5 ms·

What choice do people have? It doesn't make sense to trade anything for security because that security is non-existent anyway. Losing your job & health benefit

• cudgy 4y ago
  25k saved (the difference in price between the cars) is more than most people have in savings. It would at least delay the fall of the guillotine long enough to find another job.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Or it can be eaten up by one emergency room trip and three days of intensive care.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Quite a few countries have solved this problem.
  • AstralStorm 4y ago
    Unless you can't work, have to retrain, your work is dependent on not driving a beater, driving one of these is not banned due to environmental concerns... then it would delay nothing. Ultimately you will incur maintenance costs. The trade-off between non-existent luxury is most visible in Europe. We get small flats, mostly. The choice is between way too small inconvenient flat, inconvenient location that forces hours of commute or being already rich. The flats these days are much less luxurious than older post-war ones, and way smaller. Then again families were even twice as big and multigenerational, but flats were even 5 times bigger. The better furnishings these days slightly help but not enough. Then again, there tends to be public transport that works, except in USA. So maybe you could get away with a bicycle commute if your health allows it. Not quite yet in most cities though.
• honkkong420 4y ago
  Strongly disagree, being able to accumulate enough money to cover the bumps of life can be the difference between stringing along a middle class existence and everything working out and going broke.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    $25K is peanuts if anything even mildly serious happens.
    • jiriknesl 4y ago
      If you are insured, $25k is plenty and cover 99% of situations.
  • juve1996 4y ago
    Of course - the hypothetical emergency fund is great. The problem is the required amounts are rapidly growing. An emergency fund of 10k barely covers the 8k average deductible for a family. Ignoring things like rent, food, etc, all rapidly increasing. To have a worthwhile emergency fund is too costly for most americans. Might as well finance a car - it won't matter.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  A death sentence? Very few middle class people are at death's door and require constant medical intervention.
• trashtester 4y ago
  Security (or risk) is not a Boolean (even though it may seem so psychologically), but a probability (or set of probabilities for different outcomes). "I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking. Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes. You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.) If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example. Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".