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A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty r

A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me. I was really young, but that really stuck with me.

aspaviento 5y ago
I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. Some people live in a bubble so far from the real world that almost seems fantasy.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It depends on your liabilities and other aspects like age. 6,000 EUR per month is $7,300 USD per month is tough if you’re a new pharmacist in the US and need to repay $300k of student loans and make up for 4 to 6 years of lost income and catch up retirement savings, as an example.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Even this shows a basic lack of understanding of what "tough" means for someone who is actually poor. As soon as you put "saving for retirement" as something that's even possible, you're no longer in the realm of what's genuinely "tough". "Oh, those people making three times what I do a month have it so tough! After paying way more than the minimum on their student loans and putting aside a large chunk of money for retirement, they might only have a thousand dollars or so of truly disposable income!" "Tough" is when "disposable income" is a fantasy, and you're regularly having to choose between whether to pay your heating bill or buy enough food for the rest of the week.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      And a poor person in Sudan will say poor person in US will not know what tough is. The comment I responded to was about a politician complaining about a certain payrate. To which I wanted to show that it is possible to have to have to be stretched thin (mentally), and the politician is not thinking about having to cancel their third overseas vacation. Yes, they’re not on the very last rung of the ladder, but slipping off your rung also causes worry.
      - danaris 5y ago
        But you continue to prove the article's point: that the feeling of "slipping off your rung" and having to downsize from 3 yachts to 2 or (shock!) 1, however frustrating, upsetting, and stressful it may be to the person losing both money and status, does not remotely compare to the feeling of not knowing whether you will still have a home or even be alive next year, next quarter, or next month because you don't have enough money to pay for heat, food, and rent.
  - azornathogron 5y ago
    I'll grant you the loan repayment, but the other things aren't expenses. "Lost income" is a psychological artefact, not anything concrete. It's a result of comparing against some hypothetical ideal financial situation. The same for "catching up" on retirement savings. The concrete part is that people with that level of income (large, but not so large as to make all problems disappear) know that to be comfortable in the future they need to save a big chunk of their income. The people living with much lower incomes just don't have that luxury at all. Which is kind of the point - it's totally different worlds.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      When currency is being devalued year after year, lost income (up to a certain amount) most certainly is an expense. The longer you sit out of the asset inflation game, the more you fall behind. So whatever the cause for you falling behind has to make up for it. Maybe I’m wrong, but that model has served me well.
      - azornathogron 5y ago
        I agree that currency devaluation and so on means that saving money earlier in life has a larger impact on your lifetime comfort than saving money later. I don't really follow how it's classed as an expense though. And I don't know how you determine how much income you have "lost". I think we probably agree on the situation but disagree on what terms make sense to describe it.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Assuming you need $x by some age due to being unable to earn more money (illness, old age, not wanting to work), then not earning income in your possible working years pushes up the amount of income needed in other working years to reach the same $x. For example, if you get your bachelors in 3 years instead of 4 and spend $30k on tuition and earn $90k by working, then that would result in an extra $120k in compared to spending 4 years in college. I class it as an expense, because everything has an opportunity cost, which is defined as your 2nd best option. It is not always useful, for example thinking about spending time with your kids rather earning $15 driving for uber or something. But it could be, if you need that $15 to feed your kids.
  - monsieurbanana 5y ago
    It's in euros though, much less likely that someone on that salary in Europe would be truly struggling, compared to someone living in the USA.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  I had a coworker at my first programming job complaining how hard it was to make it on a $175,000 a year salary in the Midwest. It was nearly three times what I was making and I thought "I can manage with so much less, wtf is this person’s problem?"
  - IggleSniggle 5y ago
    If they were struggling to make it on $175000, maybe they had a $200000 a year in medical bills! This is America we’re talking about after all.
    - serf 5y ago
      I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but most coding positions i've ran into in the United States offer pretty comprehensive health and dental plans. If someone years ago making 175k a year coding doesn't have healthcare insurance then it's likely of their own doing either through contract renegotiation or taking a pretty damn bad benefits package for the sake of a fairly high salary for such a position.
      - jjav 5y ago
        > I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but most coding positions i've ran into in the United States offer pretty comprehensive health and dental plans. It's not that simple, given the health care mess in the US. I have a friend with top-shelf insurance and salary at bay area FAANG company who still has >$50K out of pocket medical costs every year.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Their out of pocket maximum was likely no more than $10k, if that.
      - jjav 5y ago
        > Their out of pocket maximum was likely no more than $10k, if that. In the US, medical insurance out of pocket maximums don't mean it's the most you can pay. I've had years where according to the insurance company accounting my out of pocket has been less than $1000, but according to bills I actually had to pay my out of pocket was close to $10K.
- fnord77 5y ago
  a national politician needs two homes - one in the capital and one in the location they represent. That alone would eat up 6000€ especially if either place is expensive.
  - chii 5y ago
