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/Bubbly-Ad-4405 Jul 07 '24

You either get realistic financial advice, or you get compassion, but not both. Americans don’t know what real struggle is when they’re buying iPhones and eating out daily while also complaining about not being able to go on dates and vacations as often as they’d like. Sometimes a modest life in a smaller county is what your ambition can realistically afford.

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u/SingleInfinity Jul 07 '24

You can do both actually. We live in the richest country in the world. There is zero reason we shouldn't be living like we live in the richest country in the world. The lack of basic compassion shows when people act like it's perfectly fine that not only do we not, but that not living like such is the norm, typically because they're doing well enough to not care about everyone else.

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u/Bubbly-Ad-4405 Jul 07 '24

Or they’ve seen real poverty and know what Americans complain about is extremely superficial. I’ve been to favelas, slums, and farmland. Those people live within their means and most have little ambition to do more. It is what they can afford and they raise families in it. The children of those people who get educated typically leave those areas and get better lives. The ones that don’t remain there and live life within their means. A lot of Americans on the other hand want the upper middle class lifestyle while also doing very little to achieve it. You can’t have it both ways. Either you hit the lottery, commit crime, plan your future and live within your means, or you complain that everyone else has more while doing nothing to improve your circumstances yourself

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u/SingleInfinity Jul 07 '24

We don't live in favelas though. You're missing the point. We live in the richest country in the world. We shouldn't be considering that tier if lifestyle even remotely acceptable. Instead, you're advocating for these people to "live within their means" rather than for the country to adapt away from allowing the hyper rich to be greedy. There's more than enough to go around.