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But personal responsibility is actually an important concept. It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult.

But personal responsibility is actually an important concept. It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility. Any strategy that is employed to remedy this has to contend with the fact that the individuals who need to have this situation remedied for themselves are the same ones who have gotten themselves into this situation. I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making. Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid. It's not as though the country has a non-existent social safety net. You simply can't propose that the solution can exist independently of the personal decisions made by the individuals in this position.

mattnewton 8y ago
Bahaha, yes, if you make perfect decisions you will have over $400. The whole point is people don’t make perfect decisions. Should they become homeless when they get hurt as a result? Does that threat help them make better decisions? Does it help society to let a small problem escalate into a larger one like that? I’d answer a resounding no on all fronts.
- rectang 8y ago
  It gives the wealthy a pleasing sense of moral superiority to see the poor fail. Humans compete not only for resources but for status. This alone is sufficient motivation to drive policies which ensure not just inequality, but humiliation of the losers.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> I will say this again. Repetition doesn't actually make your claim any better supported, so maybe instead of repeating it, provide better support or, failing that, just stop instead of reiterating.
somerando 8y ago
And here I was feeling bad because I have less than $100k on hand.
xena 8y ago
What about people whose life situations constantly rip money out of them and their pay is just fundamentally insufficient to cover their expenses?
- yermom 8y ago
  nah, they should just work harder
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    Forgot your sarc tags
- trophycase 8y ago
  You're right. Some poor people have bad spending habits, and some have unfortunate life situations, and some have both.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    In fact, poor spending habits could be caused by a poor life situation.
zeth___ 8y ago
Try being black in a ghetto. What you mean is that a college educated young white male in his 20s/30s will have $400 in spare change around the house. Because we can't be bothered to keep track of $50 notes we keep around for pizza.
- ralusek 8y ago
  What exactly about being black and in a ghetto prevents you from gathering $400? I have worked multiple minimum wage jobs before without even being on any social welfare. If you are on social welfare, receiving food stamps, affordable housing, etc, you absolutely have the capability to provide yourself with an emergency buffer, even on minimum wage.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    Racism mostly.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      Not sure why you're getting down voted. An otherwise identical resume with the first name changed from Tyrone to Brad receives 3x callbacks for interviews. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf
      - zeth___ 8y ago
        Techbros. People who have had a golden spoon in their mouth since birth and can't imagine a life where they didn't have their hands held to success the whole time. They think that because they are not billionaires they aren't privileged and anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just like their great-great-grand pappy who came from Ireland and was treated pretty badly by the English in 1864.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    It is very difficult to work multiple part time, minimum wage jobs these days because of the scheduling unreliability and availability requirements of the jobs. If you aren't available for ad-hoc hours, then your hours get dropped...
keithnz 8y ago
this is probablly a good pivot point for you to look at sociology. Because personal responsibility just doesn't magically happen. If you are not looking at what leads people into what you think is poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility, you become part of the problem. The reality is, the social structures play a big part in this, and more problematically, you can't change it quickly.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. There's a lot of "let them eat cake instead" mentality in that statement.
headmelted 8y ago
Spoken as someone well north of the poverty line. The reason for some people not having the money around is undoubtedly poor decision making, but for a great many others they simply have no gainful employment, no prospects of obtaining gainful employment and are often trapped in debt spirals due to past financial desperation. I'm real happy for you that you're so far removed from their situation that none of this occured to you.
- ralusek 8y ago
  Being trapped in a debt spiral due to past financial desperation is just a way of iterating forward in the loop of bad decision making. What I am saying is that to enter financial desperation in the United States is not actually possible if you utilize the available social safety net and make proper decisions.
  - Retric 8y ago
    The number of allowed bad decisions drops dramatically as you slide down the wealth scale. Saying you need to be correct 99.999% of the time is simply not a viable strategy. Especially when people are actively trying to get you to make bad decisions like enrolling in a for profit collage. The vast US homeless population suggests we don't really have a safety net, so much as a safety rope you need to hold on tight and pray. Consider, if all the homeless people showed up in the same place that would instantly be in the top 10 US cities.
    - selimthegrim 8y ago