    why do they need to own the place in the capital, if they only travel there to work? Can't they rent for the duration of the time they spend there?
    - lacksconfidence 5y ago
      AOC doesn't need to buy it. Simply paying rent in NYC and DC is too much for a bartender with < $30k in family wealth
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    Often politicians in that situation get extra cost of living payments for travel and accommodation (at least in the EU)
- dralley 5y ago
  I remember when US Reps worth millions were mocking AOC for not being able to simultaneously afford an apartment in DC and NYC prior to receiving her congressional paycheck.
  - ta988 5y ago
    It shows you how competent these people are at taking care of the American people...
  - prepend 5y ago
    Congress reps make $170k. It’s not super wealthy, but certainly possible to afford two rents outright. Not to mention if you sublet/etc since I wouldn’t need to literally stay in two places at once. I think no matter how much you make, higher salaries always seem so much easier. People can either budget or can’t, I don’t think it matters the actual amount. I’ve met people who were budgeted and running a family on $30k and people paycheck to paycheck on $300k.
    - dralley 5y ago
      "Prior to receiving her congressional paycheck" This was right after she was first elected, before she took office.
- wpietri 5y ago
  One summer in high school I got a factory job. It was Michigan, so I was running an injection molding press making the rims for side mirrors. (Decades later I still remember that the press took 67 seconds per cycle, and that 1600 rims was the shift target.) I was on second shift, so my crew didn't see the executives much. But one day the CEO held an all-hands, so we shut all the machinery down and went to an area big enough for him to talk with us all. I no longer remember what the meeting was about, but I think it must have been related to why the company couldn't afford a raise people were expecting. Somebody asked him a question that I couldn't hear; he looked a little flush and responded quickly, off the cuff. This guy who was wearing a nice suit, this guy who had clean hands and no burns from the presses, this guy who was easily clearing 10x what his workers made: this guy said, "I live paycheck to paycheck just like you all do!" And implied that he was just helpless in the face of his wife spending to much. Everybody in the room scoffed at him. I'm still scoffing.
  - detritus 5y ago
    O/T - How many side mirror rims were in each cycle? If it were just one, then your shifts must have been over a day long, which doesn't make much sense.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Good question! It was 4. While waiting for the press I'd deflash [1] the set that were cool enough to put to the grinder and stack them for transport to the next station. Those doing the math will note that in theory 67 seconds would allow for 1716 rims per 8-hour shift. But it took time to open it, get them out, and close it again. The machine never stopped; breaks were handled by somebody coming along and taking over for a bit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(manufacturing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(manufacturing)
      - detritus 5y ago
        Crikey! Thanks. That's still a heck of a lot of work in those hours, with very little downtime. I do a lot of 'proceduralised' jobs, but I'm 'lucky' in that I get to define and hone the procedure and then it tends only to be necessary for a few hours or a day or three, before I move onto something else entirely. I get a wee quick out of making things more efficient, then get to move on before my brain calcifies. The thought of acting a mere part of a machine for 8 hours a day, weeks, months and years on end is ... well, it makes me appreciate my job, even at its worst!
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. It depends on where you live. I lived in New York City for years. If you had a family, it would be hard to live there as on 6000€/mo, unless you had been living in the same apartment for decades. The median cost of a 2-bedroom apartment there is 3000€ a month, taxation is high (federal, city and state taxes), food is wildly expensive, etc. I hear London and Tokyo are even worse.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    It’s reasonable to assume the politician earning 6000 euro a month was not living in NYC, London or Tokyo
  - ta988 5y ago
    There are people living with much less according to salaries distributions how do they do it?
  - refurb 5y ago
    Hard to live on 3000EUR/month after housing?
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      US salaries are pre-tax, so it wouldn't be 3000 left over.
- adolph 5y ago
  The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
- slightwinder 5y ago
  This only shows that it goes both ways. Everyone does only know little about the live of others. I could easiely see a politican needing to spend more money to build and maintain their career. Similar it could be bullocks and the guy is just greedy. It's hard to understand from the outside.
elliekelly 5y ago
I thought this for the longest time. An embarrassingly long time. Then I volunteered with a program that helps people who qualify for EITC to prepare their taxes and budget how they’ll use their tax return to “get them out of their situation”. Person after person came in, we did their taxes, and then we went over their expenses and each case was a frustrating puzzle that was impossible to solve. There just wasn’t enough money for all of the basic necessities let alone even a bit of savings. And these are folks who worked full time. I was a student at the time and I remember being annoyed that not once had this situation come up in the personal finance classes I’d taken. It really changed my whole perspective. It was honestly the first time I’d ever even considered the possibility that someone could do everything “right” and still be poor. There’s a myth that you can financial-plan your way out of economic hardship but it’s simply not true.
- Vespasian 5y ago
  The ability to save money relies on the ability to "reduce your lifestyle costs" by cutting certain expenses (raising income is oftentimes not realistic. Poor People in general are not lazy) Below a certain limit there is no way to do that without loosing more money like getting rid of your car. And it's not only the obvious things. An acquaintance of mine was a single mother (ex-husband in prison) and had to decide whether she could afford to allow her children to take a bath in the bathtub. People underestimate how much such forced decisions can damage mental health and the ability to work. Many wealthy-but-broke people still have assets (like significant equity in a house) that give them runway (sometimes years) to sort things out and make life impacting decisions (such as moving far away to reduce expenses or contacting a friend from before to find you job).
