Why do Americans pretend they're not broke when most Americans are in debt?
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Yeah, close to 6% of the population is making unfathomable amounts of money and the crazy thing is that just 6% of the population is still 20 Million people. You could replace the entire population of Tokyo with American millionaires and still have more to spare to claim New York too.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Tokyo metro area is more than 36 million people.
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Same here, funny carry a balance, but at least for a couple of weeks I owe my credit card company.
Simply because if I use my debit card, i get nothing. Use my credit card and I get 2 to 3 percent off...
Yeah, I pay it off about twice a month, but usually between the day I schedule a payment and the day it arrives I've used the card again, so it's rare for me to have a zero (or negative!) balance.
I do like the CC rewards, but they get that my "shorting" / charging the merchant. So, if the merchant is part of your community, try to avoid involving a CC processor by paying in cash. (I think cash is a pain to deal with, so my in-built preference is for some sort of card / phone payment system.)
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I would rather no debt, but I kinda need a house because it's illegal to buy a field and live there in a yurt
Come out to the country. Just make sure your field is outside city limits, and you'll probably be fine living there, as long as your sewage doesn't drain into a protected waterway. A 3-phase septic wouldn't be too hard to put in, but it's a lot easier if you'll rent heavy machinery instead of shovels.
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We're talking about an average over 30 years. The market will dip multiple times through that period, but it will likely average ~10% per year gains as it has for more than a century.
I meant more like something akin to the great depression, but I get the point, if you have a buffer to wait out bad times you can enjoy some extra money for less price
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Tokyo metro area is more than 36 million people.
True but I think the rich are about 10% so I think that's number should be closer to like 30-35m
Either way, US has a mega city or canada sized country of pure high income and or asset owner.
These people are true benefecies of the empire. They essentially enforce regime orthodoxy on political level while providing their professional services to the owner class. For this they are permitted to thrive, while the rest of working class is being driven into more poverty with each generation.
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Come out to the country. Just make sure your field is outside city limits, and you'll probably be fine living there, as long as your sewage doesn't drain into a protected waterway. A 3-phase septic wouldn't be too hard to put in, but it's a lot easier if you'll rent heavy machinery instead of shovels.
Not an option in the UK
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Not an option in the UK
Well, I would say you could immigrate to the U.S., but that's a bad idea for a number of reasons, IMO.
No countryside up in Scotland anymore?
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Toxic capitalism, instagram
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Well, I would say you could immigrate to the U.S., but that's a bad idea for a number of reasons, IMO.
No countryside up in Scotland anymore?
There is countryside but you are not allowed to live on land without planning permission, I presume Scotland has a fairly similar system too.
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Tokyo metro area is more than 36 million people.
Yeah but the tokyo metro area is an insanely large sprawl only rivaled by the tristate area of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut.
I kinda meant just the dense city lines of both which is still an insane amount.
That entire tristate area is also 20 million people so its more people than that that are wealthy enough to think the empire as a truly good thing. -
I used to be comfortably poor with no debt. My income, expenses and living standards were low.
Now earning a little over minimum wage and fucking hell life is easy, but largely because I was poor and just got used to not having things. I continue that now.
Once you learn how to live on very little money out of necessity, living comfortably within your means as your wages increase doesn't feel like such a bad thing.
And anyone who has been without a safety net understands that keeping a buffer in their bank account feels way better than splurging on impulsive luxuries.
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Speaking of "paycheck to paycheck":
I certainly have compassion for people who live paycheck to paycheck because they're struggling to make ends meet, but not those living "paycheck to paycheck" who have the ability to save, but choose not to. And, despite popular belief, the majority of people in the "living paycheck to paycheck" category are actually the latter. But it's easy to assume the former meaning (it's more intuitive, after all), so those two 'subsets' are almost always (basically everywhere other than within the depths of the methodology of the research that yields the figures) conflated, and so "living paycheck to paycheck" is often used to great effect in rhetoric as a result.
The fact is, on average, Americans have more of an overspending problem, than an underearning one. Did you know that 48% of consumers earning over $100,000 a year, and over a third earning over $200,000 are "living paycheck to paycheck"? Meanwhile, 25% of those earning less than $50k aren't living paycheck to paycheck (a demo I was part of until I eclipsed $50k a few years ago)—maybe it's time to more closely examine what those people are doing, and follow their example.
It's absurd that anyone making less than $50k a year is saving more money than someone making $200k.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's absurd that anyone making less than $50k a year is saving more money than someone making $200k.
If they arent buying assets they arent actually saving, they are just building a buffer against drowning.
Also to simplify your percentages there of people living paycheck to paychecks.
- 75% under 50k a year
- 48% of people making 100k a year (only 21% of people are above this line)
- 33% of people making 200k+ a year
Seems like increasing pay does reduce that issue even if there is an issue of spending to your max budget in america but I'd actually rather have currency in circulation than sitting in accounts for the sake of collecting.
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Once you learn how to live on very little money out of necessity, living comfortably within your means as your wages increase doesn't feel like such a bad thing.
And anyone who has been without a safety net understands that keeping a buffer in their bank account feels way better than splurging on impulsive luxuries.
My buffer started at treat £2k as zero. As my wages went up I quickly started going over £5k and then £10k, didn't even know how to spend it. So I didn't spend it.
Within a few years of saving like £5-10k a year I had enough for a pretty good deposit on a house, like 15% or so. The house we got wasn't even at the higher end of what we could borrow. I don't want to min/max wealth, I want to live comfortably, and there are allotments across the road from us.
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Who's pretending?
We're all broke. Unless you're a boomer trying to sell a $0.50 house you bought in the 50s you paid for on a gas station cashier salary. They're ok for the moment. But even a lot of them are going broke now too. Highest demographic of newly homeless last I heard.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Because those boomers who are broke were attempting to keep up with those who actually had money. I know a few examples...
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This is probably a large part of the reason that 70% of generational wealth is gone in two generations, and 90% in three, on average.
Are you saying they mismanage the wealth by selling the assets, therefore not paying capital gains, but also using the cash to fund their lifestyle?
I assumed a fiscal manager would advise them to live off debt in the same way their parent had.
The only way this strategy works at all is if the market value of the assets being used as collateral continuously increases, and not just increases, but increases at a greater rate than inflation and the interest rate on the debt, combined.
Line goes up.
Are you saying they mismanage the wealth by selling the assets, therefore not paying capital gains, but also using the cash to fund their lifestyle?
I'm sure it's not exactly the same in every circumstance, but overall, I imagine some flavor of 'heirs don't have the same financial savvy as those they inherited from, and so they spend the wealth instead of preserving it'.
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I’m just telling you the meaning of the phrase ‘to be in debt’ vs having some debt. I didn’t invent it.
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Good for who?
You can’t figure that out from my comment that you responded to?
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For the person holding the debt.
Isn’t it insane that 4 people downvoted my comment saying that if you’re making more money from debt than it costs to have the debt, it’s good debt? Do these people not understand how money works?
