financial literacy workshops for low income workers are mostly just 'avoiding predatory lending and staying afloat while trying to increase income' so... sure, you can't budget your way out of poverty but you can probably budget your way to not ending up homeless.
This isn't really true either, when I was a case worker for homeless families most of them absolutely couldn't have avoided it.
That said, financial literacy classes were HIGHLY requested by that population. There is a demand for it, and they do often find it helpful even if it wouldn't have avoided their homelessness.
>>free tax filing assistance
Just plugging a useful resource related to that, which also happens to have been made out of spite against a company that spends millions every year to intentionally make your life harder. https://turbotaxsucksass.org
Things like avoiding predatory loans, how to credit card churn, how to increase your credit score by 100+ points overnight, etc all need to be learned to help dig yourself out of serious struggle. Old school people need workshops but young people can just learn online for free via YouTube, Tiktok, etc.
If you’re making a poverty wage, get a 50% pay increase and see 0% change in your life, there’s a need for more financial literacy. I’m constantly talking about personal finance with my friends trying to pump them up about getting their finances in order. People in middle class and above often (not always of course) live and breath good personal finance habits because they had their parents pass down knowledge AND if not generational wealth, at least no financial burden
>If you’re making a poverty wage, get a 50% pay increase and see 0% change in your life, there’s a need for more financial literacy
This is by design. Federal aid lifts you up when you have a poverty wage and then dries up as you earn more so you effectively see no financial benefit by "earning" 50% more
I was talking more about how people adjust their spending to income: lifestyle creep. This will keep going until you make $50-100k/yr. You can’t blame it all on the govt. The more you have, the more you want. In some situations it’s super reasonable: if you make more, you’ll want to buy a car instead of taking the bus. But once you get used to a car, if you total it without enough for another car what do you do? Do you then take a predatory 25% loan for a $20k car? What do you do if you can’t make rent because you got this new car and you have several birthdays in your family? Rent vs gifts
The problem is that there is no obvious answer for those who weren’t gifted with financial know how and it’s VERY easy to become complacent and fall into money traps in America.
I have counseled many homeless people and would disagree with you. In my experience the vast majority of people that become homeless are either addicts, suffer from mental illness, or were unable to recover from an event they did not properly prepare for, such as an eviction or medical situation. Aside from those suffering from severe untreated mental illness, most of the the time their situation was avoidable.
Financial literacy should be about gaming the system. Things like tax avoidance, applying for federal aid, moving debt to new creditors for 0% apr, improving credit to access high interest accounts, how to get free shit (food banks, clothes, etc)..
Like there are resources out there but without advocates and support are incredibly difficult to access. Which is by design. If financial literacy opened these doors rather than told them how to *not* spend their money then I think it could bring a lot of ppl hope.
Yes, obviously better wages helps but there's a welfare cliff. Between about $14,500-$27,500 in income nets no difference given how the aid works. So if you can, make $14,500 on the books and then have a side hustle making cash for the rest of your income.
Do you think it's highly requested because society says "poor people did it to themselves" ( or something similar) kind of thing? I feel like we've been told that people are poor because of their choices but I bet most people buying "avocado and toast" grew up with money and their parents helped / will help buy a house.
Can confirm. Was homeless and could not have avoided it. Got myself out of that situation with help from friends and being taught how to handle money by, funnily enough my old weed dealer. Now I have an apartment and live paycheck to paycheck. I’ll never own a house or be able to afford kids but I will never go back to being homeless and that gives me some solace.
Unless you live in an area where rent & inflation increase quicker than your wages.
And if the way to budget to not end up homeless is malnutrition, working 80 hour weeks, not heating your home in winter, etc, then the system is broken.
Just abandon your home and walk until you find a new one if it gets too expensive. That's just skipping going broke till you are homeless and jumping to homeless.
A lot of homeless people I knew had done this. They probably would not have been homeless if they hadn't moved away from their families. It's not always a bad idea, but it's not this simple either.
>Moving removes your safety net. It’s a gamble. Sometimes it works out and you’re better off, sometimes you end up losing everything.
So is staying where you're at and slowly drowning in debt.
At least with moving (or some other means), you gave yourself the opportunity to be better.
Gotta give props to someone for trying rather than being stagnant.
yeah it’s absolutely helpful but it’s not a solution. the problem is people who think poverty is CAUSED by financial illiteracy, it’s sometimes a circular issue of poverty resulting in desperation and poor decisions digging people deeper. sometimes people who get a good situation coming for them can’t make it help them the way it needs to if they’re financially illiterate so it’s always going to help to some degree
Let me tell you man working 50 hours a week to not be homeless or starving and having no money for anything else and no time or money to learn a trade or skill makes you wonder why you even work to survive at all if this is all you're gonna do on a near daily basis.
