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Old 08-21-2018, 06:03 PM
 
Location: Southernmost tip of the southernmost island in the southernmost state
982 posts, read 1,140,627 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by owensct View Post
All,

How do poor people survive in Hawaii? With great difficulty. Mostly by living in large groups. When I first moved to Hawaii in driving around all the neighborhoods on Oahu looking for a place to live I was floored by all the cars parked at the homes. I thought WOW these people really love their cars, but that wasn't it at all, the reason there were so many cars is because multiple generations were all living together to be able to survive and they aren't all living in massive 4,000 sq foot homes, but in small modest 1300-1500 sq foot and I do mean modest.

On the island of Oahu the federal government considers $80k per year and below is as poverty level income.

To give you and example. I have two friends, (brothers) both of them college educated, working in what would be considered professional careers, saving everything they could and living with their parents in a modest home in Kaneohe, (modest by Hawaii standards, by mainland standards it would be considered tiny) until they were in their late twenties/early thirties. They both got engaged to be married at around the same time and at that point needed to move as their parent's house was too small to accommodate them, their parents and their wives. So did they take what they had been saving for years and buy houses or maybe condos? No, because they couldn't afford them. What they had to do in order to have a place to live was one built a small and I mean small house in their grandmother's backyard and the other added an apartment onto the grandmother's house, and these weren't paid for cash they still had a mortgage.

So many people in Hawaii who have incomes that would be considered healthy in most places on the mainland live paycheck to paycheck, just one crisis away from a financial meltdown. Hawaii has some of the highest credit card debt in the nation. Why? Because if there is some kind of emergency like your car breaks down, water heater goes out etc, the only way they have to pay for those things in on credit and those are the fortunate ones. Many locals who have lived in Hawaii all their lives, whose grandparent and great grand parents were born in Hawaii have to leave if they have any chance at the American Dream, ie owning a modest home, being able to buy a new car once in a while, taking a nice vacation every now and then etc.

I love Hawaii and miss it desperately, but I had to leave it, I had a plan that would enable us to have our house almost paid off by retirement with enough solar panels to eliminate our electric bill and to be able to buy two fairly new used cars, (cash) just before I retired that would with care last us until we went to that great Luau in the sky. Unfortunately, I became ill and despite my best efforts to continue working ended up disabled and after being cheated out of my long term disability I didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of remaining on Oahu with what I was getting.

But there is one thing that you have to realize about living in Hawaii. If your coming from the mainland, unless your wealthy, your standard of living is going to go down from what you had on the mainland, but your quality of life will go up. We had a very nice semi-custom home when we left the California Central Valley, but we both knew that as long as we lived in Hawaii we would never be able to afford a home like that again.

Living in Hawaii is more about quality of life versus standard of living and most who come to love Hawaii will fight tooth and nails to stay there despite the financial hardships it entails.

Gordon
Another factor I notice is a difference in fiscal priorities.
I have seen numerous examples where the kids still live at home and instead of setting aside what they save in rent, they use their surplus income on 60k lifted four wheel drive trucks.
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Old 08-27-2018, 09:56 PM
 
Location: Puna, Hawaii
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I know a lot of people on the Big Island who work a full time job and also a part time job. That didn't register with me at first because I've worked two jobs most of my life so forgot that it's unusual, or at least it used to be. And as somebody else pointed out, there are a lot of cultures here who live multi-generational in a household and it doesn't have the taboo it does on the mainland. I'm referring to the jokes about millennials living in their parent's basement.
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Old 08-28-2018, 07:02 AM
 
Location: Florida Suncoast
1,823 posts, read 2,256,709 times
Reputation: 3046
Quote:
Originally Posted by terracore View Post
I know a lot of people on the Big Island who work a full time job and also a part time job. That didn't register with me at first because I've worked two jobs most of my life so forgot that it's unusual, or at least it used to be. And as somebody else pointed out, there are a lot of cultures here who live multi-generational in a household and it doesn't have the taboo it does on the mainland. I'm referring to the jokes about millennials living in their parent's basement.
I worked only one job at a time most of my life, except for a few months in my 30’s, when I worked a 40 hour job during the weekdays, and two double 8 hour shifts at another job on the weekends. After working 72 hours a week for four months, I was burned out. Its not just the work hours, but it’s also the commuting time too. Plus, those were low pay, lousy hours, and lousy working conditions jobs. Despite working all those hours, I was still poor.

