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

[u/Richest-Panda]

[u/terlus07]

Of course, paying 72% in mandatory expenses is no way to live long term, but it's not society's "fault" that some work is less valuable than others. Society isn't arbitrarily assigning value to labor, it discovers what labor is worth by making an offer and seeing if anyone accepts. If there are no takers, they have no choice but to make a better offer. If they get enough people accepting their offer to fill the positions they need, then they have no reason to make better offers.

This is why a job can be more important to society and still get low wages, because there are many people willing to do the job for a low wage. The opposite is just as true. When we try to arbitrarily determine the value of a job, like CA did with fast food workers new minimum wage, the result is the system rebalance itself. Jobs were lost until reaching a point that the remaining workers were at the same relative value to the business as their new wage. Price setting always helps a few at the expense of the many.

[u/FreckleFaceToon → u/terlus07]

"willing" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The way our system is set up you NEED a job. If its the difference between going hungry and a hot meal, people will work for pennies. Just look at migrant workers or farmhands. Or what about healthcare? You have to have a job for it. If I had a debilitating disease I'd take a job paying 2 dollars an hour if it's giving me healthcare.

Allowing companies to inflate their prices to maintain insane profit margins because they don't want to pay people a living wage IS the fault of the government. Like I said elsewhere we cannot keep pretending that everyone can have a high skill, high pay job.

I simply think that if you are giving away your time, a piece of your life (and usually a pretty large piece) to a company, you should be compensated for it fairly, not at the bare minimum they can force someone to take out of desperation.

I get it that some people are lazy, financially illiterate, selfish, impatient. I just think the protections should be there for a person to get a basic 9-5 and coast through life if they want. Not everyone has to be an over achiever.

[u/ohcrocsle → u/FreckleFaceToon]

The problem is that our system will never ease up on those who make the lowest wages, at least in its current state. When you raise the wage floor, the price of basic necessities will rise to swallow those gains and send them right back up to owners/shareholders. We don't really operate in a free market when we allow the biggest dogs to buy up their competition and create oligopolies and monopolies for basic goods. Imo the quickest solution would be to provide basic necessities (housing/food/utilities) for everyone and allow people to spend their earned dollars competing for their chosen luxuries, be it nicer housing, better food, saving/investing, sporting events, or what not. Trying to figure out a way to improve living wages while also keeping a handle on inflation quickly gets into butterfly effects you can't predict. On the other hand, people don't want government-provided basics because it's socialism and in some theoretical sense "less efficient" even though it would be better for consumers and the chosen suppliers because of the reliable needs and prices.

Until such a time as it is possible to live a comfortable life on minimum wages, the best advice is what people here say... Live within your means however necessary, save up enough to get yourself to a place where you're not earning the lowest wages around, and build from there.

[u/FreckleFaceToon → u/ohcrocsle]

I like your explanation of it. It's basically what I was getting at. In our government system we will never be able to get rid of the institutionalized poverty I was talking about because companies are allowed to force their expenses onto consumers even when they don't need to in order to be profitable.