4 ms·

Well, according to income charts, thats me. Im most certainly not upper class, as I can't even afford to buy department store clothes or go out to eat more tha

by casion 7y ago

Well, according to income charts, thats me. Im most certainly not upper class, as I can't even afford to buy department store clothes or go out to eat more than once a week. My expenses, due to my location, education, medical status and job, eat up a lot of my income. I'm VERY thrifty and am about 75% over the poverty line after job/education expenses. Throw in medical, transportation and the ridiculous housing costs and I can't even afford mcdonalds for breakfast.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
badfrog 7y ago
> I can't even afford mcdonalds for breakfast. If that's true and you're making over $400k per year, you're doing something wrong.
- casion 7y ago
  Nope. I'm doing just fine. As I said in my comment, non-negotiable expenses are high.
  - badfrog 7y ago
    > non-negotiable expenses are high. You're going to have to go into a lot more detail if you want anybody to believe expenses that high are possible.
    - base698 7y ago
      Anything medical could easily get that high. Cancer, trauma injury.
      - badfrog 7y ago
        If you're paying out of pocket, sure. But you can get a very good family insurance plan for $2k per month that should cover everything.
        casion 7y ago
        I have quite decent medical insurance, and copays still exist. I dont want to discuss my medical costs directly, but the uninsured cash cost for my monthly medications is about 5.5k month. Insurance does help significantly, but the final cost is still greater than 10% of cash price.
    - casion 7y ago
      Sure, I'll go through what Im comfortable with. I'm currently an educator in a high income area, teaching students of significant wealth. I make about 450k a year. We are required to live within a specific radius of the campus, which significantly limits my housing choices to high income, low space options. I'm around the middle of housing costs among my peers, and I'm paying 5k a month for 600 sq/ft. We are expected to provide all resources for our courses, as is fairly normal in the primary/secondary teaching profession. Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff. We are expected to bear it based on the idea that we're "over compensated" for our position, and that this "gives us flexibility to provide tailored education experiences". Nonsense, but I do love the job. Taxes and health insurance take a bit over 100k a year. That puts me around 90k gross for a family of 4 (which I have). "Very low income" level for a family of for in my area us 58k. That puts me at 55% above the VLI line. My original estimate was 75%. I have a significant medical issue that puts a financial burden on us in monthly prescription copays, plus 4 three month specialist checkups, plus the cost of 2 children. I am NOT saying this is normal by any means. My single healthy peers live fairly well. I also expect most people to think, "Just get a new job!", which is understandable. However if I were to move back to my previous southern US appointment, doing the exact same job, Id have less net income and not be working in such a cool place.
      - badfrog 7y ago
        Thanks for the details, this is very interesting. > Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff. That certainly explains everything. I'm curious where that money goes? If you're teaching a class of 30 students, you could buy each one a laptop and go on a two-week field trip with individual hotel rooms and still have 100k left from that budget.
        casion 7y ago
        I cant go into detail much because itd make it easy to google my place of employment. We pay for trips, electronics, "lab kits", license fees, PPE, raw materials, rental fees for heavy equipment and due to the nature of the content we pay probably more than we should due to inflated costs related to the specialized nature of the topic and school contracts. AND we pay sales tax on all of it, which isnt insignificant on already ridiculous costs.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    If you switch your housing over to a nice hotel, you will at least get a free breakfast every morning.
asjw 7y ago
Classes by definition are about wealth If you're unable to manage your money it's your fault, but you're not working class
- shantly 7y ago
  Income is not wealth.
  - base698 7y ago
    https://youtu.be/bZWeFtgEAEk?t=41 https://youtu.be/bZWeFtgEAEk?t=41 Here's the difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq, is rich, the white guy that signs his check is wealthy. Rich is something you can lose over the summer in Vegas with a drug habit.
    - CPLX 7y ago
      Shaquille O’Neill, with an estimated net worth of approximately 400 million dollars, is wealthy.
      - base698 7y ago
        It's an old video, def is now wealthy.
- casion 7y ago
  I manage my money quite well, thank you. Im not sure why it's difficult to grasp that the difference between gross and net income can be large for some job in some areas, but that is the case for a small number of individuals.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    It is foreign to the vast majority of people that you would be making $400k per year of income but unable to afford a $5 breakfast as you say. I'm having some trouble with it too. When if you're paying $150k in taxes, have a $10k a month mortgage payment (about a $1.5M mortgage), and are making $5k a month in student loan payments, you have $70k left over. I suppose I could see your medical bills being so high that this is then a difficult pie to share with everyday expenses. But it's a lot of assumptions to get there.
mavericking 7y ago
So... you’ve made a bunch of choices about what to do and for how much many and then how to spend the huge amount of money that you subsequently get to decide how to spend, and mathematically speaking you cannot spend all of that money on all of those things and simultaneously buy a $100 pair of pants. That can easily be true, but it’s so ludicrously far from what normal people mean when they say that they “can’t afford McDonald’s for breakfast” that I think it drives the point home pretty well. You aren’t poor because you already spent your allowance. The fact that people in the upper echelons of the global upper echelons of financial resources don’t “feel rich” because we have to make “financial decisions” only when we’ve already spent all of the rest of our money is exactly the problem. This isn’t, like, an upper-class character flaw. There’s some kind of normal human scale insensitivity that makes it really hard to understand how much a dollar is worth to someone else. But it seems like if you do the math, you should acknowledge that you genuinely are one of the people getting paid off by the pyramid scheme. If you still feel constrained in your options, it’s because everyone at every level feels that way, because the whole system is lubricated from top to bottom by a pervasive sense of personal insufficiency. And actual poverty is still a lot worse.
- casion 7y ago
  I wasnt trying to make some generalized comment about society. I was relaying my own personal situation as it's an example how how some (very few, likely) people can have a large disparity between gross and net income with little ethical choice in the matter.
CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
Which is kind of the problem with measuring income as a proxy for wealth. It’s, as you note, rather transient. What should be the focus is on the total wealth. Who controls the resources eating up all that income? And how much of that controls is concentrated into a few individuals?

