My husband and I are moving from California to Yucatán in April. Hopefully the cost of living there gives us a better quality of life.
you’re gonna feel real stupid when that meteor comes for round 2
We’ll wear helmets.
Something tells me if they gave him 40 hours he’d be posting about how he has no free time to enjoy his life.
Mkay but why shouldn’t someone be able to live a dignified life working 25 hours a week? Why does it have to be 40?
No. That’s not full time work. Full time is 35-40 minimum, often closer to 50.
That’s the type of job you have while you are in college or pursuing education for a better job.
I worked 10-20 hours a week in college. Work 25 hours a week and having nothing else to do is working 3 days a week. If OP worked 5 days a week they’d up theri income substantially, but they refuse to do so.
Big “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” energy with this comment.
It’s insane that you think people have to hit a minimum bar of “productivity” to justify living above a barely-scraping-by level, and that you set that bar at over half a person’s waking hours.
what should people do then? work 10 hours a week and then sit around watching TV for 120?
Yes, why the fuck not? Social safety nets and access to basic human necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare should not be gated by some arbitrary number of “working hours”.
because society would collapse. social programs only work by having more people putting into them than are taking out. they are a form of insurance.
resources are not infinite. the insurance company can’t operate if it’s pay outs exceed it’s pay ins.
So your argument is that if everyone has access to basic necessities, society would collapse? What in the slipperiest of slopes are you talking about?
If your “society” is dependent on people voluntarily going into wage slavery, maybe it should collapse.
He’s got a roof over his head, food to eat, and a ton of leisure time. That is dignified.
His comment about one accident away is something he’d still be facing with 40 hours a week. We could all do with improvements to the social safety net.
I don’t know how leisurely that leisure time is gonna be, considering he’s only got a hundred bucks to play with, coupled with the stress and anxiety of being one car repair or injury away from financial ruin.
You’re absolutely right that the social safety net needs improvements, but that net should be there for everyone, not just those that work some arbitrary number of hours.
Which would be a valid complaint. Your life should not be an endless grind for the privilege of having the most basic necessities to survive.
Only good capitalist is a dead capitalist.
Tightly regulated ones are ok…
The killer is volatility—irregular hours + fixed bills = constant crisis mode.
I don’t blame anyone who works a job for it not paying a living wage.
You do our masters arguing for them
This is killing me in a different way.
Weekly pay for monthly bills.
Most of my bills land between the 10th and 20th of the month, which means I have to set aside and reserve money from my other paycheques to cover that range.
I am bad at doing so.
Open an account for rent and other known monthly expenses put 25% of that total from each check(or 50% if paid 2x a month). For utilities that are variable use an average of the 5 highest bills you gotten for each account. direct deposit some amount into a account for emergency savings. And the rest to your main account. NEVER steal from your bills account. You can add an amount for fun money as well.
That would be a great idea if I had any discernable savings. I expect I need at least half a month of money in my bills account to balance everything out, for those weeks that I am paid less than what I need to pay for bills.
That’s the point of setting up the bills account. If you deposit directly to it each check the amount you need based on how many checks you get. You won’t have to worry about finding your bills money when they are due and you’ll know how much you have to spend on other stuff because bills are already accounted for. If paid weekly put 25% of your total bills(rent, phone, Internet, gas, electric water ect.). For easy math let’s say total bills are $1600 a month you’d but $400 each pay check into the account ideally using direct deposit so it’s automatic. If paid every 2 weeks $800 a check. For usage based bills (water electric ect put enough for worst case bills in each month) over time you’ll build up extra money but leave it alone until you have at least 3 months extra in the account ( it could save your ass some day).
Let’s say your take home is $580 a week $400 to bill which leaves you with $180 a week for food and gas and fun. Seems pretty shitty and I’d recommend finding a cheaper place to live or get a roommate if possible in this scenario but at least you can clearly see how much you can actually spend while your bills are already accounted for. Is still recommend taking another $30 out leaving $150 for food and gas and put it directly into a savings account. Or split it $20(emergency fund) $10(fun stuff).
Don’t buy fun stuff (games, drugs, alcohol, movies, eating out) unless you can cover it from fun stuff account.
Emergency fund is for car repairs medical bills loss of income not a new TV or vacation.
If you get a raise 90% of the new take home should go to 80/20 split emergency/ fun stuff. If you can get at least 3 months of income (6 months would be better) saved in your emergency fund you can re-allocate some of it to food /gas day to day account and fun stuff account but only do that if you need to save your sanity, because in my experience every time you feel like you’re making progress some big bill will come along and wipe it out.
