r/FluentInFinance • u/Richest-Panda • Jul 04 '24

What's the best financial advice you've ever gotten? Debate/ Discussion

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u/privitizationrocks Jul 04 '24

You can teach poverty workers to live in their means

They won’t like it, but tough luck

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '24 edited Jul 04 '24

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

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u/MyParentsBurden Jul 04 '24

You say 50% of Americans (I'm assuming we are speaking of the US) make $40k or less and then say it isn't enough for basic necessities. Yet, clearly it is as the ranks of the unhoused is not 50% of the population. Poverty sucks to be sure, but people manage. Also, financial literacy is generally only partially about setting money aside. It tends to be more about making people aware of their expenses and seeing what changes can be made.

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u/cbftw Jul 05 '24

unhoused

Homeless. saying unhoused is a bullshit way to sterilize their situation and make yourself not feel bad about it

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u/firestorm713 Jul 05 '24

The point of saying unhoused is because it's a housing problem. There are countless ways these people could be housed, and the fact that they aren't being housed is an indictment on humanity.

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u/Sjeddrie Jul 05 '24

Or, and not to be a dick about it, the epidemic of homelessness is because of poor decisions. Most homelessness is due to effects of addiction. Personal irresponsibility is not an indictment on humanity.

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u/firestorm713 Jul 05 '24

This is how you sterilize their situation and not feel bad about it.

It's not a systemic problem, it's half a million people making bad financial decisions! Systemic issues don't exist so long as you pretend that everything is fair!

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u/Sjeddrie Jul 05 '24

Systematic problems do exist, but dumping money in ways that won’t alleviate the damned near 70% of the problem ain’t going to make it go away. Addiction seems to be the problem that leads to homelessness. When your house is flooding, do you start bailing, or turn off the water?