by casion 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

badfrog 7y ago

> I can't even afford mcdonalds for breakfast. If that's true and you're making over $400k per year, you're doing something wrong.

casion 7y ago
Nope. I'm doing just fine. As I said in my comment, non-negotiable expenses are high.
- badfrog 7y ago
  > non-negotiable expenses are high. You're going to have to go into a lot more detail if you want anybody to believe expenses that high are possible.
  - base698 7y ago
    Anything medical could easily get that high. Cancer, trauma injury.
    - badfrog 7y ago
      If you're paying out of pocket, sure. But you can get a very good family insurance plan for $2k per month that should cover everything.
      - casion 7y ago
        I have quite decent medical insurance, and copays still exist. I dont want to discuss my medical costs directly, but the uninsured cash cost for my monthly medications is about 5.5k month. Insurance does help significantly, but the final cost is still greater than 10% of cash price.
  - casion 7y ago
    Sure, I'll go through what Im comfortable with. I'm currently an educator in a high income area, teaching students of significant wealth. I make about 450k a year. We are required to live within a specific radius of the campus, which significantly limits my housing choices to high income, low space options. I'm around the middle of housing costs among my peers, and I'm paying 5k a month for 600 sq/ft. We are expected to provide all resources for our courses, as is fairly normal in the primary/secondary teaching profession. Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff. We are expected to bear it based on the idea that we're "over compensated" for our position, and that this "gives us flexibility to provide tailored education experiences". Nonsense, but I do love the job. Taxes and health insurance take a bit over 100k a year. That puts me around 90k gross for a family of 4 (which I have). "Very low income" level for a family of for in my area us 58k. That puts me at 55% above the VLI line. My original estimate was 75%. I have a significant medical issue that puts a financial burden on us in monthly prescription copays, plus 4 three month specialist checkups, plus the cost of 2 children. I am NOT saying this is normal by any means. My single healthy peers live fairly well. I also expect most people to think, "Just get a new job!", which is understandable. However if I were to move back to my previous southern US appointment, doing the exact same job, Id have less net income and not be working in such a cool place.
    - badfrog 7y ago
      Thanks for the details, this is very interesting. > Resource costs are around 200k a year, and this is fairly common among the staff. That certainly explains everything. I'm curious where that money goes? If you're teaching a class of 30 students, you could buy each one a laptop and go on a two-week field trip with individual hotel rooms and still have 100k left from that budget.
      - casion 7y ago
        I cant go into detail much because itd make it easy to google my place of employment. We pay for trips, electronics, "lab kits", license fees, PPE, raw materials, rental fees for heavy equipment and due to the nature of the content we pay probably more than we should due to inflated costs related to the specialized nature of the topic and school contracts. AND we pay sales tax on all of it, which isnt insignificant on already ridiculous costs.
- itronitron 7y ago
  If you switch your housing over to a nice hotel, you will at least get a free breakfast every morning.

