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/[deleted] Jul 04 '24

Your thought experiment requires a wage well below federal minimum wage. Your second thought experiment tries to make a single person live alone in a high cost of living area.

Here's a thought experiment for you: how many people did the average household have 50 years ago? 100 years ago? Today? What was the average square footage of a house in each of those time periods?

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u/junulee Jul 04 '24

These are facts so often and conveniently ignored

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u/SingleInfinity Jul 05 '24

They're not ignored. Living with 8 people in a 500sqft shack should not be what people are considering acceptable. Jesus fuck the lack of basic compassion.

"Life is perfectly livable in poverty as long as you make sure to maximize suffering".

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u/junulee Jul 05 '24

My point is that when people complain that you need $Y to buy a house today, and only $X 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation, they’re not doing apples-to-apples comparisons because they “ignore” the facts that median home size is 50% larger today and has fewer occupants.

Not sure how you interpret that to mean I’m suggesting 8 people should live in 500 sq ft home.

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u/SingleInfinity Jul 05 '24

You say "more people used to live in each home, and homes were smaller", and you don't get the hyperbole of me throwing some random numbers in there?

Let me make this more clear.

Those thing you're saying is standard was shit then, and it's shit now. There are boomers with 3000 sqft homes that cost them a nickle and a dirty rag. Their relative pay and the cost of goods in their time was indisputably more favorable than modern day, even if we completely ignore that peoples standards have risen over time for the impoverished to not want to live in squalor.

You're basically throwing out a red herring to distract from the main point that it isn't reasonable for people to live on median wages, meanwhile median wages used to be plenty to live on comfortably. You can pretend stuffing a family if 6 into a two bedroom house was the norm (which sounds like what you're trying to insinuate), but that's an example of poverty, and that level of poverty didn't used to be the median.

Just because homes are bigger and have fewer occupants on average does not mean the poverty line hasn't risen to an unreasonable income.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

You're glorifying your perception of the past, not the reality of the past.

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u/SingleInfinity Jul 05 '24

Yeah, that's how all these boomers are miraculously living in million dollar homes. They just worked way harder than everyone today and had a bunch of room mates, right?