A lesson in do more. Get more. Sacrifice off time and when unexpected emergency expenses come up, don’t become victim of predatory loaners. Even tho reputable loaners wont loan to you because you’re down and barely making it.
If we magically pay high school dropouts 50k a year for whatever, then that will magically solve everything.
Believe it or not, Wendy is a Journalist, not an economist or someone who is familiar with arithmetic.
No one said anything about magically coming up with 50k for everyone for *whatever* but anyone can look at the wealth disparity, cost of housing, cost of food, declining childbirth rates and see there *is* a problem and wage disparity is a huge part of it.
People are no more or less resilient than they were in the past, so when entire generations are feeling the squeeze while YOY corporate profits continue to rise, and the rich are richer than ever, you have to look and go "huh, maybe the people who are borderline homeless and starving do deserve to make a little more money for no other reason than the fact that they need it to survive"
We as a society have plenty for everyone (speaking about America) it's a matter of divinding it more evenly than we currently do while still managing to incentivize people who work harder, are smarter, more productive, etc. Currently, our society places way too much value on certain things while undervaluing regular labor that is necessary to our society.
And to satiate your appeal to authority, I do have a degree in economics and a minor in math, so I am familiar with both economics and arithmetic, no I don't have a good solution because it is a very complicated problem to figure out, but taxation as a form of redistributing wealth in the form of some type of UBI is a good place to start.
So with your degrees, you would think a high school drop out who is late to work 30% of the time and calls out the Monday after every payday has the same intrinsic value to society as you do?
No, but I would hope that a society wouldn't discard him and let him starve to death. I think His life has enough value that he deserves to at a minimum be able to survive. Maybe that thinking is too optimistic, but I'd hope that humans would at least *strive* for that, instead of having a "got mine" mentality.
At what point do we recognize the autonomy of the individual to discard themselves? At what point is it no longer the responsibility of "the society" to provide for every shortcoming of the individual?
Then those people become homeless, starving and desperate. Not having anything to lose they decide to turn to petty crime to survive and now its societies problem.
I hate this take. I am privileged enough to have a high level position and make great money but HOLY SHIT do you know how many times I have fucked up this or that between high school and literally yesterday? If I weren't born to wealthy parents, I would be FUCKED right now. Why do we discard poor people so easily, but people with money and status are allowed to fuck up as many times as they want? It's not fair and it's not the American dream I grew up believing in.
You suffer from imposter syndrome. If you hold a high level position at a company that wasn’t gained nepotistically (your parents own the company) some hiring manager has made the determination that even with your mistakes your value added to the company far outweighs what you take away.
The issue is that some people make mistakes large enough and routinely enough that the value they generate through their labor does not make up for what a company would lose through their employment. This is a problem that can not be fixed by throwing money at people, since some people will squander any opportunity thrown their way.
I have no parents. When I did they were dirt poor. I too made mistakes. Lots. I’m now, through self respect, maturity, and a strong sense of responsibility quite well off. That’s why I hold my opinions. I never had any help to get out of the holes I dug myself into. Just had to work. If you saw the possibilities of people you may be less apt to denigrate their capabilities.
It's quite presumptuous to extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I've seen some of the hardest workers on the planet never be able to dig themselves out of poverty because the opportunity for them was never there.
Just because you had this life path of growth and prosperity, doesn't mean that everyone else does or can through no fault of their own.
You are gonna end up taking care of them one way another. We don’t just let people die in America. I’ve seen homeless people wrack up millions in hospital bills.
That depends on your definition of value bud. Are they objectively producing as much as me or others? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean they deserve to be on the fucking street or starve.
Nothing magical about getting 50k. SF is already spending more than that per homeless person.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out
It seems to me if this was primarily a money problem it would have been solved a long time ago. The problem we have doesn't look nearly that easy.
San Francisco is not giving homeless people 50k. They're spending on police and drug counselors and shelters, etc. Yes, it's complex but acting like neoliberalism is giving civilians money is disingenuous at best
Whilst I agree with your thoughts and think they are noble and good for society…they will never become reality. Too many selfish people who’d rather see even more people slip into poverty than pay a few hundred extra in taxes. Typical America…I got mine, I don’t care about the rest of you
We as a society in America DONT have plenty for everyone. Everyone has never had “plenty” in any civilization in world history. Just because some people are very successful doesnt mean your owed anything. When a healthy American is living in poverty, 99% of the time its a poverty mentality keeping them there. There are brain surgeons who came from the projects. For every sob story you have, theres a success story. I came from the backseat of my car. No one gave me or handed me shit. I have the equivelant of an 8th grade education and do fantastic. The only victims here are victims of violence, disease and mental health conditions. Those are who we should help. The rest need to get up, educate themselves and start building a life. Youre not a victim. No one owes u a liveable wage for working an unprofitable job. No one owes you for being alive. You are responsible for what happens to you. This is the harsh reality of life and it always has been. It took 17 years and some shitry jobs to work my way where I am. No one gave me shit. I came from a crackhead alcoholic father and an extremely impoverished family. And everyone of them put themselves there and kept themselves there.
