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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#91

Post by madcaptenor »

jeffbee wrote: post #10

Similar to car prices, we see the same mental rounding effect in rents. People will rent a home for $2100 or $2200, sometimes even $2150 for those truly dedicated to price finding, but hardly anyone rents an apartment for $2137. Source: my data for the city of Berkeley https://observablehq.com/@jwb/berkeley-rent-board-data#cell-...

You might get some of that if rent is raised by percentage. When I started my current job my salary was an integer multiple of $10,000. I got a raise at the end of my first year that was an integer percentage (3%, IIRC) so my salary was then an integer multiple of $100. The following year I got a raise again (it might have been an integer percentage, I don't recall) and my salary was just some random-looking integer.

Rent-controlled Berkeley apartments are allowed to increase rent by some fixed percentage, so maybe you can see this in your data? But I don't think the math would work out so cleanly.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#92

Post by throwaway59148 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #52

At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients. No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if y…

[dead]

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#93

Post by neilv »

hollerith wrote: post #81
neilv wrote: post #77

I was all excited when I saw on Zillow a decent new apartment complex in town with rents that were actually reasonable... until, after hours of studying photos and floorplans and neighborhood, I noticed a statement on Zillow, near the bottom of the scroll, in one of the tabs in right column, that the building is subsidized, and there's a permissible income range. While some of us could qualify while on early startup…

>I know I wouldn't feel good about having to move from a nice building because the startup was doing OK. Subsidized apartment buildings in the US don't make you move out if your income goes up: they just take away your subsidy, i.e., your rent goes up to what HUD calls the apartment's "contract rent". Then HUD (statistically speaking) directs the money they used to use to subsidize your rent to building more subsidiz…

Interesting; that sounds enlightened of HUD.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#94

Post by tocs3 »

ridgewell wrote: post #24
IncreasePosts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in America, they usually look at the past 2-5 years of income to avoid these types of shenanigans.

In Canada, they use gross income instead of net income for student grants.

So, what happens if you work in an area where the cost are high but the margin is low? You might make $100K but have $85K in costs. You still have $15K in income. Does this apply to those self employed or only wage earners (gets a paycheck)?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#95

Post by duxup »

JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

I changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp.

Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since.

I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), and so I didn't qualify, for much of any of those kinds of offers. Most of the systems in place thought of students as a typical 4 year university student and frankly ... younger. One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview.

Some of these rules I get, they don't want someone abusing their free / discounts for other reasons and they have systems in place for dealing with traditional students.

With people changing jobs and seemingly continued potential for the need for job market retraining and related disruption and etc ... it feels like it's time to make some adjustments as far as what a "student" is and so on.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#96

Post by kwhitefoot »

JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

It's because the people who make such rules are both innumerate and if not lazy then uncaring.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#97

Post by trevithick »

jancsika wrote: post #85

> One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual…

The example of buying options given in the article would take literally minutes for anyone with an existing brokerage account.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#98

Post by jeffbee »

madcaptenor wrote: post #91
jeffbee wrote: post #10

Similar to car prices, we see the same mental rounding effect in rents. People will rent a home for $2100 or $2200, sometimes even $2150 for those truly dedicated to price finding, but hardly anyone rents an apartment for $2137. Source: my data for the city of Berkeley https://observablehq.com/@jwb/berkeley-rent-board-data#cell-...

You might get some of that if rent is raised by percentage. When I started my current job my salary was an integer multiple of $10,000. I got a raise at the end of my first year that was an integer percentage (3%, IIRC) so my salary was then an integer multiple of $100. The following year I got a raise again (it might have been an integer percentage, I don't recall) and my salary was just some random-looking integer.…

Very true, but the graph I posted is initial leases only.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#99

Post by Karellen »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #72

The worst one of these that affected me was money helping people in the 2008 housing crisis. qualifying was based on what percentage of your income your mortgage payment was. So I would have got it if I had made a little less money, or if i had bought a house I knew I couldn’t afford. It felt like being punished for making the right decisions.

So... people who'd been misled into making bad decisions and were being given help because they really needed it, made you feel like you were being punished by not getting similar help you didn't really need because you were making OK money and had avoided making the same kind of mistake?

IMO, that's a really glass-half-empty way of looking at the situation.

You did good! Try to give yourself a break. People like you who didn't fall for the sleazy mortgage brokers helped limit the damage that the rest of society had to deal with. And maybe next time some society-wide con goes down, if you (or someone you love) is unlucky enough to get stung by it (because none of us are smart enough to spot the con-men 100% of the time), hopefully you (or they) will get the help that's available that time around when it is really needed.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#100

Post by danaris »

autoexec wrote: post #50
amanda99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main feature of that image is "childcare" which seems to be a fixed subsidy of $16k (and "CHIP", ~$4k related to child health care). I don't know what the former means and how these are calculated, but if you don't have children, this graph would look a lot less exciting.

The ones I've known with kids all seem to have it far worse. If they were getting a $16k tax credit or whatever it must not have been making up for the other costs involved with raising children.

That graph is also showing an ideal situation—that is, you fully qualify for and fully receive all of the benefits listed.

That means you have to also know that you qualify for them, apply for them, prove that you qualify, oh, nope, whoops, you missed one piece of proof there—that means you have to start all over.

You have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify, jump through all the hoops, you start receiving benefits! Now it's time to apply for the next one, get the slightly different proofs together, send them all in—oh, what's that? someone gave you just enough money that you went over one of the limits? you get nothing this year!

A new year, you have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify....

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