  - wpietri 5y ago
    > Poor People in general are not lazy Exactly. I grew up poor and my teen employment was bust-your-ass jobs like factory and restaurant work. I was once on a contract for a large company, and throughout the day I'd watch the office employees enjoy quiet, pleasant days with plenty of chatting with coworkers. The most strenuous thing they'd do was occasionally rush from one meeting to another. They'd all be gone by 5 and I'd stay working. Then I'd see the cleaning contractors come in and zoom through the office, working hard and never taking breaks. It always made me a little mad that most people there never even saw the hardest workers in the building, let alone appreciated them.
GuB-42 5y ago
The worst part is that your wealthy family member is right. It is well illustrated by a quote from Terry Pratchett > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. > Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. > This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  This is very naive and short-sighted, what percentage of your income go to boots? 1%? Your own example is talking about a ROI of 50USD in years, yeah sure ... that's wealth right there. People spend 90% of their wage on: rent, food and basic services. Can you be very smart and hack your way into halving your monthly rent? Can you be very smart and buy a really good potato that will last you for years? Can you be very smart and negotiate a better rate for the utilities you pay? Come on, man. Of course, planning and spending carefully go a long way, but that metaphor is a joke.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Of course it is a joke, it is Terry Pratchett after all. But there is a serious problem behind it. For example, with food, if you have enough money you can afford to buy large quantities and take advantage of discounts. For rent, it you have money, deposits won't be a problem, and landlord may be more willing to give you interesting offers. Poor people are at risk of not being able to pay the rent, and landlords have to account for it. You may even buy and not pay the rent. For utilities, if you have money, you can buy more efficient heaters and appliances, better isolation, maybe even solar panels and stuff like that which may be profitable after a few years.
christophilus 5y ago
We had a babysitter recently charge us $21 for 3 hours. It blew my mind. I insisted that we paid her $40, which still seemed insane. Someone earning $7/hr makes $280/week. I can’t imagine trying to get by on that even with no dependents.
- gruez 5y ago
  Isn't the thinking that these jobs are supposed to be for teenagers, which has their income supplemented by their parents?
  - mentalpiracy 5y ago
    Why should a working persons age or living arrangement cause a devaluation of the work they are doing? Yes the instinct is to pay teenagers less because we generally cannot fathom them capable or experienced enough to do “real” work. But does this set the stage for the devaluation of entire classes of work because they’re seen as “for teens?”
    - gruez 5y ago
      > Why should a working persons age or living arrangement cause a devaluation of the work they are doing? No, but their living arrangement does affect whether it's possible to live on that wage, which is what GP was talking about.
    - AdrianB1 5y ago
      They are not. But some low paid jobs exist only because they are interesting to certain demographics and some people are willing to pay for it; think about the paper boys or lawn mowing adolescents - it is the kind of thing I can do myself (I find it relaxing), but I pay for it only because it gives someone else the opportunity to have some extra pocket money easily. It is a good arrangement with your kids or some neighborhood kids and in rural areas in my country (Europe) it is sometimes an arrangement also for a nanny. In many cases the money I pay is more than the value I receive, but I still choose to pay. If someone feels the need to pay $40 for 3 hours for a nanny that is fine, but that does not make it automatically worth $40.
usrusr 5y ago
There's some truth in it though, which is that there's a common pattern where formerly poor people, upon achieving higher income, keep their habit of spending every last cent that's coming in, just now also on nice things in additon to necessities, never accumulating any reserves. Their buying decisions seem to be locked in an algorithm "do I have the money, yes or no?" where someone with saving ability would ask themselves "do I want to spend that amount of money?" But I suspect that this might be more common amongst those that rose from low but not very low income, I could imagine that the group of people who rose from extreme poverty contains a considerable number of people very much able to save. It's certainly not the only reason for poverty to exist. But if the poorest person you know is the high(ish) income/spend it all kind, I can easily see how you'd come to the wrong conclusions.
throw0101a 5y ago
> […] wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. See Nick Maggiulli's "The Biggest Lie in Personal Finance": > All the expense tracking and goal setting in the world cannot make up for an insufficient balance. * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-finance/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin... In the US, per BLS, the bottom 20% of earners spend more than they earn on basic necessities: housing, feed, healthcare, transportation. The next 20% barely managed to cover them, without much left over. This is why I liked Thomas Piketty's definition of the "middle class" being income earners in the 50th to 90th percentiles: enough to pay for life's necessities, with some left over for niceties (but not so much as get into the situation of having piles of money earning interest on interest). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
slightwinder 5y ago
It's not entirely wrong though. Coming from a poor family, and still not being wealthy, I learned that there are two types of poor people. The first ones are genuine poor, because they simple don't earn enough money to get a stable ground to act on. The other ones are getting enough money to live from it comfortable enough, but are stupid in managing it, and make themself poor by they own inability. Knowing how to handle your money is an important skill for not being poor. But it's something that in the wasteful societys is not educated at all. Similar being a bit frugal and investing your money longterm is something especially the older generations seems to lack understanding for. So for the second group of people your relatives comment makes sense.

