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IMO the wealthier a person becomes, the less they care about the poor. It's all about 'I did this so therefore anyone can do this' or 'I sacrifice all my life so tough s**t if they can't do the same'. A real bad mentality. There should be less ego among posters.
I agree with much of your post, but I don’t really think the first line is true across the board. There are plenty of wealthy people who care about those who struggle.
IMO the wealthier a person becomes, the less they care about the poor. It's all about 'I did this so therefore anyone can do this' or 'I sacrifice all my life so tough s**t if they can't do the same'. A real bad mentality. There should be less ego among posters.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107
it may be a concern of mine , but it sure ain't my problem , nor can i solve it .
way to much time is wasted dwelling on straw people situations and what if's in these forums and not enough time is spent actually learning how to get our own houses in order ..
These were consecutive posts.
Mathjak has written many times that he grew up poor in the projects. He made a number of good life decisions and had the willpower to have a lot of deferred gratification that created some wealth.
I think there is a middle ground here. Most economically successful people had good parenting. They were taught to make good life decisions. That dramatically increases your odds. The way you compensate for poor parenting is through education. We need to be on-message with all the life decisions that make people successful. Our schools largely don’t do that and a union elementary school teacher with the 2% pension vesting likely doesn’t have a very good handle on personal finance math. The whole country can’t be union public sector workers.
I agree with much of your post, but I don’t really think the first line is true across the board. There are plenty of wealthy people who care about those who struggle.
There is a difference between ‘care’ and enabling and rewarding poor decisions. Let’s take single parent households. An uneducated woman who gets pregnant immediately qualifies for Medicaid. When they pop out the kid, they immediately jump to the top of the queue for public housing. If they’re married, they don’t get any of that. It’s exactly backwards. We want people to get their education, establish a career, marry someone like-minded, and then reproduce. I got the memo from my parents. If you don’t follow that path, it’s an express ticket to generational poverty.
I want to break the generational poverty cycle. You do that by rewarding good behavior and penalizing poor behavior. If you make your best shot and life still blows up on you, then be generous with the safety net. The same goes for health decisions. If you eat, drink, smoke, or inject yourself to expensive chronic health problems, why should I have to pay for it? If you do everything right, life happens, and you have an expensive health issue, be generous with the safety net.
I can't remember who said this, but it was essentially a long the lines of "there are so many jobs out there now that it's your fault if you're not doing well."
You're wrong. You're dead wrong. I grew up in a mess in Appalachia. People from here have nothing. They don't have the opportunity wealthy suburbanites have. A kid in the middle class of Nashville has far, far better opportunity than a kid from my side of the rails.
If you grew up in MA, CT, NY, etc., you were blessed and had so many advantages you'd never know or realize compared to us Tennessee poor.
I’m from Massachusetts. Not the rocket fuel economy part around Boston. I’m from the failed mill city part around New Bedford. I had every advantage growing up so I was pre-programmed for success but I had to relocate to a place with better economic opportunity when I became an adult. At my 40th high school reunion recently, pretty much all of the top 20% of my graduating class moved. Some of us owned summer homes in town because it’s a nice coastal village but the only achievers who stuck around were in health care which pays well anywhere.
If you live in one of the high cost of living places, you have higher wages. You pay more into Social Security so your benefit check will be bigger. Your house costs more so you accrue more home equity. With the higher wages, there is more incentive to contribute to your 401(k). You have the option of retiring to a low cost of living place.
Armed with all of that information which can hardly be new, why are you still in eastern Tennessee? You can always retire comfortably there when you’re in your 60s.
I made $60 a week working st a gas station in 1985. $100 a month would’ve been almost 50% of my salary. I paid $50 a week for rent. I hitchhiked to work because I didn’t have a car nor money to buy one. Investing $100 a month or $10 a month would not have been possible. There are millions of people for whom it’s not possible. There are millions of people who try to save but end up needing to use it before they can invest it because the car needs work or their child needs braces.
“Everyone should invest $100 a month” is really “Let then eat cake” in a way for many struggling people in this country.
I don't claim to know what the solution is, but I think it's a combination of all the factors.
When I graduated college back in 2010, virtually no one was hiring. I had an internship related to my major, other experience, etc., and had to settle for a $14/hr call center job, and had to drive a hundred miles a day roundtrip to get that. I was grateful to have it at first. Many of my peers had no job at all after graduation, or were making $10/hr or less.
