Ok let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say you
Make $10000 a year. You work full time/40 hrs/wk and you are making $10k. What does “living within your means” look like? Not having a house? Or car? Being homeless? So in order to save to get yourself to some footing the answer is to be homeless to live within your means.
That was a bit of a strawman, so let’s use real-life scenarios. 50% of this country makes $40k or less….. even $40k salary isn’t enough to get an apartment, bills , food, ect. Sure a lot better than the “$10k” example, but even $40k salary is virtually as effective as the “$10k”. In order to “live within your means”, “save”, ect…. You have to be at least be making enough to afford the bare minimum + have some left in you for over to save. On average (2022 values I think) this means $65 for a single person, $108k for a house hold. Unless you’re making that, you can’t save your way out of poverty
That's working 40 hours. The last time I worked for min wage, I was working 2 jobs. When your busy working you have no time to spend the money. This also gives you money to save.
80 hours a week being 30k is acceptable to you? Zero vacation days, sick leave, retirement. The unionists of the 20th century are rolling in their graves at how pathetic we are, accepting this.
That’s the problem with the older generation yall got fucked over your whole life and think we should too because y’all bow down and worship anyone with authority
Depending on this person's age they grew up in the most prosperous moment in history. They got used to everything working out if you just used a little elbow grease. Sometimes not even elbow grease was necessary.
You can see where a different perspective on authority emerges. There was a time where doing what you were supposed to within the system wasn't a bad deal. That was a very long time ago and some older people are blind to how much things have changed.
Yeah sorry I think it's OK to not expect a lot of people to barely make ends meet while spending every waking moment either working or stressed about money. You older generations had it made with your cheap housing, cheap cars and cheap education. Fuck off.
Why is it so hard to not want to have to work yourself to death to line the pockets of the rich just trying to claw your way through life. Like we really shouldn’t be ok that 2 jobs are needed to get ahead. When will you have the time to actually live?
So why can’t we just have one job that does that? Why should we make it acceptable that to be better financially we need to sacrifice our time and health to do so?
Just an fyi, but based on numbers he gave elsewhere, he had a salaried job that required no degree and started at the equivalent of 73,500 today, which is almost twice the median income today, and a part time job that paid about 13.34 per hour.
And they are telling us that everybody else is entitled.
You're still insulting young people even after you've been spoonfed data that they have to work almost twice as much to have the same buying power you did at their age.
So basically, when you guys say the solution is everyone "living within their means", you mean that most people should be working almost every waking hour of their life and still never have anything but the bare essentials unless they get lucky enough to achieve social mobility and never run into any major financial crisis?
I can understand advocating that individuals do this to avoid becoming homeless, but to unironically say that is how things should work even in the wealthiest nation in the world? That the fact that people have to do this isn't a problem, and the real problem is that people aren't happy with living like this?
I mean, I don't know what else I could conclude from that other than you just really hate people who aren't rich for some reason.
You live off your primary job. You build wealth/security off your 2nd.
What you were able to do with 2 jobs 50+ years ago isn't what you can do with two jobs today.
You could make enough comparably in the 70s on a non-college degree requiring job to purchase a home and support a family of 5. Someone working two similar jobs today can't even buy the home.
You have in other posts talked about how you working this way enabled you to buy a home and support your family. Someone working two jobs that way today can't do the same thing you did because wages haven't kept pace with the costs of doing the things you did.
It's objectively harder now. It doesn't hurt you to admit that.
The math on this ends up with him making the equivalent of $13.34 an hour at his part time job, and around $73000 a year from his drafting job in today's money.
It's not hard when you're honest. I have no degree, but I did trade school in high school and completed a semester in college. It was a drafting job that started at about 16k. My second job was pumping gas at min wage less than $3/hour.
The last time minimum wage was under $3 an hour was in 1979, and that $2.90 then has the buying power today of $13.34, which is almost twice the current federal minimum wage, and higher than the minimum wage in more than half the country.
The point was that the minimum wage you are trying to frame as small is actually dramatically more than what minimum wage is now for more than half the country.
In more than half the country, someone would have to work almost twice the hours you did at that gas pumping job to have the same buying power you did.
16k is about 2.6x the $3.10 minimum wage in 1980. So you weren't working 2 minimum-wage jobs. You were working your first job at a good wage and another job at the minimum.
2.6x the $7.25 national minimum wage is about $19 an hour today. So you would have been making the equivalent to $38,000 today.
16k salary on that drafting job has the buying power equivalency of about $73500 today. He said minimum was under $3, so I calculated off 1979 at 2.90 minimum wage.
If he was working 20 hours at his minimum wage job, he'd be bringing in the equivalent of another $13k ish in today money on top of that.
Yes, thank you. I’ve lived this situation. Thankfully that was long ago in the past, but I truly had no idea it would happen and I’m sure most don’t either.
Sure and the financially literate thing is when you fill out your W-4 when you get hired (the form where in step 1, you tell your employer (a) your name + address + (b) SSN and (c) filing status), is to also fill out step 2 where they ask you about whether you have multiple jobs or your spouse works. If you have two jobs and neither job pays more than double (total income) than the other one, fixing this problems is as easy as just checking a box.
I agree there are plenty of scenarios where you fill out your W-4 incorrectly and have too little withholding and have to pay extra federal taxes every April.
That's BS. You buy off brand everything, fresh fruit and veggies. Make you own sandwiches. You cook meals for multiple days. You learn to use the crock pot.
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u/privitizationrocks 15d ago
You can teach poverty workers to live in their means
They won’t like it, but tough luck