      And once you've enrolled in that for-profit college, surprise! You can choose to keep your student status to keep your loans in deferment but now you're not eligible for food stamps while an enrolled student unless you work a minimum of 20 hours a week/earn ~$680 a month.
  - harikb 8y ago
    If you have Netflix, watch the documentary "Dirty Money". Then come back and tell us you wouldn't have been in the same situation had some event in your past not gone your favor.
wwweston 8y ago
> That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility. Poor decision making or lack of personal responsibility are certainly sufficient to achieve such a situation... but they're not necessary. Unless you play with the definition of "poor decision making" to include things like "capable of making mistakes." This could be a good time for everyone to review the concept of the Fundamental Attribution Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
dv_dt 8y ago
The overhead margin of basic life costs are much higher when one is poor then one is wealthy. It's an even higher overhead when trying to access our ever shrinking safety net with its perverse incentives and a high time and hassle factor. Blaming the victim for being poor is both ridiculous and counterproductive. You should wonder instead why basic personal finance skills aren't on any National education curriculum if its such a basic needed skill. (and I agree it is!)
- pwg 8y ago
  Are you referring to the Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    That as well as the Welfare Trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
dionidium 8y ago
OK, but, like, what if some people are just actually bad at making decisions? Unless you have a plan for that you’re just moralizing toward no practical end.
- rectang 8y ago
  Moralizing is its own reward. It feels good to look down on people.
whatAmount 8y ago
What makes $400 such a special number? Why not $100, Why not $500, Why not $1,000? What makes $400 the ideal number? Probably nothing, except the fact that it makes for the best headline, since "2 out of 5" is a quotable statistic. Formulating advice should follow a different pattern. The ideal number for emergencies is probably closer to $5,000 since it covers more realistic emergency scenarios. $500 might cover food, gas, a few taxi rides or train tickets and basic OTC medication like asprin for possibly a week. $5,000 might cover a lost or stolen laptop, plane tickets, hotel stays, car repairs, emergency rooms and ambulances and out-of-pocket prescriptions, funerals, rent or convert to a month's worth of basic needs (food, gas, short-haul travel). More is obviously always better, but emergency response is about covering the cost of capacity to react, plus supplies needed to take action, plus duration of endurance. $500 wouldn't keep you off the street for more than a weekend, but $5,000 could last a month or more.
jlarocco 8y ago
The funny thing about what you're saying is that there's always somebody richer saying the same thing about you, just with bigger sums of money. "He wouldn't have a mortgage if he just made better financial decisions!" ;-) Honestly, though, you're just stating the obvious: people screw up and behave irrationally. That's common knowledge. The goal is to minimize the impact of poor decisions and give people a way to get back on track. "F* 'em, I've got mine" doesn't help anybody.
alasdair_ 8y ago
>It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. The problem occurs when there are MANY emergencies. You're about to get evicted, your car is broken down (so you're about to lose your job) and your kid is sick and you need a doctor but can't take the time off to get one. >I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making. Okay. The day your turn eighteen, your parents (who taught you very little and gave you nothing) kick you out on the street. You have no money (because they flat out stole it the day before you became an adult). Where does this magic $400 come from? $400 is a LOT of money. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 before taxes. That's a week and a half of work without accounting for gas money to get you to the job or food to eat when you get there. After the basics (taxes, cheapest-possible rent, basic food, some kind of heating and lighting and a few other things) you're probably at the point where you have $10 or $20 left over. Let's say you get sick, or disabled, or laid off. You are so fucked. > Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid. Have you any idea how long it takes to get disability? Years. And years. And it's not certain at all. What do you do in the meantime? Even the other programs - they often fail the very people they are designed to help the most. Child support? Again, have you any idea how many years it takes to get child support from someone who bails from their job every time the paperwork makes its way into the syste, and who never files a tax return?
empath75 8y ago
You simply have no understanding of what it’s like to be poor in this country. In a lot of ways it’s more expensive to be poor than to be middle class— you get hit with higher interest rates, more fees, more things like inspection tickets for your car that you can barely keep on the road. A single emergency room visit is enough to bankrupt some people. I’m making well into six figures now, but in my early 20s, I was living pay check to pay check and barely had enough to eat some weeks. If I managed to scrape up an extra $400, I had a hundred things to spend it on that weren’t a rainy day fund.
ridgeguy 8y ago
I find your absolutist view remarkably blinkered, indeed unrealistic in the fundamental sense of the word. I wonder if you suddenly incurred uninsured medical expenses of oh, let's say, 20X your net worth or annual income, whether you might see things differently. A family of four on a $50K annual income would find a sudden $1000K obligation utterly devastating. That's life for (IMHO) too many of us. On average, it has far more to do with luck than your proffered causal moral failure. I think we can do better.