aspaviento 5y ago

I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. Some people live in a bubble so far from the real world that almost seems fantasy.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
It depends on your liabilities and other aspects like age. 6,000 EUR per month is $7,300 USD per month is tough if you’re a new pharmacist in the US and need to repay $300k of student loans and make up for 4 to 6 years of lost income and catch up retirement savings, as an example.
- danaris 5y ago
  Even this shows a basic lack of understanding of what "tough" means for someone who is actually poor. As soon as you put "saving for retirement" as something that's even possible, you're no longer in the realm of what's genuinely "tough". "Oh, those people making three times what I do a month have it so tough! After paying way more than the minimum on their student loans and putting aside a large chunk of money for retirement, they might only have a thousand dollars or so of truly disposable income!" "Tough" is when "disposable income" is a fantasy, and you're regularly having to choose between whether to pay your heating bill or buy enough food for the rest of the week.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    And a poor person in Sudan will say poor person in US will not know what tough is. The comment I responded to was about a politician complaining about a certain payrate. To which I wanted to show that it is possible to have to have to be stretched thin (mentally), and the politician is not thinking about having to cancel their third overseas vacation. Yes, they’re not on the very last rung of the ladder, but slipping off your rung also causes worry.
    - danaris 5y ago
      But you continue to prove the article's point: that the feeling of "slipping off your rung" and having to downsize from 3 yachts to 2 or (shock!) 1, however frustrating, upsetting, and stressful it may be to the person losing both money and status, does not remotely compare to the feeling of not knowing whether you will still have a home or even be alive next year, next quarter, or next month because you don't have enough money to pay for heat, food, and rent.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  I'll grant you the loan repayment, but the other things aren't expenses. "Lost income" is a psychological artefact, not anything concrete. It's a result of comparing against some hypothetical ideal financial situation. The same for "catching up" on retirement savings. The concrete part is that people with that level of income (large, but not so large as to make all problems disappear) know that to be comfortable in the future they need to save a big chunk of their income. The people living with much lower incomes just don't have that luxury at all. Which is kind of the point - it's totally different worlds.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    When currency is being devalued year after year, lost income (up to a certain amount) most certainly is an expense. The longer you sit out of the asset inflation game, the more you fall behind. So whatever the cause for you falling behind has to make up for it. Maybe I’m wrong, but that model has served me well.
    - azornathogron 5y ago
      I agree that currency devaluation and so on means that saving money earlier in life has a larger impact on your lifetime comfort than saving money later. I don't really follow how it's classed as an expense though. And I don't know how you determine how much income you have "lost". I think we probably agree on the situation but disagree on what terms make sense to describe it.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Assuming you need $x by some age due to being unable to earn more money (illness, old age, not wanting to work), then not earning income in your possible working years pushes up the amount of income needed in other working years to reach the same $x. For example, if you get your bachelors in 3 years instead of 4 and spend $30k on tuition and earn $90k by working, then that would result in an extra $120k in compared to spending 4 years in college. I class it as an expense, because everything has an opportunity cost, which is defined as your 2nd best option. It is not always useful, for example thinking about spending time with your kids rather earning $15 driving for uber or something. But it could be, if you need that $15 to feed your kids.
- monsieurbanana 5y ago
  It's in euros though, much less likely that someone on that salary in Europe would be truly struggling, compared to someone living in the USA.
phone8675309 5y ago
I had a coworker at my first programming job complaining how hard it was to make it on a $175,000 a year salary in the Midwest. It was nearly three times what I was making and I thought "I can manage with so much less, wtf is this person’s problem?"
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  If they were struggling to make it on $175000, maybe they had a $200000 a year in medical bills! This is America we’re talking about after all.
  - serf 5y ago
    I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but most coding positions i've ran into in the United States offer pretty comprehensive health and dental plans. If someone years ago making 175k a year coding doesn't have healthcare insurance then it's likely of their own doing either through contract renegotiation or taking a pretty damn bad benefits package for the sake of a fairly high salary for such a position.
    - jjav 5y ago
      > I get that it's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but most coding positions i've ran into in the United States offer pretty comprehensive health and dental plans. It's not that simple, given the health care mess in the US. I have a friend with top-shelf insurance and salary at bay area FAANG company who still has >$50K out of pocket medical costs every year.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Their out of pocket maximum was likely no more than $10k, if that.
