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There are high COL areas and low COL areas. Around here on the East Coast $35k can buy you a 3bdrm house.
[$38k can buy you a du-plex. So you get a home to live in and an income stream]
If things are really that cheap, I question the availability of jobs. I come from an area in Texas that's cheap like that too. The reason it's so cheap is because no one makes much money from the jobs around there.
In my hometown, you've got a few choices for good jobs - the school district, police dept, state or federal gov't, or a few of the family legacy businesses in town, but they tend to help out their own. Anyone who wanted a decent career had to leave. The rest of the jobs are like gas station clerk and people who want to stay will hold on to that gas station job with a vice grip. Meth and other drugs infect the place like a scourge; people have nothing better to do.
Areas like the New York catskills.... affordable property, no jobs. Good place for retirees on fixed incomes. Not so good for people trying to build a career.
Iirc you live in Maine? I applied for jobs in my field in Maine for quite a while. Visited when I lived in the Boston area & would have loved to live in Maine. Never got a call-back. From what I heard, it wasn't me. They were downsizing or on hiring freezes and in general good jobs are really hard to come by there. I could have been a tourist service worker, though.
Touristy places tend to have the really rich folks that own property that makes them money & all the others who service the tourists for minimum wage, & the lucky 20-30% who have middle class-type jobs which they will not give up.
Last edited by redguard57; 08-05-2016 at 09:07 AM..
I bought 10 acres for $40,000 @6.5% interest?!?!?!??!?!?!? lol............try adding a zero to that for 2016 dollars. Those were completely different times economically back then.
Right... And my parents earned about the same salary then, as I do now. Except they each had one. Money went a lot farther.
... I applied for jobs in my field in Maine for quite a while. Visited when I lived in the Boston area & would have loved to live in Maine. Never got a call-back. From what I heard, it wasn't me. They were downsizing or on hiring freezes and in general good jobs are really hard to come by there. I could have been a tourist service worker, though.
Touristy places tend to have the really rich folks that own property that makes them money & all the others who service the tourists for minimum wage, & the lucky 20-30% who have middle class-type jobs which they will not give up.
Tourism is big in Maine. Along the 3,000+ miles of coastline and a few designated tourist lakes, the seasonal tourism industry booms. Though it is mostly seasonal jobs. The rest of the year it is generally a depressed economy, that has been this way for many decades.
As a retiree, I do fine here on my pension. $18k/year puts us in the top 20% income earning households in our town.
It can be to those who live frugally. I own nothing that cost or is worth more than $50. Being the king of one's tiny castle is worth a lot to me, it totally beats the pants off renting rooms in houses full of drunks, druggies, dealers, sex offenders, and no-life SSI recipients.
If you can afford to live in a not-cheap rooming house - I pay more to rent a room than what many people I know pay to own a house! - the rental income from the extra rooms pays for the maintenance etc.
I'm confused. You say you don't own anything worth more than $50... and then you say the rental income from extra rooms pays for the maintenance.
Cable companies are crying these days, not very profitable...
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD
Comcast earned $16 billion on $74.5 billion in revenue for 2015. After paying an enormous amount o Federal corporate income taxes and a bit of interest, their net income was $8 billion. They take that profit machine and buy content providers. They own NBC-Universal. They'll be buying other monster content companies.
How exactly did you post that to the internet? Smoke signals?
My thoughts exactly. I bought CMCSA in the 1990s as a hedge against the rising price of cable.
And not enough to affordably rent a 1BR apartment in many areas. e.g. in this area a $20,000 household would pay 61% of gross income to rent a 1BR apartment ...
... which is why any household with a mere $20K in income -- a spectacular economic failure by every conceivable measure -- would never live in Beverly Hills, Atherton, or Palo Alto.
The SSA data include everyone whose FICA withholding is reported to the government, so it includes: teenagers, college students, recent immigrants, farm workers, part time workers, housewives working a few hours a week, old people on pensions and Social Security working a few hours a week, and... workers. I am always surprised by how many marginal people there are, but most of the people I just named live with someone else who is either working, receiving welfare benefits, or retired. They are not typically supporting themselves on these tiny wages.
Knowing how to interpret government statistics is something economists (I am one) do.
If you put as much effort into making money as you do into your epic C-D posts, you'd make $100K.
Whatever. Keep making excuses for this horrendous, numbers cooked, economy.
If Hillary gets elected or more likely fraudulently put in as these fake polls are setting the stage for we'll be on the verge of WWIII and /or Civil War by the end of her first term.
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