pays 25K$ in taxes and saves 10K$, only spends 20K$ per year, amounting to 1.2M$ (20K$ * 60 years).
Also note that, as a back of the envelope calculation, $15/hour x 40hour/week x 52week/year x 40years = $1.248M.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's very common to work until you are 80 years old though. Also, is the 55K$ figure after taxes?
Sure, but after people stop working it's common for them to replace their working income with Social Security, other pensions, and withdrawals from retirement accounts in which their savings compounded over time. And the median household income is actually $75k now. I'm just saying that $55k is very much in the ballpark for the median person. Does it really matter if that's before or after taxes?
Not sure that the 1% (or 0.1%) isn't skewing the average. Would love to see what the median American spends over their lifetime. What I'm saying is that the 400 billionaires in the Fortune 400 are likely pulling the average up.
It’s the opposite actually. Very Rich people consume far less than average in proportion to their wealth and income. When you look at what people actually consume, the US at least looks very egalitarian.
But the problem with the original article (which was pointed out elsewhere that the number could be arrived at by multiplying the median salary of $55K by 60 years, is that without the methodology by which they reached the number, and statistics that better describe the "shape" of the data set, its kind of hard to take anything away from the statement of "$3.3M on average" that is at all meaningful.
Not sure that the 1% (or 0.1%) isn't skewing the average. Would love to see what the median American spends over their lifetime. What I'm saying is that the 400 billionaires in the Fortune 400 are likely pulling the average up.
It’s the opposite actually. Very Rich people consume far less than average in proportion to their wealth and income. When you look at what people actually consume, the US at least looks very egalitarian.
> Our greatest ongoing financial priority is our home, with the average cost of a single-family house totaling $428,700,” the study states. “Americans tend to change residences every 15 years, pushing the average amount borrowed on housing to a staggering $1.5 million in a lifetime.” Why are they counting homes like that? If I sell and buy my investments in my 401k, they don't count it twice.
Because they're counting spending, not consumption. This is incidentally why house prices are not directly included in the CPI basket of goods: neither the purchase price of a house, nor the monthly payments are what people consume (= used up) in housing per year.