I agree... assuming no health/personal catastrophes for you or your family, stable employment, and good training in financial planning. Those are some big assumptions.
Not really, the vast majority of those living in first world nations don't have catastrophic events that ruin them financially.
Also, you don't need 'good training in financial planning', you just need the same amount of common sense my grandparents had - spend less than you earn, and set something aside for a rainy day.
I was laid off in 2008, couldn't get work, had to move to a different state, cashed out my 401k and sold my house 80 grand under what i paid for it and couldn't buy a new house for several years because of law.
Then my hands started hurting and I found out i had vikings disease... i type for a living. first process cost about a grand, insurance doesn't cover much of it.
Now both my hands are worse off and i'm looking at another surgery which will cost more that insurance won't cover.
My wife got into a car accident and we need two cars since i work and she home schools.
My parents are assholes and don't give a shit about myself or my family and my wifes immediate family is all dead. We inherited nothing. Raised 2 kids by ourselves, no grandma/no grandpa, no aunts, no uncles.
The world is trying hard to really fuck people over, and i've managed to stay on top of it.
Now my kids need jaw surgery and another needs teeth work - dental coverage is a joke. The jaw surgery is going to cost 5 grand and the others dental is 1700.
My property taxes are going up year over year. Maintenance costs are going up year over year, salaries have gone up but not as quickly and the tax relief was a joke.
spend less than you earn sounds esier on paper than reality of living.
we downsized our homes, we don't have cable tv, i use a company phone for cell phone, i'm always having to reduce my 401k contributions and even when i try and rollover my prior 401ks that shit is perpetually frozen and no matter where i turn or what I do it seems something is trying to stop me or block me.
All of us have those kinds of problems. I've been laid off, paid a tremendous amount of cash for dental work (growing up with poor dental health sucks), and have no meaningful help from relatives (quite the opposite, they're a regular financial drain because they need constant help.)
I remember being so poor growing up that I used my first paycheck to buy a loaf of bread and a tube of cheap sausage and it was the first time having anything approaching a real meal in a few days.
Costs happen. Kids get sick/injured, cars get damaged or break down, taxes only ever increase.
I save aggressively, consistently live below my means (not miserly, but frugally), do all of the home maintenance and car work I can do safely and legally, and cook almost all of my meals at home from relatively basic ingredients.
And you know what? I have a pretty damned good life. I had to move across the US to a place with a lower cost of living and better job opportunities. My wife had to switch careers. I had to work several years at crappy jobs.
When you buy a thing, evaluate it's lifetime cost. When something breaks, fix it quickly and correctly. Avoid unnecessary costs. Prefer mending to replacing. Save for the unexpected, and then save some more. When dealing in dangerous waters (legal troubles, real estate, complex investments or financials), hire a skilled expert, even if it means lowering your quality of life. Keep enough insurance, and do the work to get multiple quotes or bids for any kind of job.
I don't claim to be poor, but the struggle is real. And like the post above me, my life would be exponentially better if health insurance wasn't terrible.
Our system is designed for people to fail. Even our own president has bragged that another depression would be a good thing since he could buy things up at a discount. (yeah, there is a tweet for everything)
I find it so strange that <100% of Americans are not for everyone having healthcare in a system that doesn't potentially bankrupt a person. It just seems so strange.
America can't afford universal health care - doctors get paid too much. The average doctor's salary here is over 300k USD. The average doctors salary in Europe is almost one-third of that..
Here implying I don’t live here. I really don’t think doctor salaries is the problem with outrageous health car cost. I could be wrong but seems like admin overhead and over prescribing treatment is a big problem from my small point of view.
Edit: also people wanting it and the financials of it being practical are entirely coupled together. My point was I don’t see how someone can not be for the idea of health care for all.
we have a collective paranoia based on several totalitarian governments aroundnthe worls throughout history. this fear influences our attitude toward putting government in charge of many things.
we also have strangely intimate relationships to our doctors. we stick with them even when were not sure theyre doing their best for us. we fear an "anonymous" doctor who doesnt know us personally.
these fears are exploited with imagery like "death panels," where faceless government bureacuracies let people with uneconically feasible conditions die untreated.
to reverse this requires stories of success from Europe told without smugness. many memes are tonedeaf humblebragging about euro healthcare that instantly turn off americans.