    - jjav 5y ago
      > Their out of pocket maximum was likely no more than $10k, if that. In the US, medical insurance out of pocket maximums don't mean it's the most you can pay. I've had years where according to the insurance company accounting my out of pocket has been less than $1000, but according to bills I actually had to pay my out of pocket was close to $10K.
fnord77 5y ago
a national politician needs two homes - one in the capital and one in the location they represent. That alone would eat up 6000€ especially if either place is expensive.
- chii 5y ago
  why do they need to own the place in the capital, if they only travel there to work? Can't they rent for the duration of the time they spend there?
  - lacksconfidence 5y ago
    AOC doesn't need to buy it. Simply paying rent in NYC and DC is too much for a bartender with < $30k in family wealth
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  Often politicians in that situation get extra cost of living payments for travel and accommodation (at least in the EU)
dralley 5y ago
I remember when US Reps worth millions were mocking AOC for not being able to simultaneously afford an apartment in DC and NYC prior to receiving her congressional paycheck.
- ta988 5y ago
  It shows you how competent these people are at taking care of the American people...
- prepend 5y ago
  Congress reps make $170k. It’s not super wealthy, but certainly possible to afford two rents outright. Not to mention if you sublet/etc since I wouldn’t need to literally stay in two places at once. I think no matter how much you make, higher salaries always seem so much easier. People can either budget or can’t, I don’t think it matters the actual amount. I’ve met people who were budgeted and running a family on $30k and people paycheck to paycheck on $300k.
  - dralley 5y ago
    "Prior to receiving her congressional paycheck" This was right after she was first elected, before she took office.
wpietri 5y ago
One summer in high school I got a factory job. It was Michigan, so I was running an injection molding press making the rims for side mirrors. (Decades later I still remember that the press took 67 seconds per cycle, and that 1600 rims was the shift target.) I was on second shift, so my crew didn't see the executives much. But one day the CEO held an all-hands, so we shut all the machinery down and went to an area big enough for him to talk with us all. I no longer remember what the meeting was about, but I think it must have been related to why the company couldn't afford a raise people were expecting. Somebody asked him a question that I couldn't hear; he looked a little flush and responded quickly, off the cuff. This guy who was wearing a nice suit, this guy who had clean hands and no burns from the presses, this guy who was easily clearing 10x what his workers made: this guy said, "I live paycheck to paycheck just like you all do!" And implied that he was just helpless in the face of his wife spending to much. Everybody in the room scoffed at him. I'm still scoffing.
- detritus 5y ago
  O/T - How many side mirror rims were in each cycle? If it were just one, then your shifts must have been over a day long, which doesn't make much sense.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Good question! It was 4. While waiting for the press I'd deflash [1] the set that were cool enough to put to the grinder and stack them for transport to the next station. Those doing the math will note that in theory 67 seconds would allow for 1716 rims per 8-hour shift. But it took time to open it, get them out, and close it again. The machine never stopped; breaks were handled by somebody coming along and taking over for a bit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(manufacturing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(manufacturing)
    - detritus 5y ago
      Crikey! Thanks. That's still a heck of a lot of work in those hours, with very little downtime. I do a lot of 'proceduralised' jobs, but I'm 'lucky' in that I get to define and hone the procedure and then it tends only to be necessary for a few hours or a day or three, before I move onto something else entirely. I get a wee quick out of making things more efficient, then get to move on before my brain calcifies. The thought of acting a mere part of a machine for 8 hours a day, weeks, months and years on end is ... well, it makes me appreciate my job, even at its worst!
TomSwirly 5y ago
> I remember a politician complaining about having difficulties with a salary of 6000€/mo. It depends on where you live. I lived in New York City for years. If you had a family, it would be hard to live there as on 6000€/mo, unless you had been living in the same apartment for decades. The median cost of a 2-bedroom apartment there is 3000€ a month, taxation is high (federal, city and state taxes), food is wildly expensive, etc. I hear London and Tokyo are even worse.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  It’s reasonable to assume the politician earning 6000 euro a month was not living in NYC, London or Tokyo
- ta988 5y ago
  There are people living with much less according to salaries distributions how do they do it?
- refurb 5y ago
  Hard to live on 3000EUR/month after housing?
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    US salaries are pre-tax, so it wouldn't be 3000 left over.
adolph 5y ago
The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
slightwinder 5y ago
This only shows that it goes both ways. Everyone does only know little about the live of others. I could easiely see a politican needing to spend more money to build and maintain their career. Similar it could be bullocks and the guy is just greedy. It's hard to understand from the outside.