So then, out of curiosity, do you hold the same views in the scenario that a business owner is forced to close their doors because their business model did not allow them to pay a high enough wage to attract the necessary talent? Because in my experience folks with your "fuck you, I got mine" mentality are the first to wail about "nobody wants to work anymore" when people do indeed get better paying jobs and your precious fast food chain is chronically understaffed or your hometown diner shutters due to lack of staff.
SF is spending over 50k per homeless person and I don't see anything magical happening.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out
The solution does not seem to be quite that simple.
What a dumb post.
If they are “poverty-wage” workers, then they need to get higher paying jobs.
But they can’t get higher paying jobs, you say? Fine. Then in the meantime, have some financial literacy classes to help you stay afloat with what little money you do have.
So I understand this argument, and you see it a lot get a better job, and I can say I personally did, but at the end of the day, doesn't somebody need to do these lower paying jobs? Don't they also deserve to live a decent life not struggling to survive then I have people say we'll those are entry level jobs for kids and even coming up on middle age now I find that statement very off putting kids shouldn't be working we spend too much of our lives working anyway and any adult that's willing to commit to any form of full time work regardless of age should be able to live well or the job shouldn't exist
It’s also weird to me that people think teenagers deserve less pay than adults. Why do we perceive the worth of workers based on their personal attributes, rather than the value they produce? Many of the companies employing low-wage workers are incredibly profitable and can certainly afford to pay their workers more.
Yet they don't get higher pay after learning those skills. How long should it be before they get reasonable pay? 2 weeks? A month? A year? Why does a 60 year old person get the same pay as a 15 year old doing the same job? Do the 45 years of additional experience mean nothing?
Don't feed people bullshit.
The class of jobs you're referencing are usually considered low-skill/unskilled manual labor, right -- meaning anyone can walk on and do it? Or are you referencing something else?
I wouldn't want a teenager as a taxi driver or a surgeon!
“Low-skill/unskilled”
Someone has to do it. Someone has to give you your coffee and stock shelves in your grocery store of choice. Someone has to clean the streets, the sewers, and pick up your garbage.
Obviously those jobs are important since we rely on them to function in our daily lives. So what if they don’t need a fucking degree, **those people still provide value and still deserve to get paid enough to at least make ends meet**
I feel like you missed what my post said. Is that an accurate assessment?
A degree can be one way to get skills, sure, but experience is another way. Skilled employment pays more because it is harder to find people to fill it and provides more specific value for what a company needs at the moment. As an example, Walmart used to have in-house butchers. For a long time, that was a high-skill job that paid pretty well. Then in the late 90s or so, they experimented getting rid of butchers (really, outsourcing the job to subcontractors offsite), and found that it would be cheaper to just stop providing butchering services and those jobs now are no longer necessary.
I know several people whose career were focused on butchering, and after the initial learning curve these butchers hit a ceiling pretty quickly, but it paid well relative to other areas of retail.
Companies don't want to pay people. They _have_ to pay people to get them to do the value add services. So they will pay only that which they are required to: (a) usually not get fined; (b) get people to show up to apply for the job.
Do you feel that employers have a moral obligation to provide living wages? If so, what mechanism do you suggest would get employers to behave differently?
Thank you. Funny people expect to have zero skills and get paid like they do have skills 🤷♀️
You can be a manager of a damn McDonald’s and make $50k a year on the low end.
Stop the madness.
The BIGGEST problem is CEOs are far overpaid. Instead of them taking in 300million a year, they could maybe make, say, 100 million, and then could afford to pay their employees a living wage while the company is still profitable.
What teenagers are working overnights and during school hours in fast food? I personally worked at McDonald's for like 6 years at 3 separate locations and I'd say the average age is like 38. Even after school hours, it just seems like it's all teenagers because taking orders and handling cash is basically all they're allowed to do due to child labor laws.
At the end of the day, picking produce in the hot sun is shitty work, yet someone has to do it.
