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That is quite fortunate. My high school basically either said college or McDonalds.
That's what the vast majority of high schools say. Few of them have robust vocation-prep curricula...most just have a college-prep curriculum.
And when I say "robust," I mean a curriculum that will prepare a kid for rigourous technical training and certification. Such a program would, for instance, hammer basic algebra and plane geometry. It would hammer technical reading and writing. It would hammer basic sciences: Electrical, electronics, pnuematics, mechanics, building science. It would hammer small business management, business math and economics, small business law and codes.
I'm sure Costco could pay as little as Walmart does if they really wanted to. But I feel they want to attract a better quality of worker.
On the other hand, I like the fact that Walmart is starting employees at $11 an hour, hiring good people in our community that may not be given a chance at other companies.
I'm a long time Costco business member, but not a fan of shopping there. Prices are too high.
Once out major manufacturing left, only minimum wage service jobs were left.
Coupled with employers nation wide not caring about their employees enough to want to provide benefits, it's a problem.
Why are we still here? We consider it out duty to look after our 83 and 90 year old father's...
I tip my hat to you. I do the same with my 91 year old mom & 65 year old autistic brother.
Quote:
Originally Posted by galaxyhi
...who lived here, benefiting from the manufacturing structure that allowed tgen to amply raise a family on their single salary. A situation thst no longer exists.
There was also a tremendous amount of sub contractors who worked for the major employers, who paid well, but not quite as well as the major players, but a family coukd be supported by one earner. A part of that is that we no longer manufacture much in the USA.
As soon as our fathers are gone, though we'll be out of here. Hopefully to retire as,well.
This area has continuously turned down opportunities for both manufacturing and other things such as a mall to compete with the one in Branson, and a couple companies wanting to set up a headquarters for the north east region of the country. Nope as long as they get their state, county and city pay with full benies paid by the minimum wage based community here, they don't care about bringing jobs that do pay in.
A good portion of the county is also farming community, but due to the "hardships" of farming, even that is disappearing.
But that leads to the " picturesque country side here the leaders "don't want to change". But even tourist dollars don't come in to enjoy this "picturesque country side "!!
The NIMBY attitude is alive and well here.
Also the area, when it does gain a new employer, doesn't bother to train a workforce beneficial to the future employers , so they hire/tramsfer people from outside the area to run the facilities.
There is also no " promotion from within", it's we'll hire an outsider.
Even the real estate market has been stagnant for 2 decades, largely because wages have been stagnant. Those from the outside can easily afford a house here, but since 2015 it has,risen. We bought our house in fall 2015, just at the upswing of the competitive market enjoyed here today.
It is true that a minimum wage based job earner can afford a house here if they both work 2 two minimum based jobs full time, but our minimum is waaaay above the federal minimum.
And for someone like me who is physically disabled, any old job is not available to me, or I'd be mowing lawns for the town/county like I did when I was a teenager and early 20s.
As someone mentioned before and someone backed them up, NIMBY doesn't help matters.
Wow. That's sad. I agree with you -- the NIMBY mentality is evident in many locations, and City Fathers do not do the electorate any favors when they let NIMBY get in the way of economic development. NIMBY is one of the major factors responsible for (relative) shortages of affordable housing, mental care facilities, half-way houses, and other social services. Collectively, we all want such things to be available. Few of us want them in our own back yards.
Yeah that was a pretty ridiculous answer they gave. A lot of privileged people post here who are fortunate who do not understand struggling nor have any empathy for those who are not as fortunate as them. Their attitude is that they made it why can't you,,,, just hypocrites. that's the problem with Make America Hate Again.
Because your post is directed at me, I guess I should put my comments in some context about just how privileged and fortunate I am and how much empathy I lack.
My father, like so many young men of his generation, lied about his age & joined the US Navy the day after Pearl Harbor (indeed, he was on a Destroyer in the Pacific that was hit by a Kamikaze, killing many US serviceman). Years later, he died unexpectedly when I was 12 years old, leaving behind an uneducated widow ill-prepared to be a head-of-household (she grew up in a rural agricultural area - with quite literally and without exaggeration her home had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing), my older high-functioning autistic brother, my younger severely mentally retarded sister, and me. And a pile of debts with no assets to speak of. Mom went back to work, of course, but didn't make much.
I grew up quickly. Being too young for a work permit, I resorted to hustling to earn money to supplement Mom's meager earnings. I don't mean anything illegal - but anything where someone needed unskilled labor such as mowing lawns, cleaning out garages, cleaning trash cans, washing cars, washing windows, etc. Anything to make a buck, and I turned it over to Mom. Fortunately, Mom made me put half into a passbook savings account at a savings & loan and I got to see compounding in action. If I recall correctly, interest was 5.25%.
We lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. There were "race riots" a couple times per year on my high school campus, and the police would come through on horseback. I had the snot beat out of me on several occasions because I was easy prey, not being in a gang. I remember there were 660 in my high school graduating class, and 12 of us went to college or jr. college (the second worst in the state that year).
I went on to earn scholarships to help pay for college and grad school, and worked while in school. To help fund my education, I had a choice: I could have an on-campus job that paid peanuts, or look off campus. I picked up an old push lawn mower at a garage sale for a few bucks and mowed some lawns in nearby residential neighborhoods, earning more than I could make working in the campus bookstore or library. In spare time I hustled more clients, and after a while I hired a local high school kid to help. By the time I was a senior in college, I had 6 part-time employees, a trailer, and several used but working gas lawn mowers. I would periodically "fire" customers because they were not on an optimal driving route for me to pick up the high school kids and transport them to customers, replacing the fired customers with new customers that were on my route. I sold the "business," such as it was, to another college student who was 2 years behind me once I graduated.
Ultimately, I went on to be named inventor on several patents and rose to manage technical innovation at some name-brand Fortune 100 companies -- all the while partially supporting my aging mom & brother (my sister died less than a year after my father died). Mom's now 91 years old; my autistic brother is 65. I bought them a house to live in in a 55+ age restricted community 10 minutes from my primary home, and partially support them. Mom has a small county pension but no savings. When she passes, I'll fully support my brother. While he's high functioning autistic, he's never been employable.
We have a wonderful daughter who suffers from from severe medical problems that interfered with academics. I still remember the Chief of Pediatric Cardiology at Stanford Children's Hospital telling my wife & me, "I promise you we will do everything in our power to prevent your daughter from dying today." Despite her medical issues, she went on to graduate from an Ivy League school (and no, she's not a legacy).
I paid for her college completely. With her medical issues, there is no way she could have both worked & gone to college. In my judgment, she already had gone through many character-building experiences. Ivy tuition plus room and board is not cheap. When she picked up her diploma, she said to me "you know, for a quarter million dollars of tuition, you'd at least think they could frame the damn thing."
I've endowed professorships at my alma maters. I've funded a full-ride academic scholarship for kids graduating from my former high school to my alma mater. I've participated in major capital campaigns for a new science center. My name (along with others) is on the side of a science building on campus. I'm a not-insignificant fundraiser for charities. We like to host charity fundraising events where we might have 50 to 100 people in attendance. Target charities have included the National Ability Center, The ARC (formerly the Association for Retarded Citizens), and The Organization for Autism Research. Personally, I'm a volunteer math tutor for middle-school kids; in my own view, middle school is about the time when kids either make a left turn and say "math sux & I hate it" or they make a right turn and say "solving problems with math is kinda fun." I hope to get a few who would otherwise make a left turn to instead make a right turn.
Clearly, I was financially successful -- successful enough that there was no financial aid for our daughter. Successful enough that I could semi-retire at 40 and fully retire before 50. Yes, I'm financially secure. I do consider myself fortunate, but not lucky.
And I would trade every penny of financial success if it would bring back my dad.
We all make choices, and those choices shape our lives.
Years ago shops would offer apprenticeships and a worker would learn a trade and a lifelong career with that company. My grandfather was a HS dropout and became a machinist at GM for most of his life. I can't see why we can't do that today. Now shops complain about a lack of skilled labor, but refuse to train.
And that's a big part of it right there. I like to use the police force as an example. Years ago, you could join and they'd train you. Now a lot of police departments won't hire you unless you complete academy training on your own.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KathrynAragon
Many HIGH SCHOOLS now offer trades training and some certifications - at no cost to the students. We have one of those high schools here - in a small city an hour and a half from Dallas in NE Texas.
That's great for the students who are 16 to 18 years old. But what about those who are pushing 40 or 50 and need to learn some new skills just to keep afloat until they retire?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ringwise
You're college educated, not young, but you only make $15,000 a year? Something wrong there.
I'm no young bunny, and the recession hit me hard. Coming on the heels of a divorce which gave me a house in exchange for 25 years of retirement savings, I also lost my job when a business my husband and I were working in with plans to purchase fell through, because the owner could no longer afford to retire. Knowing it would be hard to find another with no college degree, out of control unemployment and a sinking housing market (this was in California) we made the tough decision to move to a more affordable area. We left family, friends, and many volunteer organizations that I belonged to. We moved to a place neither had been before, and we knew nary a soul. We sold my house with just enough profit to pay for a moving van, and hit the road.
Now 10 years later, we own another home, have good jobs and are starting to replenish the retirement account.