elliekelly 5y ago

I thought this for the longest time. An embarrassingly long time. Then I volunteered with a program that helps people who qualify for EITC to prepare their taxes and budget how they’ll use their tax return to “get them out of their situation”. Person after person came in, we did their taxes, and then we went over their expenses and each case was a frustrating puzzle that was impossible to solve. There just wasn’t enough money for all of the basic necessities let alone even a bit of savings. And these are folks who worked full time. I was a student at the time and I remember being annoyed that not once had this situation come up in the personal finance classes I’d taken. It really changed my whole perspective. It was honestly the first time I’d ever even considered the possibility that someone could do everything “right” and still be poor. There’s a myth that you can financial-plan your way out of economic hardship but it’s simply not true.

Vespasian 5y ago
The ability to save money relies on the ability to "reduce your lifestyle costs" by cutting certain expenses (raising income is oftentimes not realistic. Poor People in general are not lazy) Below a certain limit there is no way to do that without loosing more money like getting rid of your car. And it's not only the obvious things. An acquaintance of mine was a single mother (ex-husband in prison) and had to decide whether she could afford to allow her children to take a bath in the bathtub. People underestimate how much such forced decisions can damage mental health and the ability to work. Many wealthy-but-broke people still have assets (like significant equity in a house) that give them runway (sometimes years) to sort things out and make life impacting decisions (such as moving far away to reduce expenses or contacting a friend from before to find you job).
- wpietri 5y ago
  > Poor People in general are not lazy Exactly. I grew up poor and my teen employment was bust-your-ass jobs like factory and restaurant work. I was once on a contract for a large company, and throughout the day I'd watch the office employees enjoy quiet, pleasant days with plenty of chatting with coworkers. The most strenuous thing they'd do was occasionally rush from one meeting to another. They'd all be gone by 5 and I'd stay working. Then I'd see the cleaning contractors come in and zoom through the office, working hard and never taking breaks. It always made me a little mad that most people there never even saw the hardest workers in the building, let alone appreciated them.