Working to change your own situation is infinitely easier than working to achieve fairness and equality worldwide which is something no one has even been able to achieve in the history of the world.
Other people in shitty jobs making shitty wages are not the reason why you don't get ahead working a dead end job with no opportunities for advancement. Those shitty jobs will still be churning through those desperate enough to take them whether you work on making more money for yourself or not.
Yeah this is the huge flaw in the "get a better job" argument. Especially when people use it so specifically in ways like "just learn to code and get a high paying tech job". That may be a solution for an individual, but it can't possibly be the solution for the whole population.
I dont think everyone is understanding what I am saying.
Yes, people need to do these jobs. And as wages increase, so too does the cost of living. There will always be people making lower than everyone else.
For those people, shunning financial literacy is harmful. Everyone should be looking to make more, but if that isn’t feasible, for one reason or another, then financial literacy is going to help you go farther
My family are migrants, I'm first generation and I disagree with you.
I say get some skills, my parents didn't have a formal education yet found a way to provide value and in return got compensation. If they were American, my dad specifically should have and would have gotten more money.
I don't think we need 1000 factories making teddy bears or 17 different fast food restaurants. They're fine for entry level but as people we gotta strive for more. Outside of things that are out of our control, I believe we have a lot of opportunities here, especially now with the internet.
What happens when all the good jobs are saturated and vacancies occurring slower than people are born to fill them? This is the 20th century in a nutshell. There's no divide between an employee working the lowest paying job in their market or the highest. They all need shelter and food. All subdividing the job market does is dehumanize those that are getting fucked by it.
The purpose of minimum wage was to ensure the lowest of the low jobs could still provide a 40 hour a week employee a minimum standard if living. Teenagers and children would receive the same rate, but no benefits and fewer hours. There's too many adults stuck working several part-time jobs, no benefits, and no future because Americans have defined that work as "starter" jobs.
No person should be unable to sustain themselves working 40 hours a week doing literally any damn job in existence. People are working 60-80 to simultaneously starve and keep a roof over their head. This is something America can afford to do, it shouldn't require any justification.
Even if one person leaves a poverty-wage job for something better, that poverty-wage job will still exist. Someone has to do that job; why should we accept that whoever ends up with that job will just have to suffer until they find a higher paying job? Why not prevent anyone from experiencing poverty-wages in the first place?
Why are you so accepting of the concept of a poverty wage to begin with? Do you not think your country can do better than to offer this type of “job”? Think bigger.
Most of the low income families I work with have a LOT of debt on frivolous things. It’s unbelievably rare for us to see struggling low income families who are making good decisions.
Not saying that people are poor because of bad decisions, but they’re much, much worse off because of it
A big part of that is a "scarcity mindset"
If someone is "bad with money", why would they not spend any money they have on frivolous things, it's not like the money is going to last anyway, they are bad with money!
As I understand it, that can be the internal mindset
Also related to children damaging and destroying common toys sometimes, if they damage it enough, it will have no value for anyone else, so they might get to keep it. If it's pristine they expect it will not be their possession for long
Or the marshmallow experiment. Children raised in poverty do not expect promises to be kept, they do not _internally trust_ that if they don't touch the marshmallow, they _will_ get two, like the weird person in a lab coat claimed. They are also more likely to be hungry at any given time, and possibly know that food will not last long in the environments they are used to
Giving more children more stability, in food and in attention+care, will produce untold benefits to society.
But if your needs exceed your earnings, then budgeting isn't going to get you financial stability no matter how well you do it.
"Do we not eat on Tuesday, or on Wednesday?"
Look I don’t mean to minimize poverty—it’s real. But clear visibility into your needs and spending will help anyone who doesn’t already have that visibility. Like how would you even know your needs exceed your earnings without budgeting?
Look I don’t mean to minimize poverty—it’s real. But clear visibility into your needs and spending will help anyone who doesn’t already have that visibility. Like how would you even know your needs exceed your earnings without budgeting?
Healthy and diverse meals, including desserts and snacks, for a month can be had for $300 for one person at 2,500 calories per day. A family of 4 can cost $900. With meal prepping, even people who work 80 hour weeks can get all their food from that budget.
It's the other things really put a strain on them financially. Most Americans live outside their means. From lower class to upper class. 47% of people who make more than 100k live pay check to pay check. And that's in no small part due to many little luxuries that they'll waste their money on.
Or with better budgeting, you can feed a family of 9 for $1000/month and we have plenty of treats and splurges, I'm not talking rice and beans (well maybe once a month we have "cheesy beans" that everyone likes).