This all sounds great until you realize that you need time to run up to this, or a modicum of savings in order to make it happen.
Your numbers are optimistic at best. My bills vary and they’re more than 70% of my income (roughly).
It’s more efficient to deposit my money into a bill payment account, then take out what I can spend from that.
Guess what I already do?
Guess how much “spend” I have, per week, that needs to cover all of my gas, food, and everything else? I’m not even saving a dollar, and my available money per week is around $200.
That seems great until you realize that I’m Canadian and it’s Canadian dollars, and $200 CAD is around $150 USD.
I’m employed, full time, in a specialized field, and I can spend $100 USD a week on food because I need the extra $50 for incidentals and gas.
I don’t need a budget. I have a budget. I need a raise.
Ask for a raise. One thing that might help you stretch your money a bit further is utilizing a food pantry or food bank. Not sure if they are as common in Canada.
I was only off by $30 in my scenario compared to your situation. Having multiple accounts and using direct deposit to help divide your budget upfront just makes it easier.
I’m lucky that money isn’t a major concern for me at this point in my life, but earlier in my career when my ex-gf had a significant amount of credit card debt doing our budget this way really helped and got her to be debt free.
I’m not sure why you think my scenario requires savings to start, If you’re already paying all your bills. This is just a tool to help manage your budget.
I need savings because all my bills land in the same week-and-a-half timespan.
So there needs to be all of the money in the account before that happens.
I know, it’ll balance itself out in the long term, but the weeks I don’t have bills to pay are usually the weeks that I need to refill the pantry, and end up spending more than I have allocated for that week so that I can eat.
I need to accumulate the base amount to pay all my bills when they come due, before I can really get started.
I know it seems really simple, once all my bills are done for the month, start then! Except there’s probably incidentals, like the food that I mentioned, that need to be purchased, that I just can’t afford on the $100 available for me that week. So I take what’s needed, and then I’m behind again. The cycle continues.
I had a very good system for this when I was getting paid twice a month. I took the ~400 or 450 or whatever (again CAD) from each paycheck, and I split my bills so that, by cost, they were roughly split between before-the-15th and after-the-15th pay periods. I’d get paid, take my share, let the bank do the rest, and when I get a notification for a bill I need to pay by hand, from my calendar app, I go and pay it in full.
Then I ended up with weekly pay and suddenly, I’m paying 130%+ of a weeks income to pay my bills on the same week.
It fucked me up man. I’m still pretty wrecked by it and it’s been like this for more than a year.
If you can afford $9/mo, YNAB (You Need A Budget) is a great app for managing income and expenses that don’t necessarily align on a calendar schedule.
I get that budgeting won’t make up for insufficient income, but if it’s actually the financial habits that are holding you back, this app works wonders for learning how to properly plan your expenses.
If you’re into open source stuff and are willing to spend more effort tinkering, ActualBudget is the same concept, but lacks some QoL features (notably, auto-importing transactions from your bank/credit card statements).
I’m a big fan of a budgeting software called “budget with buckets”.
It’s the same envelope/bucket budgeting method as YNAB, except it only runs on your machine so you have greater privacy. It comes with an unlimited, untimed free trial, since it often can take months to decide if a budgeting software works for you. I used it for maybe a year without paying. If you do pay, it’s a one-time payment.
It supports account syncing for a pittance - I think it was $15/year.
The rich have optimized too much “slack” out of the system. Every optimization is more profit to the rich and less flexability and benefits to the working class.
I mean, I don’t want to say that the american system is perfect - or even good. But anon is really missing out on some significant and obvious financial options, and really this is due to the defeatist, doomer attitude they express in their last few sentences. They are effectively resigning themselves to the life of poverty they envision because they don’t want to consider that there might be things within their control to inprove their situation.
lol “financial options” in a dying town in a flyover state
Yeah. So how do you think OOP could improve their financial situation?
Are you going to share the knowledge with the class or keep it to yourself?
The problem with saying obvious things to people with doomer attitudes is that they dismiss them out of hand as soon as they hear them. Literally any suggestion that is made is “dumb” or “impossible” or ends up being more evidence that the system is out to hurt and oppress them specifically.
And of course, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right - or at least the latter part is true.
Overcoming any doomer mindset and beginning to work on your problems starts with admitting that maybe things aren’t quite as bleak as you think they are, and allowing yourself to believe that a better life is possible. Without that, no advice -regardless of content - will help
Go array, Ayn Rand.
This is why no therapist will ever say “okay, so here’s what you need to do to solve your fucked up problems.” Their patients need to come to the answers themselves to accept and take action on them.