asjw 7y ago

Classes by definition are about wealth If you're unable to manage your money it's your fault, but you're not working class

shantly 7y ago
Income is not wealth.
- base698 7y ago
  https://youtu.be/bZWeFtgEAEk?t=41 https://youtu.be/bZWeFtgEAEk?t=41 Here's the difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq, is rich, the white guy that signs his check is wealthy. Rich is something you can lose over the summer in Vegas with a drug habit.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    Shaquille O’Neill, with an estimated net worth of approximately 400 million dollars, is wealthy.
    - base698 7y ago
      It's an old video, def is now wealthy.
casion 7y ago
I manage my money quite well, thank you. Im not sure why it's difficult to grasp that the difference between gross and net income can be large for some job in some areas, but that is the case for a small number of individuals.
- sanderjd 7y ago
  It is foreign to the vast majority of people that you would be making $400k per year of income but unable to afford a $5 breakfast as you say. I'm having some trouble with it too. When if you're paying $150k in taxes, have a $10k a month mortgage payment (about a $1.5M mortgage), and are making $5k a month in student loan payments, you have $70k left over. I suppose I could see your medical bills being so high that this is then a difficult pie to share with everyday expenses. But it's a lot of assumptions to get there.

mavericking 7y ago

So... you’ve made a bunch of choices about what to do and for how much many and then how to spend the huge amount of money that you subsequently get to decide how to spend, and mathematically speaking you cannot spend all of that money on all of those things and simultaneously buy a $100 pair of pants. That can easily be true, but it’s so ludicrously far from what normal people mean when they say that they “can’t afford McDonald’s for breakfast” that I think it drives the point home pretty well. You aren’t poor because you already spent your allowance. The fact that people in the upper echelons of the global upper echelons of financial resources don’t “feel rich” because we have to make “financial decisions” only when we’ve already spent all of the rest of our money is exactly the problem. This isn’t, like, an upper-class character flaw. There’s some kind of normal human scale insensitivity that makes it really hard to understand how much a dollar is worth to someone else. But it seems like if you do the math, you should acknowledge that you genuinely are one of the people getting paid off by the pyramid scheme. If you still feel constrained in your options, it’s because everyone at every level feels that way, because the whole system is lubricated from top to bottom by a pervasive sense of personal insufficiency. And actual poverty is still a lot worse.

casion 7y ago
I wasnt trying to make some generalized comment about society. I was relaying my own personal situation as it's an example how how some (very few, likely) people can have a large disparity between gross and net income with little ethical choice in the matter.

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago

Which is kind of the problem with measuring income as a proxy for wealth. It’s, as you note, rather transient. What should be the focus is on the total wealth. Who controls the resources eating up all that income? And how much of that controls is concentrated into a few individuals?