I had a choice - either blame the world for my problems and demand the world pay for me to survive, or just going about the business of doing what it takes to get ahead. I'm never going to recover to pre-2008 levels. The house I sold was worth hundreds of thousands more than what I sold it for just 3 years prior. I lost many years of retirement savings because we were just scraping by to pay the bills. We've gone without to save a down payment on a house.
The moral of the story is: if you can't afford to live where you are, then MOVE.
Er, something got lost in translation here. I went to community college but never got a degree. Mainly I was playing catch up in math classes (I flunked math all through high school), trying to get my basics like English and History etc, and spent a couple of years in a court reporting program. I don't know if any of that really qualifies as college educated.
And I'm not making any money right now. I'm living on SSDI.
As to moving where I can afford to live, I have. It was expensive and I was lucky in that I was able to transfer my job and had an apartment lined up because I could do everything over the phone. That doesn't happen anymore and if you aren't working for a national chain of anything, it's going to be hard transferring your job to a new area.
And there's a lot more involved than just moving to a cheap place besides the cost. As I pointed out, you could buy a house for $10,000 in Detroit. Would you like your daughter to live on a block where the houses are only $10,000 in Detroit? I thought St. Louis would be a good fit pricewise, then I found out how hot it got in summer. I get sick in high heat. There's reasons why I moved to Washington after I left California and of course, the big question is, what happens when there are no more cheaper places to move to?
Many employers enjoy a surplus of low-wage labor, in which case Why Pay More?
I know an employer who has lifers in their 40s/50s/60s earning within 25 cents of minimum wage.
When I was 16 years old, my family lost our home. We literally had a 15 year old car with us and our processions. I lived in the one of the single hardest hit areas of the rust belt. Ground zero for economic devastation.
You look at what you produce. At 2 years past. 5 years. 10 years. At what point do you start to take responsibility? If someone has worked for minimum wage that long, how have they not risen to assistant manager? Or store manager? Or just simply looked in the mirror and really truly asked themselves if they’ve given it their all. What’s holding them down? A company? A manager? Their attitude?
There is no stronger motivator than being at the precipice. It’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. As randy pauch said in his book, “really achieving your childhood dreams”, you can’t change the hand you’re dealt, you can only change the way you play the hand.
Instead, it seems you continue to complain about the cigarette smoke, the lighting, the way the person next to you is playing, and the dealer. Meanwhile, no one cares. Life moves on. If you want something to happen, get your ass up and make it happen.
Last edited by Thatsright19; 06-19-2018 at 09:28 AM..
There is a big demand for high paying trade shops right now that are sitting empty
“While a shortage of workers is pushing wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor's degree is softening, even as the price — and the average debt into which it plunges students — keeps going up.”
I never said there were not job openings of course there are but nowhere nearly enough for everyone. Like I said before someone has to work retail and restaurants and jobs like that.
To those that say that "today" you can't start over, I will use my mother as an example. My mother never finished high school, she got pregnant and dropped out at 15. She worked fast food type jobs for 15 years while raising us kids, so that she could be home during the day. Once my little sister finally graduated, she got an office job at a small engineering firm. She worked there until the age of 65, when severe arthritis robbed her of her ability to type. She was fired. She never earned more than $12.00 an hour. She had no benefits, not even a 401k. After my father died, the main source of income was gone for her. He had a pension, but without spouse benefits. Even though us kids offered to help, she didn't want us to sacrifice our financial future for her. She lost the home, as my fathers 25k life insurance wasn't enough to pay all of the debts. It took 11 months for the bank to kick her out, and she used that time to save money. Her only income is $985.00 per month from SSA.
She contacted a real estate agent and asked them to find the cheapest 1 acre lot in the state of Florida. She found one in North Central Florida, in a small town, for $800.00. With the small amount of money she had saved, she purchased it. She contacted a local contractor, and advised him of her situation. He agreed to give her any second hand materials they would normally pay to take to the dump, and any left over building supplies they normally would donate. In the interim, she lived with my sister. After a couple of months, she had enough materials to build a mini home. She contacted Habitat for Humanity and asked if they would build it for her, they declined, but said that they would let their volunteers know. 2 weeks later, about 20 tradespeople showed up, and built her home. It is a simple 800 square foot mini-house on a concrete foundation. Not fancy, but she owns it.
There are plenty of great people in this country, who are willing to help. You just have to have the initiative to seek them out. This couldn't have happened in a place like Miami. Plenty of the rural areas of the U.S. have been decimated. Land is cheap. Yes it is difficult to relocate, but it is possible. Get the heck out of the overpopulated areas, and into the sticks.
Because your post is directed at me, I guess I should put my comments in some context about just how privileged and fortunate I am and how much empathy I lack.
