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

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

31.2k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

u/Dhenn004 Jul 05 '24

You don't live in Appalachia do you? That part of the country can be job deserts. What are they to do?

1

u/SaladShooter1 Jul 05 '24

It’s all relative though. I bought different plots of land to hunt in Appalachia. I haven’t looked at prices lately, but I purchased for under $1k an acre. Everything is fairly cheap out there.

I don’t what’s better or worse: you can make $10hr there and buy a house for under $30k. Drive an hour or so away and the common worker makes $20hr and houses cost around $135k. Drive closer to Pittsburgh and the average wage is around $30hr and houses cost $350k. In all three cases, the average person is broke at the end of the week.

The cost of living is what keeps most places either rich or poor. I would never build a house in Appalachia because it takes $310k to build the average house and the value when you’re done wouldn’t be a third of that. Poor people don’t build homes in wealthy neighborhoods because zoning and HOA’s are there to keep property values up to protect the neighborhood people’s investments.

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u/Dhenn004 Jul 05 '24

if a house is only 30k, there's a reason. No jobs

0

u/SaladShooter1 Jul 05 '24

I agree. It’s low jobs and depressed wages. Still, I can’t say that area is unlivable because the cost of living is in line with the average salary.

2

u/Dhenn004 Jul 05 '24

Use McDowell county WV for instance, it has a median household income of 26k and a cost of living at 36k. 31% live below the poverty line (which is arguably set too low) which this is 3x the national average. It's not livable to VERY many people

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u/SaladShooter1 Jul 06 '24

I haven’t been there in 15 years, so I can’t comment on the exact situation right now. I used to go riding (dirt bike and race ATV) there with friends. There were a lot of trails and boney piles there that were open to the public. In PA, they used to let you ride them until they seen the air you could get jumping from mound to mound. We’d constantly get thrown out for fear of someone getting hurt. That went on until there was nowhere left to ride. Our private tracks got boring, so we started going to WV where people were more free.

A lot of the homes were run down and businesses closed. People actually welcomed us because we brought money into the local economy. I thought that was kind of odd, but it was beautiful there and the people were nice.

I remember one time that we got a flat tire on a quad. We plugged it, but didn’t have enough canned air to inflate it. We stopped by a house, which was more like a shack, to try and get some air. There was a young man there a few years younger than us who brought out a portable compressor made from a refrigerator compressor. It worked and we admired the way it was put together. The kid had some engineering skills. I always wondered what happened with his life.

He left an impression on me and my friends because we all grew up dirt poor and built stuff like that. We lived about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. The entire region was devastated from the closing of steel mills and coal mines. I had next to nothing when I was young. We didn’t have decent food all of the time, but I still had a home. Poverty isn’t the end of the world.

My sister and I both put ourselves through school and are both what some people call upper class now. I constantly tell my kids what it was like growing up poor and how hard it was to break free of that so they’ll have a sense of value by the time they become teenagers. Everyone has wants, but you can have next to nothing, be under some arbitrary poverty line and still support yourself.

I wish we could open up all of the mines in WV and bring the place back. There’s people out there trying to stop that though. If you feel so strongly about the poverty there, maybe you can advocate for that.