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Your numbers are way off. My car (including pro-rated price, gasoline, maintenance and insurance) costs $2500/year to drive 10,000 miles a year. If you call it $2600/year, that's $50/week. I do the routine maintenance myself. Buy a Haines/Chilton manual.
Health insurance costs me $263/month.
$600/month for rent and utilities is reasonable, with a roommate.
A used washer/dryer is $100, one time expense. Clothing is trivial, you buy socks and underwear new, everything else at thrift stores. It's not like you have to dress well for a $10/hr job.
Food is more like $5/day, or $35/week.
That brings you to around $250/week, out of $350/week take home. Put $200/month in savings and you still have $200/month for entertainment and incidentals.
You are not including the cost of your own time. It's misleading to say you save so much by DIY, which is largely an illusion you create by treating yourself as a slave and pricing your labor at $0/hour.
From my perspective, more economic failures should choose suicide. In fact, I'm in favor of spending public resources to educate economic failures about the benefits of suicide.
So, if a person doesn't make enough money, they should kill themselves?
From my perspective, more economic failures should choose suicide. In fact, I'm in favor of spending public resources to educate economic failures about the benefits of suicide.
I was totally with you on your previous post about how economic failure affects all of us. But suicide? No, thanks.
Apparently all I can read is the first page, which is enticing but not very helpful.
i'll stipulate that poverty is associated with relatively greater perceived payoff to crime among those without morals, but poverty would be irrelevant in a moral world.
You are not including the cost of your own time. It's misleading to say you save so much by DIY, which is largely an illusion you create by treating yourself as a slave and pricing your labor at $0/hour.
What hourly rate do you put on posting inane comments on the internet? A big part of poverty does not arise from wasting money, it arises from wasting time. You are never paid as well as when you work for yourself. It's a great way to accumulate wealth.
What hourly rate do you put on posting inane comments on the internet? A big part of poverty does not arise from wasting money, it arises from wasting time. You are never paid as well as when you work for yourself. It's a great way to accumulate wealth.
Bahahah. :P
Or, what hourly rate do you put on walking everywhere vs. driving?
"Live within your means" as a phrase and as a popular figure of speech, would seem to be self-evident and obvious, at least on the surface. Simply put, it might represent not spending what you don't have. However -- and this is a big "but" -- it can also get incredibly frustrating to have people automatically parroting this phrase, for several reasons. First, the "means" with which one lives has gone down, not up, over the past 30+ years, with wages not being fairly-adjusted to inflation. What this means on a practical level, is that with the varying levels of inflation and deflation of the dollar over the past few decades, people's standards of living have gone down, not up. It was much easier to "live within one's means" in 1950, 1960, and 1970, than it was was say from 1980 - present. Houses that could once be bought decades ago on a single-income family salary for $25,000 may now, in 2015, cost as much as $750,000+, in certain residential areas. This is an extreme example where it is obvious that the financial industry has "moved the goal posts" of what living within one's means represents today in 2015, vs. what it used to mean.
While observing some degree of "living within one's means" would actually seem prudent and even wise, it almost sounds like some people may take it to drastic extremes, where it is used as a justification for endorsing the gradual (and involuntary) reduction of people's living standards, over time. While also serving as an apologist of sorts to the well-off, well-to-do, and the wealthy. Keeping in mind that it is much, much easier to live within one's means, so to speak, if one is already well-off in the first place.
Considering that a lot of benefit programs (think rewards, mileage, credit cards with perks, etc) are only accessible to well-off people, I agree with you for the most part.
If you have money, it's easier to get things more cheaply, and if you don't have money, you pay more for the same services the wealthy person is getting.
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No, thanks.