Even if you have no kids, no debt, and living with mom/dad, $10/hr is tough to survive on. $14/hr is doable, if you're frugal, but the child needing braces or the car blowing up can really sink you. Another rub is that those low paying jobs are likely going to be less flexible with life's emergencies than higher paying professional jobs. If my car blows up and I need a day off, it's generally not a problem. I could work from home for a day or two if needed. I'm not going to lose my job over it. Someone temping for $12/hr with no benefits would likely lose their jobs.
I’m from Massachusetts. Not the rocket fuel economy part around Boston. I’m from the failed mill city part around New Bedford. I had every advantage growing up so I was pre-programmed for success but I had to relocate to a place with better economic opportunity when I became an adult. At my 40th high school reunion recently, pretty much all of the top 20% of my graduating class moved. Some of us owned summer homes in town because it’s a nice coastal village but the only achievers who stuck around were in health care which pays well anywhere.
If you live in one of the high cost of living places, you have higher wages. You pay more into Social Security so your benefit check will be bigger. Your house costs more so you accrue more home equity. With the higher wages, there is more incentive to contribute to your 401(k). You have the option of retiring to a low cost of living place.
Armed with all of that information which can hardly be new, why are you still in eastern Tennessee? You can always retire comfortably there when you’re in your 60s.
Here's the current situation.
I make a little over $60,000 working for a large local employer. I'm basically double the median income for a man. If I moved to Burlington, MA, where a previous employer was HQ'd, I'd need to essentially double my income to avoid a cut in standard of living.
I used to work for Charles River Development. Toxic corporate culture with constant one-upmanship. The mantra there was to throw each other under the bus to make yourself look good in front of a client. Every day was stressful and the staff always wondered if we'd be fired on any given day for no reason at all. I have a relatively easy job here and minimal job related stress. You can't necessarily put a dollar value on that.
My team moved from offices from a failing manufacturing city, with all the attendant sights and smells, to the college town I live in last week. I'm a few miles from my residence. Technically, we're three miles from the border of the Cherokee National Forest, and I can be hiking on steep mountain trails within fifteen minutes of leaving this office. My residence is also walkable to the best minor league baseball stadium within an hour, as well as the downtown restaurants and breweries. I'm within about five miles of an Indian grocer, African grocer, Indian/German/Cuban/Korean restaurants, and numerous other grocers, restaurants, and health food stores.
I'm a few miles from a university of about 15,000. That provides some level of diversity, intellectualism, and overall dynamism not common to isolated towns of 60,000. I'm about an hour from Asheville, NC, which is nationally regarded as a tourist destination, and dining and beer mecca. I went to Asheville one night last week for dinner.
Are things great? No. Most of the locals have no sense of intellectual curiosity at all. There are a lot of "dumb Bubbas" here. The dating scene is practically nonexistent outside of the college kids. You have the constant small metro issues with jobs. If I lost my job, I'd be moving unless I could find something remote.
There are places I'd rather live in, but for a town of 60,000 or so that is an hour away from any other metro, it's not that bad. The town I worked in, Kingsport, totally sucks and Bristol isn't much better. Still, I'll probably be moving to one of the larger Carolina metros in the next few years.
Last edited by Serious Conversation; 05-30-2018 at 08:05 AM..
There is a difference between ‘care’ and enabling and rewarding poor decisions. Let’s take single parent households. An uneducated woman who gets pregnant immediately qualifies for Medicaid. When they pop out the kid, they immediately jump to the top of the queue for public housing. If they’re married, they don’t get any of that. It’s exactly backwards. We want people to get their education, establish a career, marry someone like-minded, and then reproduce. I got the memo from my parents. If you don’t follow that path, it’s an express ticket to generational poverty.
I want to break the generational poverty cycle. You do that by rewarding good behavior and penalizing poor behavior. If you make your best shot and life still blows up on you, then be generous with the safety net. The same goes for health decisions. If you eat, drink, smoke, or inject yourself to expensive chronic health problems, why should I have to pay for it? If you do everything right, life happens, and you have an expensive health issue, be generous with the safety net.
We aren’t talking about people in poverty though, that is not who the article is talking about. Of course people on public assistance don’t have money for “retirement”. They will carry on as is until they go to a nursing home under Medicaid. It’s the working poor who are going to be trouble. There are millions of families doing the best they can with two wage earners but still struggling. That is who I am talking about. The answers given by some (simply invest $100 a month starting in 1972 when $100 was actually worth about $1200) are just ridiculously out of touch for people who have to decide whether to get their brakes fixed or pay the electric bill this month.