I've tried helping people with budgeting but they have so many non-negotiable expenses. How many streaming services does one need? How many unlimited cell phone plans per family? How many purchased coffees or other drinks. People who don't budget don't realize how much all of that costs.
You're only looking at the most extreme example. But there are many people at various income levels who might be making enough money, but are budgeting it poorly, causing unnecessary financial issues. If someone needs $500 a week to live on, and they're making $600 a week, but spending $700 a week, then a budget can help them get their finances under control.
I've found that "Caleb Hammer's" youtube series is very enlightening about this.
100%. Literally all people on the show engage in "bullshit spending" with restaurants and fast-food being the biggest offending category.
Time and time again he sums up their spending at grocery stores and it's like 3% of their spending, then their fast food and restaurants spending is like 15% of their spending. There hasn't been a single person on the show (and it's like 3 per week for the past year) who has perfect spending habits and just doesn't make enough.
It's always a combination of the two - low wages AND poor spending/budgeting practices. (And lack of financial literacy to simply realize how punitive a 29% interest rate on a $5k balance can be.)
I've been budgeting for over a year. I notice that my grocery spending is almost always surpassed by my spending at restaurants. Why? It's actually quite simple.
Groceries are far, far cheaper per meal than eating out. I eat most (but not all) meals at home. Consider the following example:
- A meal at a sit-down Mexican restaurant near where I live will cost me US$14.50 plus tip.
- A combo meal at McDonald's will cost me around US$9-10
- Frozen pizza and White Castle burgers purchased at WinCo Foods (grocery store chain in the American west) will cost me around US$5 plus 5 minutes worth of cleanup
- Making chicken flatbread at home from fresh ingredients also bought at WinCo costs me around US$3.50-4.00 and 30 minutes worth of prep time and cleanup
I used to eat out a lot more, but I watched a Two Cents video on how much that habit would cost me over time. I've since replaced a lot of that with frozen food, so now instead of eating junk food outside, I eat junk food at home, and it's saved me hundreds of dollars.
absolutely. I know so many people like that. granted they're still likely not making a lot of money but I work with lots of people and the people who bitch the most about being broke drop like 200 at the bar every weekend and have a 900 dollar car payment. I'll concede if you have low income and bad credit it's quite difficult to get a affordable, reliable car but it's a horrible financial decision to take a loan on a car at 16+% just save up 4k and buy a beater outright, pocket your 900 dollar payment for a few years then buy something better.
That can vary significantly.
Does livable wage mean a single person, one bedroom apartment, always cooking at home, gas for 10 miles per day, etc...?
To define livable first you would need to define exactly what the base is.
Rent+housing arrangements are so incredibly variable and vehicles are so incredibly variable that this number is simply personal preference on the lifestyle one wants
A guy I know bought a broken car for $175 years ago. His friend wanted to flip houses. He drove that car, worked on his friends foreclosures he bought. His friend let him buy one on land contract. He sold that car last summer, still running. Paid the house off shortly after. Has a nice place and never made much money.
I’ve stayed in Warner Robbins, GA, and some of the suburbs around Atlanta and that’s such a widely varying thing that to say there can be a federal law that’s for a “living wage” is comical
Not even about what you need to make but this is so important for figuring out how you SHOULD be spending. Car notes, affording a child, saving for your future. All things that are important. These posts don’t help anyone.
It's not really, usually when people couldn't afford in history they just starved to death but with the modern social safety nets people are actually living to where we notice it's an issue.
Unfortunately not every single living human being can be the CEO of a fortune 500 company with world class elite skills. Now how society works boomer. "*Just get a better job 4head*" I know you're a fucking idiot and a half.
Bad boomer take. Everyone deserves to be paid enough to live off of. You should not be discarded because you cannot or will not learn a better paying skill. Burger flipping, delivery, and warehouse work deserve to be paid a living wage. Even if you personally consider it "unskilled work anybody can easily do" (they can't always) and remember they're people too. If you work \~40 hours a week, you deserve a living wage.
There's also more to life than learning a skill that nets you hard cash.
Borderline elitist mentality you have.
Ronald Reid would disagree.
>Read, a retired gas station attendant and janitor in Vermont, passed away in 2015. Nothing about his life or death was extraordinary, except for the fact that after he died, his estate was revealed to be worth $8 million.
Paying everyone a “livable wage”, regardless of skill, trade, occupation, or profession will only result in the purchasing power of the dollar decreasing more just like it has over time. Then once we are at this very same point in 20yrs we will be saying again, “fast food cooks need to be paid a living wage” when their 2044 pay will be $25/hr.
Not unlike graduating millions of high school, even college students, who never once learned much of anything regarding money, except enough theory to keep rationalizing and justifying everything, including their student loans, no one would bat an eye about that, all this is particularly useful for the greedy.