This is not controversial. It is literally standard practice among mental health professionals.
You’re not even talking to the 4chan OP directly (probably), this is a comment thread on a different site.
Right, but the reason it was posted here is to garner sympathy for this sort of doomer attitude, and I see this sort of attitude on Lemmy quite frequently. It’s the attitude of all the people downvoting me. So I figured I’d address the issue directly
Nah, im downvoting youcause you are not providing a lot of value to the conversation and keep dancing around with statements meant to look down on others.
Basically im downvoting you cause i dont really care to watch you metaphorically masturbate to your own intelligence as a conversation style.
People are downvoting you because you claim that they could do better relatively easily but refuse to explain how. It’s hard to not take it as insensitive bullshit when you don’t substantiate your claim, and why wouldn’t people downvote insensitive bullshit in a thread like this?
Like I said: go away, chud.
Why?
You still have not disclosed the quote “serious financial options”, and as an autistic person who is not able to deduce conclusions based on breadcrumbs all you’re doing to me is withholding information. So, congratulations I guess. You made your point while filtering the disabled.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, I’m not autistic and I also don’t get the point he’s trying to make. Probably something like “get a better job”, “leave to somewhere where things are better”, “go live with your friends/parents/whatever”.
Usually these people take it as an article of faith that there’s something you could do to unfuck your situation, without necessarily having any idea what that something is. I think he’s just fundamentally speaking abstractly.
They are literally in the other response saying they dont really have any real suggestiins but are sure that if they were in that situation that they woukd come up with something cause they are soooo clever. Like it purposely lacks empathetic insight or any awareness of luck and situational start points.
Its really just fluff to boost their ego and keep a negative view on others. It just isnt conversational, its the same as chest pumping but with fancy sounds.
I, of course, have my own ideas about what I would do in OP’s shoes. But I don’t claim that these are the “right” answers, and I don’t think these are the answers you “should” give. Literally all I’m saying is that OOP has options, and his biggest problem is that he refuses to believe they exist. So if you are in a similar situation to OOP, or empathize with him and want to know what advice would improve his situation, what I am saying is that you should start by opening up to the possibility that OP improving his life is under his control, and then just start thinking of ways that he could. And sure, some of these ideas you come up with will be dumb, or wrong. Some will seem like great ideas but will fall apart during implementation. And that’s all fine. There are no bad ideas, even if they don’t work, because the process of creating these ideas in the first place is the most important part of the process.
I don’t see what serious then from having a second shitty job? At 25 hours a week they’ve definitely got free time.
Dont quote me on this but having a 2nd job would disqualify them from Medicare, which appears to be their only form of health insurance.
That makes sense - for a given value of sense. American health care is just evil.
I’ll second stray’s opinion, but also add on that you’re typically fighting for a job in those shitty areas. Anon is likely incredibly lucky to have gotten the above average wage job, and will still be in a big competition with others for the average wage jobs.
Working two jobs can be difficult to impossible. The schedules usually aren’t fixed and cause frequent conflicts. A lot of places aren’t even willing to hire you if already work elsewhere because they don’t want the hassle.
Anon needs to find full time employment and get a roommate.
And vote blue
i know people making 150K a year, who complain they are broke.
and they often actively refuse any suggestion of cutting their spending, getting a roommate, etc. if you suggest maybe their trade in their 50K car they are spending $1000/mo that that they never drive… they tell you to f yourself.
it’s hilarious. and they go on and go on just like OP about how it’s the government’s fault. Nothing, including their own personal choices, is their own responsibility. They are just a hapless victim and the world is a big mean place oppressing them for choosing to waste $100 a day on uber eats rather than cook and spend $10 a day for food.
Ah yes, poverty is the individuals fault and if impoverished people were just better with money they’d be fine
And this is why some people are voluntarily living in their cars, you can’t save for shit when rent eats 2/3 of your paycheck
Which seems like a decent plan, untill your house breaks down or runs out fuel in the middle of nowhere, or your apartment gets impounded while you’re at work or using the gym shower, or even just while you’re sleeping in it…, and then auctioned off after the mail notice they sent to your last physical address was not responded to in time.
Its basically not legal, anywhere in the US, right now, to live in a car and park it almost anywhere.
You have to be hypervigilant, to survive this way, and … that just is PTSD, it’ll make you worse at your job, more likely to lose it.
So we’re basically just making a permanent, sub-proletariat class, thats just gonna get funneled into jail or some kind of concentration camp, probably just turned into some kind of functional, if not formal slave class, whether by debt or criminal conviction or both… within, I dunno, 5 years or less?