My father, like so many young men of his generation, lied about his age & joined the US Navy the day after Pearl Harbor (indeed, he was on a Destroyer in the Pacific that was hit by a Kamikaze, killing many US serviceman). Years later, he died unexpectedly when I was 12 years old, leaving behind an uneducated widow ill-prepared to be a head-of-household (she grew up in a rural agricultural area - with quite literally and without exaggeration her home had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing), my older high-functioning autistic brother, my younger severely mentally retarded sister, and me. And a pile of debts with no assets to speak of. Mom went back to work, of course, but didn't make much.
I grew up quickly. Being too young for a work permit, I resorted to hustling to earn money to supplement Mom's meager earnings. I don't mean anything illegal - but anything where someone needed unskilled labor such as mowing lawns, cleaning out garages, cleaning trash cans, washing cars, washing windows, etc. Anything to make a buck, and I turned it over to Mom. Fortunately, Mom made me put half into a passbook savings account at a savings & loan and I got to see compounding in action. If I recall correctly, interest was 5.25%.
We lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. There were "race riots" a couple times per year on my high school campus, and the police would come through on horseback. I had the snot beat out of me on several occasions because I was easy prey, not being in a gang. I remember there were 660 in my high school graduating class, and 12 of us went to college or jr. college (the second worst in the state that year).
I went on to earn scholarships to help pay for college and grad school, and worked while in school. To help fund my education, I had a choice: I could have an on-campus job that paid peanuts, or look off campus. I picked up an old push lawn mower at a garage sale for a few bucks and mowed some lawns in nearby residential neighborhoods, earning more than I could make working in the campus bookstore or library. In spare time I hustled more clients, and after a while I hired a local high school kid to help. By the time I was a senior in college, I had 6 part-time employees, a trailer, and several used but working gas lawn mowers. I would periodically "fire" customers because they were not on an optimal driving route for me to pick up the high school kids and transport them to customers, replacing the fired customers with new customers that were on my route. I sold the "business," such as it was, to another college student who was 2 years behind me once I graduated.
Ultimately, I went on to be named inventor on several patents and rose to manage technical innovation at some name-brand Fortune 100 companies -- all the while partially supporting my aging mom & brother (my sister died less than a year after my father died). Mom's now 91 years old; my autistic brother is 65. I bought them a house to live in in a 55+ age restricted community 10 minutes from my primary home, and partially support them. Mom has a small county pension but no savings. When she passes, I'll fully support my brother. While he's high functioning autistic, he's never been employable.
We have a wonderful daughter who suffers from from severe medical problems that interfered with academics. I still remember the Chief of Pediatric Cardiology at Stanford Children's Hospital telling my wife & me, "I promise you we will do everything in our power to prevent your daughter from dying today." Despite her medical issues, she went on to graduate from an Ivy League school (and no, she's not a legacy).
I paid for her college completely. With her medical issues, there is no way she could have both worked & gone to college. In my judgment, she already had gone through many character-building experiences. Ivy tuition plus room and board is not cheap. When she picked up her diploma, she said to me "you know, for a quarter million dollars of tuition, you'd at least think they could frame the damn thing."
I've endowed professorships at my alma maters. I've funded a full-ride academic scholarship for kids graduating from my former high school to my alma mater. I've participated in major capital campaigns for a new science center. My name (along with others) is on the side of a science building on campus. I'm a not-insignificant fundraiser for charities. We like to host charity fundraising events where we might have 50 to 100 people in attendance. Target charities have included the National Ability Center, The ARC (formerly the Association for Retarded Citizens), and The Organization for Autism Research. Personally, I'm a volunteer math tutor for middle-school kids; in my own view, middle school is about the time when kids either make a left turn and say "math sux & I hate it" or they make a right turn and say "solving problems with math is kinda fun." I hope to get a few who would otherwise make a left turn to instead make a right turn.
Clearly, I was financially successful -- successful enough that there was no financial aid for our daughter. Successful enough that I could semi-retire at 40 and fully retire before 50. Yes, I'm financially secure. I do consider myself fortunate, but not lucky.
And I would trade every penny of financial success if it would bring back my dad.
We all make choices, and those choices shape our lives.
Yeah yeah, but don’t you think it would have been easier to flip burgers and demand to be paid more? You could have avoided a lot of pitfalls~
All jokes aside, that’s impressive.
This is the reason why family wealth is lost more than 70% of the time within 2 generations. The people who knew the fear and struggle and accumulated it are gone, and their family has been shielded from what pushes people to do great things.
It cracks me up when people say that people who are financially successful had it easy or don’t care about others. Very often, they had a very difficult road to success and from that pain they tap into the greatest virtues of humanity and do stuff to help others. Successful people are generally very well rounded and believe very strongly in paying it forward.
Last edited by Thatsright19; 06-19-2018 at 10:33 AM..
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