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I am very sorry for the medical situation. This is very bad and insurance is indeed an issue. But: I found myself married to a wife who was a full-time student

• bane 14y ago
  In my opinion each of these factors are your very own choice. I agree and disagree. If you want to follow that logic to its conclusion, everybody incurs costs from simply living. They choose to stay alive when suicide would simply free them from that burden. Getting married, trying to improve oneself and not leading an itinerant life should be among the basic affordances society can guarantee to any person. But I also will concede that I could have dropped out of school and lived a marginally better life in perpetuity until I was too old to continue to do heavy manual labor, then died in poverty.
  • stfu 14y ago
    You are painting here a picture between extremes. There a millions of students who live on campus at a cheap dorm room, have no car and get around on a budget where $900/m sounds like a life of luxury. If you decided to life in one of the very few inner-city metro areas where this is the norm nothing forced you to stay there. This is your lifestyle choice, not a poverty choice.
    • overgryphon 14y ago
      A cheap dorm room these days can be around $800-900 a month, and dorms aren't generally coed, so his married status would have made that a much more expensive option. The car was probably required for the job, and the time required to find a new job isn't feasible when you are working 80+ hours a week to keep everything afloat. Moving is expensive, and would have required both him and his wife to transfer schools. That requires long term planning and isn't a feasible option for an immediate crisis.
    • justinsteele 14y ago
      "Cheap dorm room"? Every dorm room at my university was more expensive than the surrounding (better quality) apartments.
    • bane 14y ago
      Okay smart guy, here's your challenge, using only resources available to a young person with no college degree, and no friends or family resources, and only what was available in 2001 and around $150 in starting cash. Put together a proposal of what I should have done. Include in it a location: It must be on or near an accredited university. Find housing that is magically "super cheap" or not a "luxury". Specify the costs. The housing must allow for no deposit (don't have the money) and nonexistent credit and allow for a married couple to stay there - dorms obviously won't work. Scans of local newspaper clippings from around the country will suffice since Apartments.com didn't exist back then. A money ($) budget: Include all relevant transport costs, food, clothes, tuition, etc. Every single thing that costs money. These have to be real costs and not a WAG. If you pick a school, include tuition for two and all relevant fees exactly. A time budget: Map out what my day-to-day life should have been according to your omniscience. Include every minute from wake-up to sleep. Include all travel times to and from work, home and school (I'll allow shopping time to be ignored). This probably implies that work, home and school are within walking distance, large isolated land grant universities won't work since available jobs centers are obviously too far. A job or two: They must pay in isolation or in combination enough to cover the budget above, while allowing time to go to school, and they must be able to be done at different times. No time travel! Remember no college degree or other relevant qualifications. Jobs must be both available and plentiful. Just putting out "work at Costco" won't cut it, one actually has to get hired. I can tell you that my hit rate on job applications was less than 10% (I received 1 job based on over 100 applications). Add in a $10,000 medical bill due in 45 days. Describe a way to relocate two cars and an apartment full of stuff at zero cost to this magical valley of freedom (as in beer) and plenty.
      • jsnk 14y ago
        I did not have $10000 med bill coming my way, but I lived a very frugal life during my university days. Some of it is written here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371702). With that said, I think you could have saved money on several things. $900/month is a lot for students. I decided to go to school in small city instead of a large one because I knew it would be cheaper to live there. By sharing rooms with 4 other students, I only paid between $325/month to 375/month. This was including, heat, water, power etc. Did you have cable TV or internet? Cut it. You spend minimum $40 on it. Did you ever eat out? Never do it. You can save $1000/month there. You mentioned that you drove. Sell the car. Car costs much more money that you think. $16000 is not a lot, but that's actually enough for many students. I made less than that during 4 month summer internships, and I paid my tuition and living expenses without any problem.
  • Camillo 14y ago
    I think it all boils down to your decision of getting married, especially to someone who couldn't work and you had to support. That was the one big luxury you chose to splurge on.