I wish we lived in a society where the common belief was that a rising tide lifts all ships, instead of this pull yourself up by your bootstraps rugged individualism nonsense.
Funny thing about that one, the original meaning of that bootstrap idiom was to mean basically impossible, and yet it’s used about as unironically as trickle down economics was
who is coming to help you? or anyone?
until then all you can do is help yourself.
and if you refuse to do that… well you get what you get.
I don’t think I’ve heard the bootstrap phrase unironically in the past decade. I truly don’t remember even hearing it outside of contexts like this on reddit or similar.
Ah well, last guy who talked like that got his cranium evacuated by the CIA in broad daylight, so uh…
… yeah …
“Voluntarily”
For many, they get the air quotes
Those companies would be screwing you regardless, you can’t get a company to do anything but acquire profit without government to restrain them, otherwise they run the show and would own you as a slave. Only government limits their power, which would be absolute otherwise.
Unfortunately, our government is now under the control of corporations and has been for some time (since at least “money is free speech” and “corporations are people” court victories), defeating it’s purpose. We used to break up monopolies and remove business licenses for unlawful practices! The good old days.
Hmmm, if corporations are people, and they make and employ AI, that means AI is people or something. So that’s kinda neat.
Clearly government has failed in limiting their power.
I will not consider a corporation or AI a ‘person’ until Texas publicly executes one.
Why do we pay taxes before we pay for rent? If the government won’t provide housing at least they could be nice and not ask for their cut before we get that done.
In Canada at least rent payments are tax deductible so you’ll get all tax paid on those monies back
Still not enough cookies. Nice improvement though.
I did the math based on the average volume of a cookie and Elon Musk’s pile would be 15.6 cubic kilometers. That doesn’t account for any air gaps between cookies, either.
“American experiment” I hate that phrase.
America is just an arbitrary area on the ground some of us were born inside. It’s not some erudite experiment; it’s five corporations in a trench coat pretending to be a country.
All governments are experiments in how we organize and order society. Some experiments (governments) lead to greater flourishing than others, like socialism and communism (in theory). We’d have better evidence that those forms of government actually bring what they promise if oligarchies didn’t shut that shit down as soon as it takes route (see South America).
This is what people mean by that:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
In its conception is very much was an experiment. “A republic, if you can keep it” so to say.
They’d already failed the experiment before the ink dried: 34 out of 47 founders owned slaves. I guess the natives weren’t too equal, either. Oops!
OOP can live alone and pay bills on part time minimum wage is insane
15 bucks is like double minimum wage in most places. But yeah, I’d love $750 rent, but he obviously lives in the middle of nowhere
I graduated in 1984 when unemployment was 10% and minimum wage was $3.35/hr. My friends and I all left the burbs for the inner city and we would live 5-7 of us in a house. Nonskilled jobs were more plentiful and there was public transportation. Sometimes we had a land line phone, never had cable. Plenty of parties and beer though. Don’t know if this helps anybody but it’s how we got by
I am really shocked when I hear these budgets that more people aren’t trying communal living, or at least roommates. When I was young and broke, that is what I did.
Genuinely tho I think the economy is why it seems like everyone 20-35 is in a polycule.
Yeah for all of the talk about socialism and communism. We never used those words, just did it out of necessity. It’s not for everyone. Some cities now have laws limiting how many nonrelated people can live in a house. Mostly brought on by immigrants and xenophobia.
Compared to Now: I would LOVE to have $100 a month all to myself.
The American experiment has succeeded, because the suffering is the point and the system is working as intended.
Exactly. The wealthy are living beyond reality now and have adapted the population to working for pittance, living in squalor, and are above the law.
America is the nicest 3rd world country anywhere in the world! America #1
It’s weird to see this kind of comment and also a Ukrainian flag in the username.
It’s weird to see this kind of hypocrisy and also… no, wait, it’s the same username who thinks adult women can’t have small breasts. Kindly fuck off.
I have never made any such claims.
It’s a nation of individual freedom taken to the extreme. That includes the freedom for wealthy individuals to exploit everybody else. And Anon is on the side of the exploited. Anon does seem as a person that will always argue for complete freedom, so finally maintaining the exploitation of themselves and the situation they find themselves in.
It’s a nation of individual freedom taken to the extreme.
It is ?.Have you not lived with a HOA ?
No
Why am I not free to ingest what drugs I want if we are so free?
Nixon wanted to legally bash up hippies and black people.
Drugs makes the chattel lazy. Can’t have that. It might hurt GDP.
Usually because a group beneficial to rich folks didn’t like it.
If you’re rich you can.
