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In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

nytimes.com

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Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#81

Post by codekansas »

luxuryballs wrote: post #32
codekansas wrote: post #30

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention social security. A young person making $2,000 a month is paying $240 a month towards social security (half directly and half through their employer), and will likely never see any of it once they reach retirement age.

oh I bet they’ll get the check exactly as they are owed it will just be worth a fraction of what it would be worth today in terms of what you can buy with it

Social security payments are inflation-adjusted actually. It's more an issue of solvency. The trust fund backing payments is projected to run dry in the mid-2030's [1]. Solving this either means raising taxes on working-age adults or lowering payouts; the UK is a good example of the former, where working-age incomes have recently fallen below pensioner incomes [2], and no politician wants to be the one to bite the bullet on the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38957903

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#82

Post by pixl97 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #48
rcme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry. This is an unfair dismissal. Most industries are not high paying, therefore most workers are not earning enough to save. You're basically saying "they're not saving because they're not earning more!" Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers? > so…

> Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers? Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money. The plight of... every person on earth

>Reduce expenses to live within your means

Which is cool until the point that rents take up 100% of your income and then you're screwed.

Let's imagine a world where almost everyone makes $7 an hour. You would expect pricing in the world to reflect that and housing to fit in that budget.

But now in that world you create a small percentage of people that can print as much money as they want. These people that print as much money also have a terrible problem as they are completely greedy and always want more. You'd expect the first outcome of this situation to be asset inflation. The behavior of the greedy would be to buy up as many 'real' assets with their fake money as quickly as possible. Eventually the behaviors of the people earning $7 simply don't matter. The greedy will extract as much wealth as possible and drive up costs beyond the point of survival until a significant portion of the population is tossing the other half of the population in to guillotines.

It is important to keep income inequality under control if you want a stable society (that's not a police state).

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#84

Post by notch656c »

rcme wrote: post #79
notch656c wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody does at the current wage, then wages will have to rise to meet supply/demand. As it stands individuals see the good feels as part of their wages. Otherwise they would do something higher paying. IF nobody does the job because the good feels does nothing for them then they'll have to start paying as much as the cold capitalist job.

Your argument ignores the fact that people need to work at every point in their adult life unless they're privileged enough to have someone subsidize their existence. There is a large group of people in society who only have low paying work available to them with their current set of skills. Without being able to save, they don't have the means to acquire new skills. So they're quite literally trapped in low paying j…

You don't have the opinion social workers have the skills to obtain higher paid work? How do you have such low opinion of social workers that you find their skills non-transferable and even compare their skill level to that of fast food workers? This is a pretty uncharitable view of the skilled people helping our more vulnerable elements of society.

And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast food wage in the goal of helping others whereas a large number of our skilled and caring social workers knowingly entered social work knowing their college education could be used for higher paying endeavors.

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#85

Post by olliej »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #28
olliej wrote: post #10

A super shitty one: in Berkeley there's a mandatory savings contribution, with no income floor. So what you get is people who are on minimum wage who can barely cover bills because of laughably low minimum wages, who are effectively having those negligible wages garnished - the "savings" aren't meaningful for retirement in any way shape or form, so all that is happening is they're having money taken from them so that…

Yeah, the people of Berkeley just shit on the constitution regularly

"cool"

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#86

Post by notch656c »

jewayne wrote: post #72
notch656c wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody does at the current wage, then wages will have to rise to meet supply/demand. As it stands individuals see the good feels as part of their wages. Otherwise they would do something higher paying. IF nobody does the job because the good feels does nothing for them then they'll have to start paying as much as the cold capitalist job.

Yes, that's how it works. Certainly nobody would just complain loudly that "Nobody wants to work anymore!" and demand more suffering for the people at the bottom of society.

It would be an interesting experiment if we fired all the social workers and gave the money of the salary and all the overhead of those programs directly to the poor, and compare the outcomes.

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#87

Post by rcme »

notch656c wrote: post #84
rcme wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument ignores the fact that people need to work at every point in their adult life unless they're privileged enough to have someone subsidize their existence. There is a large group of people in society who only have low paying work available to them with their current set of skills. Without being able to save, they don't have the means to acquire new skills. So they're quite literally trapped in low paying j…

You don't have the opinion social workers have the skills to obtain higher paid work? How do you have such low opinion of social workers that you find their skills non-transferable and even compare their skill level to that of fast food workers? This is a pretty uncharitable view of the skilled people helping our more vulnerable elements of society. And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast fo…

I'm not comparing social workers to fast food workers. I'm saying there are other low-paid jobs in addition to social work.

And I would be very curious to hear some suggestions for jobs a social worker could get without any additional training that pay better than social work. NYC requires posting salaries in job openings, so with a suggested job alternative, we can easily find if there are many job openings for the new line of work and whether or not the job would pay materially better than social work.

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#88

Post by notacoward »

Surprisingly (tellingly?) absent is the utter lack of support that many people this age get from their parents. And why are the parents unable to give support, or even need support themselves? Because so many of them also failed to save any money, even when doing so would have been easier. This is not a new thing, and at least today's 20-somethings have an excuse. They're not completely wrong when they say that we (I'm 57) left them in a worse position than we inherited ourselves. FWIW, I and my family are doing fine, but I sure do understand why in general they don't think our advice is worth a damn.

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#89

Post by poulsbohemian »

timr wrote: post #18

The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry. The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it . Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author. The third woman actually makes a lot (they won't say how much) and has "achieved financial stability" (thus undermining the thesis…

I think you laid out nicely why I stopped paying attention to both NYT and WaPo. They might be the best newspapers in the country and the "paper of record" but there's way too much of this shaping the story to a desired narrative rather than the facts that happens. It's sad, because there are so many stories out there in the world that need to be told. Each of the examples you gave has way more interesting subject matter - how many young people are supporting family? How did a young person attain financial stability so quickly? How does a young man making well below average manage to save so much? And on and on. But it likely caters to their demographics and/or people buying newspapers (or - whoever paid to submarine this story) to spin that young people today are lazy and not saving. Yawn.

Re: In Their 20s, Struggling to Save and Tired of Being Lectured About It

#90

Post by notch656c »

rcme wrote: post #87
notch656c wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have the opinion social workers have the skills to obtain higher paid work? How do you have such low opinion of social workers that you find their skills non-transferable and even compare their skill level to that of fast food workers? This is a pretty uncharitable view of the skilled people helping our more vulnerable elements of society. And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast fo…

I'm not comparing social workers to fast food workers. I'm saying there are other low-paid jobs in addition to social work. And I would be very curious to hear some suggestions for jobs a social worker could get without any additional training that pay better than social work. NYC requires posting salaries in job openings, so with a suggested job alternative, we can easily find if there are many job openings for the…

If your position is they're literally getting the highest amount possible they could, even more than they could in private cold capitalist industries they're qualified for, then it's kind of crazy to characterize them as being the victims of sub-market pay. They're the market makers in that case at the top of their skill pyramid!

Which leads me to my response:

>What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs?

Well if what rcme says is true, they're being paid the top dollar of anybody with their skills... that kind of answers the question. They're at the biggest buck profession they can get (remember rcme thesis is they don't have the resources to retrain or whatever) therefore the profession will still exist.

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