GuB-42 5y ago

The worst part is that your wealthy family member is right. It is well illustrated by a quote from Terry Pratchett > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. > Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. > This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

moralestapia 5y ago
This is very naive and short-sighted, what percentage of your income go to boots? 1%? Your own example is talking about a ROI of 50USD in years, yeah sure ... that's wealth right there. People spend 90% of their wage on: rent, food and basic services. Can you be very smart and hack your way into halving your monthly rent? Can you be very smart and buy a really good potato that will last you for years? Can you be very smart and negotiate a better rate for the utilities you pay? Come on, man. Of course, planning and spending carefully go a long way, but that metaphor is a joke.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Of course it is a joke, it is Terry Pratchett after all. But there is a serious problem behind it. For example, with food, if you have enough money you can afford to buy large quantities and take advantage of discounts. For rent, it you have money, deposits won't be a problem, and landlord may be more willing to give you interesting offers. Poor people are at risk of not being able to pay the rent, and landlords have to account for it. You may even buy and not pay the rent. For utilities, if you have money, you can buy more efficient heaters and appliances, better isolation, maybe even solar panels and stuff like that which may be profitable after a few years.

christophilus 5y ago

We had a babysitter recently charge us $21 for 3 hours. It blew my mind. I insisted that we paid her $40, which still seemed insane. Someone earning $7/hr makes $280/week. I can’t imagine trying to get by on that even with no dependents.

gruez 5y ago
Isn't the thinking that these jobs are supposed to be for teenagers, which has their income supplemented by their parents?
- mentalpiracy 5y ago
  Why should a working persons age or living arrangement cause a devaluation of the work they are doing? Yes the instinct is to pay teenagers less because we generally cannot fathom them capable or experienced enough to do “real” work. But does this set the stage for the devaluation of entire classes of work because they’re seen as “for teens?”
  - gruez 5y ago
    > Why should a working persons age or living arrangement cause a devaluation of the work they are doing? No, but their living arrangement does affect whether it's possible to live on that wage, which is what GP was talking about.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    They are not. But some low paid jobs exist only because they are interesting to certain demographics and some people are willing to pay for it; think about the paper boys or lawn mowing adolescents - it is the kind of thing I can do myself (I find it relaxing), but I pay for it only because it gives someone else the opportunity to have some extra pocket money easily. It is a good arrangement with your kids or some neighborhood kids and in rural areas in my country (Europe) it is sometimes an arrangement also for a nanny. In many cases the money I pay is more than the value I receive, but I still choose to pay. If someone feels the need to pay $40 for 3 hours for a nanny that is fine, but that does not make it automatically worth $40.

usrusr 5y ago

There's some truth in it though, which is that there's a common pattern where formerly poor people, upon achieving higher income, keep their habit of spending every last cent that's coming in, just now also on nice things in additon to necessities, never accumulating any reserves. Their buying decisions seem to be locked in an algorithm "do I have the money, yes or no?" where someone with saving ability would ask themselves "do I want to spend that amount of money?" But I suspect that this might be more common amongst those that rose from low but not very low income, I could imagine that the group of people who rose from extreme poverty contains a considerable number of people very much able to save. It's certainly not the only reason for poverty to exist. But if the poorest person you know is the high(ish) income/spend it all kind, I can easily see how you'd come to the wrong conclusions.

throw0101a 5y ago

> […] wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. See Nick Maggiulli's "The Biggest Lie in Personal Finance": > All the expense tracking and goal setting in the world cannot make up for an insufficient balance. * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-finance/ https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin... In the US, per BLS, the bottom 20% of earners spend more than they earn on basic necessities: housing, feed, healthcare, transportation. The next 20% barely managed to cover them, without much left over. This is why I liked Thomas Piketty's definition of the "middle class" being income earners in the 50th to 90th percentiles: enough to pay for life's necessities, with some left over for niceties (but not so much as get into the situation of having piles of money earning interest on interest). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

slightwinder 5y ago

It's not entirely wrong though. Coming from a poor family, and still not being wealthy, I learned that there are two types of poor people. The first ones are genuine poor, because they simple don't earn enough money to get a stable ground to act on. The other ones are getting enough money to live from it comfortable enough, but are stupid in managing it, and make themself poor by they own inability. Knowing how to handle your money is an important skill for not being poor. But it's something that in the wasteful societys is not educated at all. Similar being a bit frugal and investing your money longterm is something especially the older generations seems to lack understanding for. So for the second group of people your relatives comment makes sense.