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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care

The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?

Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.

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I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s).

Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.

I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.

Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.

Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.

Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.

You focus on banking, I’m talking about budgets. Do you track every cent in and out and have a quarterly updated forecast of your financial position a decade out? How close are you to that? If your answer doesn’t include a spreadsheet of some sort you’re not budgeting but taking a shortcut on faith your intuitions are correct.

Did you get taught how credit applications work, how banks determine credit worthiness, how to depreciate an asset, how to calculate lifetime cost of a vehicle, how to draft a bill of materials for a project? All things everyone should be able to do. It’s the lack of these skills and the cost of living crisis that creates ripe markets of ignorant people to exploit for profit through their financial mistakes.

Your school offers home ec? Mine dropped it forever ago. Only the trade school kids learned anything more hands on AP chem.

Cars are more reliable sure, but less maintainable in a home garage. I didn’t bring them up because the best argument I have for cars is repealing cafe and taxing cars annually with a multiplier for wheelbase squared x miles.

No I don't budget to that degree. Neither did most people 30 years ago.

I put a percentage of my income into an investment account automatically every payday and forget about it. What I have left is my spending money. That's very simple and tends to work for me.

My bank app does that stuff automatically. They have identified and classified pretty much all merchants so the app can breakdown spending and tell you exactly how much you spend on essentials, restaurants, alcohol, etc.

You get the same info as your spreadsheet, but without any work.

Exactly. If you are taught to balance a checkbook, it inherently forces you to budget.

> Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.

Yeah, getting your engine rebuilt used to be a fairly common occurrence. Now, unless you own a vintage car, it's quite rare.

> You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you.

Very true. The US health insurance industry is to blame for a lot of the consolidation; it's getting harder and harder for independents to survive as time goes on, with smaller providers being less attractive for insurers to begin with and the ones who will deal with them squeezing them more and more. The increasing documentation requirements by insurers are also much harder for independents to meet.

Society is consciously created by the active participants in that system. Government fails to hold them accountable for directly creating unwanted outcomes. Task companies with robust interoperability and let’s see how that goes.

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