mattnewton 8y ago

Bahaha, yes, if you make perfect decisions you will have over $400. The whole point is people don’t make perfect decisions. Should they become homeless when they get hurt as a result? Does that threat help them make better decisions? Does it help society to let a small problem escalate into a larger one like that? I’d answer a resounding no on all fronts.

rectang 8y ago
It gives the wealthy a pleasing sense of moral superiority to see the poor fail. Humans compete not only for resources but for status. This alone is sufficient motivation to drive policies which ensure not just inequality, but humiliation of the losers.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> I will say this again. Repetition doesn't actually make your claim any better supported, so maybe instead of repeating it, provide better support or, failing that, just stop instead of reiterating.

somerando 8y ago

And here I was feeling bad because I have less than $100k on hand.

xena 8y ago

What about people whose life situations constantly rip money out of them and their pay is just fundamentally insufficient to cover their expenses?

yermom 8y ago
nah, they should just work harder
- your-nanny 8y ago
  Forgot your sarc tags
trophycase 8y ago
You're right. Some poor people have bad spending habits, and some have unfortunate life situations, and some have both.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  In fact, poor spending habits could be caused by a poor life situation.

zeth___ 8y ago

Try being black in a ghetto. What you mean is that a college educated young white male in his 20s/30s will have $400 in spare change around the house. Because we can't be bothered to keep track of $50 notes we keep around for pizza.

ralusek 8y ago
What exactly about being black and in a ghetto prevents you from gathering $400? I have worked multiple minimum wage jobs before without even being on any social welfare. If you are on social welfare, receiving food stamps, affordable housing, etc, you absolutely have the capability to provide yourself with an emergency buffer, even on minimum wage.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Racism mostly.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Not sure why you're getting down voted. An otherwise identical resume with the first name changed from Tyrone to Brad receives 3x callbacks for interviews. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf
    - zeth___ 8y ago
      Techbros. People who have had a golden spoon in their mouth since birth and can't imagine a life where they didn't have their hands held to success the whole time. They think that because they are not billionaires they aren't privileged and anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just like their great-great-grand pappy who came from Ireland and was treated pretty badly by the English in 1864.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  It is very difficult to work multiple part time, minimum wage jobs these days because of the scheduling unreliability and availability requirements of the jobs. If you aren't available for ad-hoc hours, then your hours get dropped...

keithnz 8y ago

this is probablly a good pivot point for you to look at sociology. Because personal responsibility just doesn't magically happen. If you are not looking at what leads people into what you think is poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility, you become part of the problem. The reality is, the social structures play a big part in this, and more problematically, you can't change it quickly.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

> It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. There's a lot of "let them eat cake instead" mentality in that statement.

headmelted 8y ago

Spoken as someone well north of the poverty line. The reason for some people not having the money around is undoubtedly poor decision making, but for a great many others they simply have no gainful employment, no prospects of obtaining gainful employment and are often trapped in debt spirals due to past financial desperation. I'm real happy for you that you're so far removed from their situation that none of this occured to you.

ralusek 8y ago
Being trapped in a debt spiral due to past financial desperation is just a way of iterating forward in the loop of bad decision making. What I am saying is that to enter financial desperation in the United States is not actually possible if you utilize the available social safety net and make proper decisions.
- Retric 8y ago
  The number of allowed bad decisions drops dramatically as you slide down the wealth scale. Saying you need to be correct 99.999% of the time is simply not a viable strategy. Especially when people are actively trying to get you to make bad decisions like enrolling in a for profit collage. The vast US homeless population suggests we don't really have a safety net, so much as a safety rope you need to hold on tight and pray. Consider, if all the homeless people showed up in the same place that would instantly be in the top 10 US cities.
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
    And once you've enrolled in that for-profit college, surprise! You can choose to keep your student status to keep your loans in deferment but now you're not eligible for food stamps while an enrolled student unless you work a minimum of 20 hours a week/earn ~$680 a month.
- harikb 8y ago
  If you have Netflix, watch the documentary "Dirty Money". Then come back and tell us you wouldn't have been in the same situation had some event in your past not gone your favor.