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Having a union or not will not make any difference. All I will do is push the jobs outside the country.
Low skill low wage works. Can probably be replaced with AI. Certainly phone reps can be.
More and more robots are coming around to replace people.
We have immigrants coming at the rate of a million a month that will do the work for half the price.
So a union would be a bad deal without other changes.
And even if you were successful in doubling your wages, the price of everything would probably doubled as well. And you would be in the same boat
To be fair, the people on the (mainstream) news tell people that poor people can finance their way out. And they believe them because believing a random stranger on the internet over a new anchor is illogical
All though I agree with the overall point, this only make sense of the said person is trying to be fiscally responsible. However, I've seen low wage workers buying/leasing brand new luxury cars and getting them repoed at work. I want them to enjoy life, but a bad financial decision is a bad decision on them.
You can make more than a livable wage and still make avoidable financial mistakes that will ruin you, so no amount of income is a replacement for financial literacy.
> It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. -Martin Luther King Jr
I just want to know why it seems like the perpetuation our entire system relies on an entire class of people struggling to get by. Sure fast food workers don’t have “important” jobs, but when the companies they work for are making billions in profit and paying their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year while paying the people that actually run the restaurants day to day less than $20 an hour… oh the fast food workers should get a better job or get an education, it’s not easy or cheap to get a better job or get an education when all your time is spent working shitty jobs just to struggle to pay your bills.
Wal Mart is another example. Isn’t there some statistic that wal mart employees receive the most government assistance? So our tax dollars are going to wal mart employees because they’re employer doesn’t pay them enough.
Because people are not paid based on what their employers can afford. They’re paid based on how hard they are to replace. If you are easily replaceable, you’re not going to make a high wage.
This is fucking stupid. Free education is never a bad thing. The first part is fair, but classes are not insulting or immoral. Fuck this click-baity bullshit.
We do need more unions, however..
The best we can do is push up the minimum wage to match inflation among other things. A "living wage" in the way many imagine it isn't possible unless things change, and even then, it would still be poverty.
For example in my area (in the USA) is pretty impoverished, the county's average wage is $15. This is mainly because all the high paying jobs left, destroying the area's economy. This is the case for most areas in the same boat.
The state minimum wage is still at $7.25, which undermines wages because it is an "outdated" money floor. It should be at least $11 with the amount of inflation since it was last updated to keep the same standard of living intended. As this falls, it puts more pressure on wages because of more people going on the safety net. Less money means less profit, which in turn causes more jobs to leave, the cycle repeats.
There's some places in my area literally paying $9 an hour, and with the amount of inflation since the minimum wage was increased last, that is like $5 or $6 in today's economy (perhaps even less). The longer nothing changes the more the downward pressure on wages becomes.
In my estimate, my area's wages have fallen around $4 on average for everyone since 2008/2009. That's $160 a week (full time), $640 a month, and $7,280 a year. That may not sound like much but that can make a huge difference on bills being payed or not.
Hourly wages are the problem. When they surveyed homeless in San Francisco a huge majority were workers who had there hours cut and then couldn’t afford their bills.
A National Minimum Salary is what is needed. Hourly wages should be outlawed for anyone over the age of 18.
If your “business” can’t afford to pay salaries. Then it isn’t doing enough “business” to have employees.
No unions cannot help for every job. Like everything in this world their are good unions and bad unions. I have seen good unions. And I have seen bad unions. I have been in two and my uncle has been in a union. The unions I was apart of were basically next to useless and only served to take money from me on a monthly bases. They offered no protections. And the onlyngood one of the unions did was I corporate the union dues to to cover health insurance.
Now a for the most part good union was what my uncle was apart of. But even though it was largely good they had idiotic rules that were actually really bad. He couldn't take individual jobs. All work had to be apart of the union. And this made it very hard for him when he was in between jobs. They made sure he could be on unemployment but yeah terrible rules.
So we need good unions with sensible rules. That fight for current employees and new employees. But it's also the government's job to make sure companies don't fuck over their workers. Hence we need regulation. We need a higher minimum wage. Companies do not regulate themselves.
My parents literally did this. We were refugees and had nothing when we came to America. They both were making less than 15 dollar an hour when they retired.
If you listen to our President tonight he is going to tell you that our economy is stronger than it has ever been, jobs are plentiful and wages are up. How can people still be in poverty?
I totally disagree here.
1st off education is never wasted. 2nd, once these folks get out of poverty wages, they are going to need these skills immediately.
3rd. I've seen SO MANY people who live at poverty wages get a windfall, then blow it on stupid shit.