    • bane 14y ago
      I don't disagree. In theory she would have been able to work 90 days after we got married (the time it took to get a work permit). But 9/11 happened between the time we got married and that 90 days and it put her in a holding pattern for two years. After she got her permit, she started working and things improved quite a bit.
  • mindcrime 14y ago
    Getting married, trying to improve oneself and not leading an itinerant life should be among the basic affordances society can guarantee to any person. This may not be a very popular position, but I disagree. I don't think society owes a single one of us anything. By what possible mechanism could they be said to incur that obligation anyway? Now, you could argue that it's in the best interests of society-as-a-whole to provide those basic affordances, and I think certain results in game-theory would support that argument. But, to my way of thinking, there's still no reason to expect that "society" will guarantee anything for any one individual. Maybe I'm just weird in this regard, but at nearly 40, I'm still unmarried... biggest reason? I grew up dirt poor, never felt like I could afford to start a family, and so never seriously pursued marriage... and I was obsessive about spending my time trying to ramp myself up the socio-economic ladder so that one day I could do things that mattered to me. Now at this age, whether or not I ever do get married is a whole new question, for a variety of reasons. But the point is, I - for one - never had any expectation that society should provide for me to an adequate level that I could marry and skimp out on hard work. All of that said, I received various random acts of charity throughout my younger years and, looking back on it all, I think I agree with the gist of TFA. Some of those random acts came at critical junctures and probably made a huge difference in me achieving what I have achieved, and me having committed suicide out of despair and depression 20+ years ago. Somebody gave me a car once, when mine had broken down. That enabled me to keep working and keep going to school, when the alternative would have been a complete shuddering stop to my progress. But, as appreciated as that was, I appreciate it as a gift and see no reason to believe that anybody owed me that.
    • bane 14y ago
      I think I agree with the broad strokes of your argument. Consider this, because somebody gave you a car, or somebody gave me a $1000 check, it kept us on the upwardly moving socioeconomic ladder, ensuring that our taxes would become many times what they would have been had we stayed working hourly low waged jobs. Consider if those things had been paid for out of the tax base, thus putting a net positive back into the system. For sake of comparison, a few friends of mine from where I grew up could't stick with the living hell of it all and didn't finish college (those that tried) for a wide variety of reasons (very few of those reasons were laziness), I paid around the same in taxes each year over the last five years than any of them made in salary during the same period. They're effectively making the same wage working today as they made in their early 20s, thus greatly lowering the tax base that they could have provided back into the system. I can't say that a single pivotal act of state-sponsored charity would have turned their lives around and made them into vastly more productive citizens, but a few dollars here and a discount there could have been all it took. Who knows? I think my point is that putting it in terms of who "owes" what, is probably not the right model. If the system isn't dysfunctional, you can trivially calculate what the average family of n requires, and make sure that the working adults in that family, working a full-time job, can earn enough to make that if working full-time is what they choose to do. A medical surprise or an auto repair or what have you shouldn't be something that derails their entire lives. In my case, we were both living spartan, but comfortable, lives after college for around $40k per year combined (my first job after graduating). This is with a $900/mo apartment, one car payment, and no children. We ate out once or twice a week, and cooked in the rest. We had enough to clothe ourselves professionally and keep the lights on when we wanted them (not when we needed them), not eat absolute garbage three meals a day, and a few hours at the end of the day in "free-time". It works out to about $20/hr. And turns out that the literature shows that in my area, a living wage for 2 adults is shown to be $19.25 [1] Now there's an argument that there should be jobs that aren't living wage. Unskilled, extremely low end jobs, like fast food restaurants, they should pay enough to get people into the work force, but motivate them to move up and above that. It's an interesting bit of social engineering. But it has a problem that's not always overcome. That's because the minimum wage is like a speed limit. It's the default setting unless some other factor causes you to deviate from it like a lack of a hiring pool. [1] - http://livingwage.mit.edu/ http://livingwage.mit.edu/
• EliRivers 14y ago
  Although if you ever paid for English lessons, somebody owes you a refund :)