wwweston 8y ago

> That is a situation that can only be achieved by poor decision making and a lack of personal responsibility. Poor decision making or lack of personal responsibility are certainly sufficient to achieve such a situation... but they're not necessary. Unless you play with the definition of "poor decision making" to include things like "capable of making mistakes." This could be a good time for everyone to review the concept of the Fundamental Attribution Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

dv_dt 8y ago

The overhead margin of basic life costs are much higher when one is poor then one is wealthy. It's an even higher overhead when trying to access our ever shrinking safety net with its perverse incentives and a high time and hassle factor. Blaming the victim for being poor is both ridiculous and counterproductive. You should wonder instead why basic personal finance skills aren't on any National education curriculum if its such a basic needed skill. (and I agree it is!)

pwg 8y ago
Are you referring to the Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
- dv_dt 8y ago
  That as well as the Welfare Trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

dionidium 8y ago

OK, but, like, what if some people are just actually bad at making decisions? Unless you have a plan for that you’re just moralizing toward no practical end.

rectang 8y ago
Moralizing is its own reward. It feels good to look down on people.

whatAmount 8y ago

What makes $400 such a special number? Why not $100, Why not $500, Why not $1,000? What makes $400 the ideal number? Probably nothing, except the fact that it makes for the best headline, since "2 out of 5" is a quotable statistic. Formulating advice should follow a different pattern. The ideal number for emergencies is probably closer to $5,000 since it covers more realistic emergency scenarios. $500 might cover food, gas, a few taxi rides or train tickets and basic OTC medication like asprin for possibly a week. $5,000 might cover a lost or stolen laptop, plane tickets, hotel stays, car repairs, emergency rooms and ambulances and out-of-pocket prescriptions, funerals, rent or convert to a month's worth of basic needs (food, gas, short-haul travel). More is obviously always better, but emergency response is about covering the cost of capacity to react, plus supplies needed to take action, plus duration of endurance. $500 wouldn't keep you off the street for more than a weekend, but $5,000 could last a month or more.

jlarocco 8y ago

The funny thing about what you're saying is that there's always somebody richer saying the same thing about you, just with bigger sums of money. "He wouldn't have a mortgage if he just made better financial decisions!" ;-) Honestly, though, you're just stating the obvious: people screw up and behave irrationally. That's common knowledge. The goal is to minimize the impact of poor decisions and give people a way to get back on track. "F* 'em, I've got mine" doesn't help anybody.

alasdair_ 8y ago

>It is completely unacceptable to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency as a functioning adult. The problem occurs when there are MANY emergencies. You're about to get evicted, your car is broken down (so you're about to lose your job) and your kid is sick and you need a doctor but can't take the time off to get one. >I will say this again. As a mobile adult, in the United States, to not have $400 on reserve for an emergency is simply not possible with proper decision-making. Okay. The day your turn eighteen, your parents (who taught you very little and gave you nothing) kick you out on the street. You have no money (because they flat out stole it the day before you became an adult). Where does this magic $400 come from? $400 is a LOT of money. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 before taxes. That's a week and a half of work without accounting for gas money to get you to the job or food to eat when you get there. After the basics (taxes, cheapest-possible rent, basic food, some kind of heating and lighting and a few other things) you're probably at the point where you have $10 or $20 left over. Let's say you get sick, or disabled, or laid off. You are so fucked. > Individuals at that level of poverty have national and state level food stamps, welfare, disability, affordable housing, rent control, minimum-wage laws, child-support, often social security, medicare/medicaid. Have you any idea how long it takes to get disability? Years. And years. And it's not certain at all. What do you do in the meantime? Even the other programs - they often fail the very people they are designed to help the most. Child support? Again, have you any idea how many years it takes to get child support from someone who bails from their job every time the paperwork makes its way into the syste, and who never files a tax return?

empath75 8y ago

You simply have no understanding of what it’s like to be poor in this country. In a lot of ways it’s more expensive to be poor than to be middle class— you get hit with higher interest rates, more fees, more things like inspection tickets for your car that you can barely keep on the road. A single emergency room visit is enough to bankrupt some people. I’m making well into six figures now, but in my early 20s, I was living pay check to pay check and barely had enough to eat some weeks. If I managed to scrape up an extra $400, I had a hundred things to spend it on that weren’t a rainy day fund.

ridgeguy 8y ago

I find your absolutist view remarkably blinkered, indeed unrealistic in the fundamental sense of the word. I wonder if you suddenly incurred uninsured medical expenses of oh, let's say, 20X your net worth or annual income, whether you might see things differently. A family of four on a $50K annual income would find a sudden $1000K obligation utterly devastating. That's life for (IMHO) too many of us. On average, it has far more to do with luck than your proffered causal moral failure. I think we can do better.