In my late 30’s, I looked around at others around me, and they were only working one job, but either making six figures or close to six figures. I decided to make a radical change in my life just before age 40, and went back to school for just over a year to rapidly complete a two year IT degree. I then got a job a couple years before the Y2K crisis, which turned out to be not a crisis at all, but it made the IT job market very hot in those years.

My income immediately doubled, and quickly kept growing over the years. Eventually, I was making 6 times as much as I used to make when I was poor. When my income increased, I held back my spending, to save a lot of money. Eventually those investments made about as much money as my high paying job. If I stayed working at my low paying paycheck to paycheck job, that would have never happened.

I was holding myself back in life, until I changed my life. I see a lot of young people in my life that are working low pay jobs. It’s nearly impossible to convince them that they can improve their lives by investing in themselves, educating themselves in a high return on investment, high income career. They don’t want to put in the effort to improve their lives, and are content with working a low paying job, or multiple low paying jobs.

Now, I don’t have to work anymore, and my lifestyle hasn’t changed at all. I’ll actually have to start spending more money in my retirement years. Transforming your life requires a lot of effort to meet the long term goal to make something of your life. Most people are unwilling to do it, and remain poor their whole lives. If high paying jobs are not available where you live, you might need to relocate too. I didn’t need to relocate because high income jobs existed where I lived.

A huge number of poor people don’t have to stay poor if they could motivate themselves to get the skill sets that allow themselves to qualify for the high income jobs. But sadly, most poor people won’t become motivated, and will stay poor their whole lives.
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Old 08-29-2018, 09:57 AM
 
Location: Juneau, AK + Puna, HI
10,406 posts, read 7,502,641 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Grassyknoll View Post
Another factor I notice is a difference in fiscal priorities.
I have seen numerous examples where the kids still live at home and instead of setting aside what they save in rent, they use their surplus income on 60k lifted four wheel drive trucks.
Well said, minus any judgement. Good grief, $60K-really? I wondered why so many of these vehicles were on the road in Hawaii. Well, one may argue that they have their priorities straight.

In response to OP, I've noticed that many Puna poor try to be jacks of all trades, able to fix and build stuff for themselves if necessary and for others for income.
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Old 08-29-2018, 10:01 AM
 
Location: Edgewater, FL
69 posts, read 53,363 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by davephan View Post
A huge number of poor people don’t have to stay poor if they could motivate themselves to get the skill sets that allow themselves to qualify for the high income jobs. But sadly, most poor people won’t become motivated, and will stay poor their whole lives.

I have a somewhat similar tale to your own (i.e. late bloomer, professionally). My sister and one of my nephews came to live with my wife, step daughter, and me earlier this year. My nephew is 21, a bright kid, and good with computers. Prior to the move, he was slinging burgers in a famous chain. I talked with him and offered to pay for his IT certification testing if he would study. Initially, he seemed very interested because he would like to be an IT professional, even mentioned he was interested in my particular field of IT.


Ultimately, he really didn't take it too seriously, at least, not anywhere nearly as seriously as he took his gaming, guild chatting, and video-streaming. He then bombed what is essentially a standard requirement security cert for any type of IT work around here and it is not really a particularly difficult one, at least in comparison to the higher level certs along that path. He was despondent and surprised that putting in very little effort didn't yield an enormous windfall of reward.


So, I offered to pay one (& only one) more time for him to have another attempt but that if he wasn't interested enough in his own future to care to really put in effort and if playing games with his friends is so vital that he would rather work low skill "joe" jobs for the rest of his life just so he can play, he shouldn't expect the rewards of someone that puts in the effort to better themselves. Since, he appears to have been studying, at least most days, but we'll see next week when he tests again.


I tried to kindly and sympathetically share that despite what he may think about reality, most people with good careers making good money did not have it handed to them. They chose to forgo immediate gratification and instead put in work, time, and effort now to pay off hugely down the road. It sometimes seems that young people think that someone will just hand them something for nothing or that they'll make a YouTube or Twitch channel and hit it big and get paid to play games and talk about themselves.