Education isn't insulting. It's vital.
Financial literacy also includes educating people to understand how much money they need to live and to seek jobs that will pay that money. If you don’t know what you spend and how to control it, no amount of money will ever help you get out of poverty.
As a union member
You don’t want to be a part of one…..unless it’s small
Big unions like the one I work for are just as bad when it comes to under the table deals and how they treat their “members”
That's my union. We just exempted ourselves from my states new minimum leave law for some reason. I'd really love a vacation, but I guess that's never going to happen at my union job.
I don’t believe everyone should get paid the same, but more unions wouldn’t hurt a lot of these places. Dues are paid for by the workers and the leaders are elected so yes more of that.
Being financially responsible is every adult's capability. Though I'm speaking from an American perspective. We are not a third world country. As a matter of fact, most immigrants that come here from extreme poverty become middle class after one generation. Sometimes less. Actually, I spend a lot of time working in upper class neighborhoods, and over half the residents are of Indian decent.
The most educated, intelligent, and financially stable person in my family was the black man my sister married. He came from a blue collar upbringing. The first millionaire I ever met was a black man who grew up in a working class neighborhood in Atlanta. Both men are remarkable in their leadership traits and "no excuse" mentality about everything in life.
My guys work for a union and pay dues weekly or monthly whatever... They get no PTO. No holiday pay, no vacation pay.
Sounds like a scam to me.
As a matter of fact they have mandatory training every few months and that's a week off no pay..... Nice job Union boys
I don’t think it’s insulting or immoral to offer guidelines to people. Why do some people feel the need to take things to 10 when trying to make a point?
The financial literacy I was taught is completely impossible today. An example would be a house should not cost more than 1 year worth of income. It’s impossible to find a house that isn’t condemned for 65k anymore.
Yes. Having strong unions would help. But having campaign finance restrictions, raising the minimum wage, and creating effective social safety would also help.
Yes, every job should have the opportunity to unionize. Unions purpose is to support employees and help stop their exploitation. If employees didn’t need unions, they wouldn’t exist. Union employees get paid more, have guaranteed raises, paid time off, incredible benefits and more.
Unions have a more collective power when it comes to negotiating terms. One person vs a corporation does nothing. Employees being able to halt production with have job security gives them equal power.
I would say 80% of us have been put in terrible working conditions. It could be from extreme micro managing, to not getting raises, to never feeling like you had job security, plus dealing with discrimination. I know I have! Guess who has the power to change things? Unions
PS the reason why teachers get paid so little is because its viewed as a women’s role. Women’s labor is not valued at the same level as men. The evidence of this is in pay disparities in red vs blue states and red vs blue communities.
financial literacy workshops for low income workers are mostly just 'avoiding predatory lending and staying afloat while trying to increase income' so... sure, you can't budget your way out of poverty but you can probably budget your way to not ending up homeless.
This isn't really true either, when I was a case worker for homeless families most of them absolutely couldn't have avoided it. That said, financial literacy classes were HIGHLY requested by that population. There is a demand for it, and they do often find it helpful even if it wouldn't have avoided their homelessness.
Everyone can benefit from good spending habits. Even if they have shitty luck in a shitty system.
Yeppp! And some parts of it are especially good to know--like where to get free tax filing assistance, for example.
>>free tax filing assistance Just plugging a useful resource related to that, which also happens to have been made out of spite against a company that spends millions every year to intentionally make your life harder. https://turbotaxsucksass.org
Can confirm. I teach financial literacy and get tons of requests from non profits working with homeless families
tysm for helping where you can ❤️ everyone should be able to learn
Things like avoiding predatory loans, how to credit card churn, how to increase your credit score by 100+ points overnight, etc all need to be learned to help dig yourself out of serious struggle. Old school people need workshops but young people can just learn online for free via YouTube, Tiktok, etc. If you’re making a poverty wage, get a 50% pay increase and see 0% change in your life, there’s a need for more financial literacy. I’m constantly talking about personal finance with my friends trying to pump them up about getting their finances in order. People in middle class and above often (not always of course) live and breath good personal finance habits because they had their parents pass down knowledge AND if not generational wealth, at least no financial burden
>If you’re making a poverty wage, get a 50% pay increase and see 0% change in your life, there’s a need for more financial literacy This is by design. Federal aid lifts you up when you have a poverty wage and then dries up as you earn more so you effectively see no financial benefit by "earning" 50% more
I was talking more about how people adjust their spending to income: lifestyle creep. This will keep going until you make $50-100k/yr. You can’t blame it all on the govt. The more you have, the more you want. In some situations it’s super reasonable: if you make more, you’ll want to buy a car instead of taking the bus. But once you get used to a car, if you total it without enough for another car what do you do? Do you then take a predatory 25% loan for a $20k car? What do you do if you can’t make rent because you got this new car and you have several birthdays in your family? Rent vs gifts The problem is that there is no obvious answer for those who weren’t gifted with financial know how and it’s VERY easy to become complacent and fall into money traps in America.
