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Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

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Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#241

Post by thelasthuman »

moorhosj wrote: post #38
leoedin wrote: post #27

Earlier 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 average person is not a mortgage/real estate expert. They trusted professionals who misled them because of the profit motive. (For an example look into the reasons for the 2008 housing crash)

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#242

Post by thelasthuman »

vram22 wrote: post #133
moorhosj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. Did a lot of people wrongly (as it turned out) think that in the 2008 Great Recession?

A lot of people were manipulated and lied to by professionals with a profit motive.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#243

Post by zanny »

derekp7 wrote: post #10
tjr225 wrote: post #2

"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…

You bring up a good point, that even people who make decent money still can't get ahead much more than those making close to minimum wage. Why is this? My theory, is that life is full of stress, and throwing money at problems can make some causes of stress diminish. Whereas a minimum wage worker will shovel his own driveway, a higher paid office worker may typically have a snow plow contractor on retainer (for them i…

This depends on your definition of "decent money".

If we wanted a legitimate middle class, the textbook definition of one, the per-capita incomes in such a class would need to average around 100k for the whole US. Then you would make enough to invest enough to be making an appreciable amount of your money from investments and thus be "middle" class.

The average income is still a bit more than a third that, so the average is still decidedly a member of the working poor.

Money doesn't stop buying happiness until... coincidentally... you start making about enough money to be middle class. I'm not surprised at all that those below that threshold are buying happiness at the expense of future stability or prosperity.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#244

Post by darpa_escapee »

sputr wrote: post #176

Most comments in this thread are about learning to budget/control finances. I would just like to point out what I call "The IT bubble". We all make money here. Most of us make good money. Our social circles are filled with people making money. Most people do not have this privilege. Below a certain threshold there is no such thing as budgeting/finances. It's just survival. You're not gonna budget because you can't sa…

> At least here the problem isn't financial illiteracy. The problem is that they (a) make way too little to live off and (b) worker protections have eroded past any sane point.

This is the crux of the reality that many face, yet is often ignored by pundits.

Raving about budgeting is missing the point: you can't budget what isn't there in the first place.

When there is something left over to budget, saving $20-$50 a month isn't going help with the problems of "a dollar is worth less every year and wages haven't kept up with inflation or cost of living in decades" and "if someone in my family gets sick or injured, we will likely take on debt that will bankrupt us".

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#245

Post by thelasthuman »

mAEStro-paNDa wrote: post #49
perfmode wrote: post #6

Don’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…

This is an extremely important point. Everyone deals with these kinds of intrapersonal conflicts and issues on a different breadth and scale, one way or another. It's this coupled with economic distress or anxiety, in addition to a massive income and wealth inequality, that produces the kind of conditions and struggle that people and families go through, like those described in this short article. Sure, there are var…

While I appreciate where you are coming from, I disagree. No one should live in poverty, job or not.

But it does show how far we are from getting there when people can't even agree that people with jobs shouldn't be living in poverty.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#246

Post by thelasthuman »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #76
kurthr wrote: post #58

Earlier 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'?

UBI is an attempt to save capitalism from itself. That's why you see 1%ers like Elon musk advocate for it.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#247

Post by greedo »

astura wrote: post #111
eyko wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or your partner has a fatal disease or accident.

Ideally this case would be insured; you'd also be eligible for Social Security survivors benefits.

Survivor benefits cap out at 75% of the worker's benefits. That itself caps out to $2675. So a spouse with kids would get at most $2006/month. Not horrible, but a parent with two kids would just be over the poverty level. And realistically, most people at that age would have small accrued benefits.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#248

Post by WalterSear »

Aeolun wrote: post #229
WalterSear wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parents are supposed to be omniscient? The majority of single parents haven't fallen from some perfect baby making situation. They make a risky, selfish choice, usually after the fact. You shouldn't breed if your situation isn't stable. You shouldn't breed if your partner isn't 100% committed to having children. You shouldn't breed if you are living paycheck to paycheck already. Babies aren't magical. Parents aren'…

Everyone should breed. That’s evolution.

That's an asinine statement.

We aren't bacteria. We don't have to behave like bacteria, irregardless of one's relationship to authoritarianism or social conformity.

And we should not forgive, let alone celebrate, people who do behave like bacteria.

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#249

Post by prolikewh0a »

wutbrodo wrote: post #99
gamma-male wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better: not being paid enough is a sufficient condition, but it is not required. Of course rich people can have such problem, but if you think low wages and the lack of universal health care and free education is not the main issue you are lying to yourself.

I'm not sure lack of healthcare and low wages _is_ the main issue[1]. As the parent comment points out, it seems like that would lead to a pretty different pattern of this phenomenon. It seems to me that there's a couple broad categories that can lead to paycheck-to-paycheck living: 1) Poverty, at the level where spending on a reasonable floor of basics (food, shelter, education, leisure) leaves little for savings. T…

How do you account for the fact that when accounting for inflation, a lot of the country hadn't seen a wage increase since the 70's[1]? The cost of essential goods has gone up. A lot of people are seriously on the edge and aren't spending on useless consumption.

I think what you have are people trying to survive, and another subset of people who are surviving perfectly fine and are comfortable but have become rampant consumers due to advertising. I know engineers in the latter circumstance.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

Re: Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common

#250

Post by Aeolun »

zozbot123 wrote: post #156
mAEStro-paNDa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely important point. Everyone deals with these kinds of intrapersonal conflicts and issues on a different breadth and scale, one way or another. It's this coupled with economic distress or anxiety, in addition to a massive income and wealth inequality, that produces the kind of conditions and struggle that people and families go through, like those described in this short article. Sure, there are var…

> For the former, anyone who uses such an argument has in some form or fashion accepted the belief that some jobs should not pay a livable wage... What's a "livable wage"? The whole point of assessing whether people are "living beyond their means" is precisely to figure out if they're keeping their expenses within that 'livable wage' threshold. I think you'll find that most people with money-related issues ("poverty"…

Vanishingly rare... 12.3%?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

If 12% of your people are living in poverty as defined by your government then there may be something systematically wrong.

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