Have you ever watched someone try to persuade others to their opinion? Are people perfect evaluators of facts and reason completely impervious to the negative affect of the persuader?
Or is it more common people go along with a emotionally-resonant personality and dismiss their reliance on facts and figures based on intuition?
You can be sure when I buy computer parts, numbers are the bottom line, but what if an ad for, say, an SSD offered a great price and excellent performance. Would you still buy it if next to the price tag, it said that if you did so, you're pathetic?
> "death panels," where faceless government bureacuracies let people with uneconically feasible conditions die untreated.
We prefer the private "Free Market" death panels. (Health Insurance), which effectively do the same thing. But you get a choice in who will deny you cover if you ever go over a limit or could not afford you cover.
> we also have strangely intimate relationships to our doctors. we stick with them even when were not sure theyre doing their best for us. we fear an "anonymous" doctor who doesnt know us personally.
What does that have to do with the issue? Germany has mandatory healthcare insurance, and I'm still free to choose my GP and specialists.
I understand your difficulties and sincerely hope you'll manage to get out of them. Also Im really happy to be in west Europe where we have a real social security. Say what you want, you don't build incentives with health. You just stop and heal people (of your country). Case in point : whoever you are, where I am you will have the expensive surgery / medicine / scanner. For free. Prioritized with your health and benefits, not how much you earn (well that's true to a good approximation)
Homeschool is rather involved, we do hands-on learning so lots of field trips, lots of "Coop classes" with other families, we also do art/music and tutoring and there are park-days for kids to play and so much more.
I live in Austin Texas, you need a second car to survive. Getting wife and 2 kids around town for everything in uber/lyft isn't economical and my wife also runs a not for profit and volunteers with charity and runs events and I have after work activities such as volunteering for first robotics, girl scouts and such.
Likewise, "not having a car" doesn't mean "never leave the house" (source: I don't have a car, leave the house occasionally).
I can appreciate having a car can be useful, but I'd not call it a necessity. Perhaps things are different in the US of A. The perceived poverty threshold is a lot higher. In many countries, if you have clothes, a roof over your head, and can eat regularly, you're good.
>I can appreciate having a car can be useful, but I'd not call it a necessity. Perhaps things are different in the US of A.
American urban planning is heavily car-centric. They talk about "walkable communities", because the opposite is the norm. A large proportion of American towns and suburbs are sprawling, low-density and strictly segregated between residential and commercial developments. Public transport is often meagre or nonexistent. Parts of America are practically uninhabitable without a car. It's probably true to say that Americans are unreasonably attached to driving and averse to walking, but at this stage it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
So if wife needs a car during the day she drives husband to work in the morning and picks him up in the evening, that's what my husband and I do if only one of us works one day, we only have one car. I can't begin imagine owning two cars if only one of us worked! We'd have to have pretty wealthy to even consider that.
If things are that tight, why not send your kids to a public school so your wife can find employment? Even a part-time job would add tens of thousands of dollars to your total annual income and go a long ways towards easing those squeezes you're feeling.
I don't think it matters how exceptional or unlucky the specific situation is. A system that "punishes" bad luck like that is at some level fundamentally broken.
The lack of meaningful systemic mitigation for "bad luck" is what I'm talking about with "punishment". It's why I quoted the word. You're drawing a stricter meaning than I think is apparent in my position, and making a semantic dodge around it.
At the end of the day, someone's life is still wrecked through no fault of their own, and "the system" — which is us — just stands there, all, "Sucks to be you."
Fwiw, I'm all for systems that mitigate bad luck. It's just that... these systems are large, have been in place for a long time, and have immense amounts of inertia. Which is not to say we shouldn't try to change them!
I think we've been agreeing right past one another, then. I'm reminded of the Joe Rogan quote to the effect that "the sooner we can all realize we've been taught how to live life from people operating on the momentum of an ignorant past" (or however it's phrased), the better off we'll all be.
You have had good financial planning habits in your family for two generations. That is in some sense "training" that many first-world poor people don't get.