Anyway, sorry to derail from the original thread subject of how people survive in Hawaii, but I wanted to echo your observation that if people were willing to self-motivate and sacrifice some fun time now to pursue education or training for the future, it can really change your prospects.
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Old 08-29-2018, 10:56 AM
 
1,262 posts, read 1,293,588 times
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Default Completely clueless

Quote:
Originally Posted by sasie123 View Post
Is Hawaii a Sanctuary City? Usually, Sanctuary cities have lots of goodies in place to help poor people, for example: New York City, being a Sanctuary city, has loads of rent subsidized buildings where the rent is kept at a minimum for people of low income or the rent will go up very minimally per year. They have also have lots of laws to protect the poor, and immigrants, which this is made possible through government grants.
NYC has had rent subsidized apartments since at least the 1960's. That has NOTHING to do with being a Sanctuary City. Despite your implication that there are vacancies in those subsidized apartment buildings, in reality you can wait for years to get in.

I'm not a fan of Sanctuary Cities, especially the ones that have taxpayers foot the bill to provide competent counsel to represent illegal aliens in court, but let's keep it real.
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Old 08-31-2018, 09:04 PM
 
Location: Puna, Hawaii
4,365 posts, read 4,784,712 times
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"They don’t want to put in the effort to improve their lives, and are content with working a low paying job, or multiple low paying jobs."


Wait until they raise the minimum wage to $15. Everybody will want to be a hamburger flipper. It certainly beats the current system of throwing down all that money and time learning how to be a pilot to get your first job making less than that.


Low paying jobs are SUPPOSED to be stepladders in life. Trying to artificially make them a living wage keeps people down at the bottom where they blame the government for their problems so that they will elect people who potentiate these failed policies.
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Old 08-31-2018, 10:48 PM
 
Location: Florida Suncoast
1,823 posts, read 2,256,709 times
Reputation: 3046
Quote:
Originally Posted by terracore View Post
"They don’t want to put in the effort to improve their lives, and are content with working a low paying job, or multiple low paying jobs."


Wait until they raise the minimum wage to $15. Everybody will want to be a hamburger flipper. It certainly beats the current system of throwing down all that money and time learning how to be a pilot to get your first job making less than that.


Low paying jobs are SUPPOSED to be stepladders in life. Trying to artificially make them a living wage keeps people down at the bottom where they blame the government for their problems so that they will elect people who potentiate these failed policies.
If there’s a minimum wage of $15 for burger flippers, there will be much fewer burger flippers. Automation will replace many of those workers, and there will be fewer workers. A $15 an hour is not utopia! The people dreaming of that $15 an hour job will still be poor, and dependent on government services. Some politicians want a large number of poor and depend people that will reliably vote for them, to keep them in power, while the poor, remains poor.
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Old 09-03-2018, 07:38 PM
 
Location: Puna, Hawaii
4,365 posts, read 4,784,712 times
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Yes, and inflation lags increases to the minimum wage. Businesses don't "absorb" increases to the minimum wage, they pass it on, so prices only go up, and the purchasing power of the increased wage reverts to what it was before.

As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman explained, the "actual" minimum wage is always going to be zero- the amount a non-worker isn't paid because their entry-level skills can't be priced into the market:

"The minimum wage law requires employers to discriminate against persons with low skills. No one describes it that way, but that is in fact what it is. Take a poorly educated teenager with little skill whose services are worth, say, only $2.00 an hour. He or she might be eager to work for that wage in order to acquire greater skills that would permit a better job. The law says that such a person may be hired only if the employer is willing to pay him or her (in 1979) $2.90 an hour. Unless an employer is willing to add 90 cents in charity to the $2.00 that the person’s services are worth, the teenager will not be employed. It has always been a mystery to us why a young person is better off unemployed from a job that would pay $2.90 an hour than employed at a job that does pay $2.00 an hour."

-Milton Friedman

Automation degrades these workers further. A business that can use a robot for $14/hour will create an unemployed human at $15/hour.

Last edited by terracore; 09-03-2018 at 07:47 PM..
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Old 09-05-2018, 09:49 PM
 
Location: Honolulu/DMV Area/NYC
30,463 posts, read 17,896,116 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by davephan View Post
If there’s a minimum wage of $15 for burger flippers, there will be much fewer burger flippers. Automation will replace many of those workers, and there will be fewer workers. A $15 an hour is not utopia! The people dreaming of that $15 an hour job will still be poor, and dependent on government services. Some politicians want a large number of poor and depend people that will reliably vote for them, to keep them in power, while the poor, remains poor.
While I don't agree with $15 an hour for fast food workers, I also think that states like Hawaii and California would pass legislation to limit the impact of automation.
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