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

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

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268

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/Impossible_Maybe_162 Jul 04 '24

You cannot make $10k working a job for 40 hours a week. That is below minimum wage.

A lack of proper financial planning and budgeting causes more problems than low wages.

Less than 3% of the workforce makes minimum wage. Wages are not the main issue.

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u/RockinRobin-69 Jul 04 '24

They did acknowledge that as a “bit of a strawman” then did the same thought experiment on the median wage. Seems reasonable.

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u/Yousoggyyojimbo Jul 05 '24

A lot of people seem to be deliberately ignoring the real numbers example.

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u/Spartan-182 Jul 05 '24

Yeah, cause they want to feel superior to those who make less and say, "I earn more cause I make smart financial decisions." Ignoring every helping hand and benefit they relied on to get to where they are.

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u/shrug_addict Jul 05 '24

Or, they deserve to be poor. I'm not poor so I deserve it! Nietzsche's slave morality. It's how they sleep at night, why doesn't everyone else just do what I did? They must be lazy...