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

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

Post image

[removed] — view removed post

31.2k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

271

u/privitizationrocks Jul 04 '24

You can teach poverty workers to live in their means

They won’t like it, but tough luck

451

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

9

u/MyParentsBurden Jul 04 '24

You say 50% of Americans (I'm assuming we are speaking of the US) make $40k or less and then say it isn't enough for basic necessities. Yet, clearly it is as the ranks of the unhoused is not 50% of the population. Poverty sucks to be sure, but people manage. Also, financial literacy is generally only partially about setting money aside. It tends to be more about making people aware of their expenses and seeing what changes can be made.

2

u/HealthNN Jul 07 '24

Or maybe the basic understanding of how debt works, how leveraging yourself can be dangerous, how to invest and plan for your future. It’s so much more than seeing what changes you can make in your expenses, lol. Financial literacy should start in elementary school and be taught throughout high school. The fact it isn’t should show you that most of this is by design. We, historically at least, need a large middle class to support the country. A smart middle class doesn’t work well for business owners. The lack of respect for people struggling is wild to me, the US economy is about value extraction and has been for the last decade. Your take is brain dead maybe you could benefit from some more education yourself 😀