I’m from Massachusetts. Not the rocket fuel economy part around Boston. I’m from the failed mill city part around New Bedford. I had every advantage growing up so I was pre-programmed for success but I had to relocate to a place with better economic opportunity when I became an adult. At my 40th high school reunion recently, pretty much all of the top 20% of my graduating class moved. Some of us owned summer homes in town because it’s a nice coastal village but the only achievers who stuck around were in health care which pays well anywhere.
If you live in one of the high cost of living places, you have higher wages. You pay more into Social Security so your benefit check will be bigger. Your house costs more so you accrue more home equity. With the higher wages, there is more incentive to contribute to your 401(k). You have the option of retiring to a low cost of living place.
Armed with all of that information which can hardly be new, why are you still in eastern Tennessee? You can always retire comfortably there when you’re in your 60s.
Or, live in or near a mid-sized city and have access to good jobs while also keeping housing costs in check. You don’t have to live in a huge city to have a good job. It only makes sense to live in a city like NY or Boston or San Fran if you’re making well over six figures. If you work for a bank as an investment banker, great, live in New York. If you work for a bank as a risk management officer or business analyst, you might be better off in a mid sized city. A lot of large companies have operations in cheaper cities throughout the country. I have a good job in St. Louis in finance that affords me a decent house and the ability to travel. Why would I leave for an expensive city when my salary increase wouldn’t afford me a similar house? Salaries don’t triple for the exact same job just because you relocate to a high cost of living area. They’re high cost because people want to live there and are willing to decrease their standard of living to increase their quality of life, so to speak.
We aren’t talking about people in poverty though, that is not who the article is talking about. Of course people on public assistance don’t have money for “retirement”. They will carry on as is until they go to a nursing home under Medicaid. It’s the working poor who are going to be trouble. There are millions of families doing the best they can with two wage earners but still struggling. That is who I am talking about. The answers given by some (simply invest $100 a month starting in 1972 when $100 was actually worth about $1200) are just ridiculously out of touch for people who have to decide whether to get their brakes fixed or pay the electric bill this month.
No, but close inspection of their spending likely shows a lot of poor decisions to spend rather than save & invest. And to do leisure things instead of learning job skills that would raise their income.
I make a little over $60,000 working for a large local employer. I'm basically double the median income for a man. If I moved to Burlington, MA, where a previous employer was HQ'd, I'd need to essentially double my income to avoid a cut in standard of living.
I used to work for Charles River Development. Toxic corporate culture with constant one-upmanship. The mantra there was to throw each other under the bus to make yourself look good in front of a client. Every day was stressful and the staff always wondered if we'd be fired on any given day for no reason at all. I have a relatively easy job here and minimal job related stress. You can't necessarily put a dollar value on that.
My team moved from offices from a failing manufacturing city, with all the attendant sights and smells, to the college town I live in last week. I'm a few miles from my residence. Technically, we're three miles from the border of the Cherokee National Forest, and I can be hiking on steep mountain trails within fifteen minutes of leaving this office. My residence is also walkable to the best minor league baseball stadium within an hour, as well as the downtown restaurants and breweries. I'm within about five miles of an Indian grocer, African grocer, Indian/German/Cuban/Korean restaurants, and numerous other grocers, restaurants, and health food stores.
I'm a few miles from a university of about 15,000. That provides some level of diversity, intellectualism, and overall dynamism not common to isolated towns of 60,000. I'm about an hour from Asheville, NC, which is nationally regarded as a tourist destination, and dining and beer mecca. I went to Asheville one night last week for dinner.
Are things great? No. Most of the locals have no sense of intellectual curiosity at all. There are a lot of "dumb Bubbas" here. The dating scene is practically nonexistent outside of the college kids. You have the constant small metro issues with jobs. If I lost my job, I'd be moving unless I could find something remote.
There are places I'd rather live in, but for a town of 60,000 or so that is an hour away from any other metro, it's not that bad. The town I worked in, Kingsport, totally sucks and Bristol isn't much better. Still, I'll probably be moving to one of the larger Carolina metros in the next few years.
Regarding your last line, I'm sure the Chamber of Commerce people in Kingsport and Bristol hope that is the case!
Many of us have worked $12-15/hr. jobs for most of our working years. Still, I managed to save. I started a job right after college and started contributing to a 401k in 1980, just a couple years after 401k law came into existence. And contributed continuously through several jobs through the years. So I know people can save on a low salary because I've done it.
But to answer the original question of this thread, "the main reason so many people don't save for retirement", one answer is saving isn't a top priority for many people. New cars, bigger TV's, fancier smart phones, etc. is their priority. That's ok, but it just means they will save less than a person who puts saving as a high priority.
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