Maybe you should not live somewhere so expensive and stop spending money on unnecessary things. You can switch to eating cheap food and minimize your expenses.
If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.
If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.
Edit: you've posted a bunch of other flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments in this thread as well. Please stop doing that. It's not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227287.
Thanks for replying so nicely - I know it's not pleasant to get a moderation scolding.
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...
• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...
• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...
2. This article would be better for poor people to read.
3. Okay
It’s also useful for non-poor people to know how poor people are conditioned to think and behave.
your grasp of statistics lets you down. US pay is distributed like this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...
Given that education requires spare income, and spare time, how are you supposed to gain qualifications/training to allow you to up your income?
Assuming that everyone was able to become qualified, given the saturation in the market place of cheap, new people, how will that glut of supply increase media wage?
If you cannot earn, how are you supposed to save for "financial responsibility"?
You have a workplace accident, not your fault. Now you have huge hospital debt. This is coupled by inflation on fuel and housing. Minimum wage doesn't rise. how are you supposed to earn more?
Because The Poors waste their money?
> You can switch to eating cheap food and minimize your expenses.
So, The Poors shouldn't care about nutrition?
> If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.
This is so naive.
Either that or they are not using their time well for making money.
>So, The Poors shouldn't care about nutrition?
cheap and nutritious don't have to be mutually exclusive
>This is so naive.
It means you are living a life you can't afford.
When the choice is between "living a life you can't afford" and "not living at all as they do not have any money to pay rent", I think it is clear that people should try to live.
I agree that a lot of people make really poor financial decisions, but don’t think everyone has the same earning potential as you.
you've not worked in retail have you?
If you had to work 50h/week plus 3-4h commute every day, how would you study programming exactly? If you didn't have access to a computer, how would you do it? If everyone around you made it seem like it's an activity out of your reach, how would you figure out it's not?
That is one of the problems of the "cycle of poverty". Moving requires a large upfront capital investment for a moving truck or gas for your own vehicle at the very least, as well as taking time off of work for house and job hunting (since getting to your old job may be unfeasible from wherever you manage to find a home). Not to mention you'll need to pay up for a deposit for the new location without having the old deposit back yet and in almost all cases either a fee for breaking your lease or paying two rents simultaneously for a month or more.
Summarized, that is easily hitting 5.000 $ if not more.
> If you are just making ends meet you are not financially responsible.
Are you really calling nearly 70% [1] (or, after COVID, likely more!) of Americans "irresponsible" for having less than 1000$ in savings?
Were the rate of people in that circumstances something like 5% or lower, I might be inclined to agree. But that large amount speaks rather for a systematic problem!
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-69-americans-less-1-17...
There are financial instruments like loans where you can for a fee get money which you can use now and pay back later.
>Are you really calling nearly 70% [1] (or, after COVID, likely more!) of Americans "irresponsible" for having less than 1000$ in savings?
Yes. I don't even have a job that pays well and I could quit my job and live for years if I wanted to off my savings. Now I'm perhaps an outlier, but you should have a buffer in case you can't work for whatever reason or something unexpected happens.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danipascarella/2018/04/03/4-sta...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/30/covid-consumers-did-great-jo...
[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/07-08/consumerism
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/47-percent-of-americans-say-...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
If you’re poor your credit history is likely shot. Good luck getting good terms on that loan.
> Yes. I don't even have a job that pays well and I could quit my job and live for years if I wanted to off my savings.
It means your job in fact does pay well.
> you should have a buffer in case you can't work for whatever reason or something unexpected happens.
You should also not get sick, have an education, be born into a wealthy family. There are a lot of nonactionable “shoulds” one can throw around.
What should e.g. waiters / waitresses do then? Drive to work for hours every day so they can serve coffee to those who can afford to live where they need to work?
You make it sound simple but it is not.
Eventually there wouldn’t be enough in cities and they’d have to raise wages to equalize, but a lot of people can’t even envision not living in a mega-city.
And you also need to consider social networks. Poor people depend heavily on their existing social network for financial safety. Having a social safety network when things go poorly is the difference between having a bad time and going homeless. Moving to a new area involves potentially shedding that safety network, which is a high risk high reward maneuver. Often for those on the edge of financial ruin the potential downsides emotionally dominate the potential upsides, which is unsurprising if you've ever experienced poverty.
Can it be done? sure. People do do it, after all. But it's difficult, risky, and expensive. If you ever find yourself wondering why most people don't do something that's "easily" done, then chances are it's less about people being lazy or dumb and more about there being factors you've missed.
> but a lot of people can’t even envision not living in a mega-city.
I think the snide tone here is completely unwarranted. It's not that people "can't even envision not living in a mega-city", they live there for a variety of perfectly rational reasons. If you've ever talked with the working class in those "mega-cities", a lot of them would absolutely love to move to at least a smaller city, but feel like they can't because of everything I said above.
And even outside those mega cities it's not like everything is perfect either; there's not some magical utopia in Kansas or wherever with high wages and low COL that the workers are too stupid or too myopic to move to. Most of the areas with jobs are also expensive, and getting more expensive still. Places that are actually cheap are cheap because there isn't a lot of work to do, because they're unpleasant places to actually live, or because they involve a hellacious commute into the areas where the jobs are.
The commute thing might sound petty if you have a new car, but it's a big problem if you're poor. Long commutes cost more in gasoline and maintenance, and an unexpected breakage can put savings (if any exist) and jobs at risk. Nevermind that adding a long commute might not be possible on top of the hours required to float the household financially.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.