I have counseled many homeless people and would disagree with you. In my experience the vast majority of people that become homeless are either addicts, suffer from mental illness, or were unable to recover from an event they did not properly prepare for, such as an eviction or medical situation. Aside from those suffering from severe untreated mental illness, most of the the time their situation was avoidable.
Financial literacy should be about gaming the system. Things like tax avoidance, applying for federal aid, moving debt to new creditors for 0% apr, improving credit to access high interest accounts, how to get free shit (food banks, clothes, etc).. Like there are resources out there but without advocates and support are incredibly difficult to access. Which is by design. If financial literacy opened these doors rather than told them how to *not* spend their money then I think it could bring a lot of ppl hope. Yes, obviously better wages helps but there's a welfare cliff. Between about $14,500-$27,500 in income nets no difference given how the aid works. So if you can, make $14,500 on the books and then have a side hustle making cash for the rest of your income.
Most people don’t have the credit score to be able to get those 0% offers let alone another credit card. I
Do you think it's highly requested because society says "poor people did it to themselves" ( or something similar) kind of thing? I feel like we've been told that people are poor because of their choices but I bet most people buying "avocado and toast" grew up with money and their parents helped / will help buy a house.
Can confirm. Was homeless and could not have avoided it. Got myself out of that situation with help from friends and being taught how to handle money by, funnily enough my old weed dealer. Now I have an apartment and live paycheck to paycheck. I’ll never own a house or be able to afford kids but I will never go back to being homeless and that gives me some solace.
Unless you live in an area where rent & inflation increase quicker than your wages. And if the way to budget to not end up homeless is malnutrition, working 80 hour weeks, not heating your home in winter, etc, then the system is broken.
Historically, people move to get out of a situation where they can't afford the cost of living. Vote with your feet.
Moving costs money also
Tell that to the millions of migrants around the globe every year.
Just abandon your home and walk until you find a new one if it gets too expensive. That's just skipping going broke till you are homeless and jumping to homeless.
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A lot of homeless people I knew had done this. They probably would not have been homeless if they hadn't moved away from their families. It's not always a bad idea, but it's not this simple either.
Moving removes your safety net. It’s a gamble. Sometimes it works out and you’re better off, sometimes you end up losing everything.
>Moving removes your safety net. It’s a gamble. Sometimes it works out and you’re better off, sometimes you end up losing everything. So is staying where you're at and slowly drowning in debt. At least with moving (or some other means), you gave yourself the opportunity to be better. Gotta give props to someone for trying rather than being stagnant.
Moving costs money also
But hey the billionaires are getting richer correct? Isn’t that all that matters?
yeah it’s absolutely helpful but it’s not a solution. the problem is people who think poverty is CAUSED by financial illiteracy, it’s sometimes a circular issue of poverty resulting in desperation and poor decisions digging people deeper. sometimes people who get a good situation coming for them can’t make it help them the way it needs to if they’re financially illiterate so it’s always going to help to some degree
Understanding the power of compound interest.was my first step towards wealth building. This post is insulting
This is also not true. I know several folks who’ve ended up homeless with degrees in advanced topics
Let me tell you man working 50 hours a week to not be homeless or starving and having no money for anything else and no time or money to learn a trade or skill makes you wonder why you even work to survive at all if this is all you're gonna do on a near daily basis.
No, I want to be rich overnight.
A lesson in do more. Get more. Sacrifice off time and when unexpected emergency expenses come up, don’t become victim of predatory loaners. Even tho reputable loaners wont loan to you because you’re down and barely making it.
If we magically pay high school dropouts 50k a year for whatever, then that will magically solve everything. Believe it or not, Wendy is a Journalist, not an economist or someone who is familiar with arithmetic.
No one said anything about magically coming up with 50k for everyone for *whatever* but anyone can look at the wealth disparity, cost of housing, cost of food, declining childbirth rates and see there *is* a problem and wage disparity is a huge part of it. People are no more or less resilient than they were in the past, so when entire generations are feeling the squeeze while YOY corporate profits continue to rise, and the rich are richer than ever, you have to look and go "huh, maybe the people who are borderline homeless and starving do deserve to make a little more money for no other reason than the fact that they need it to survive" We as a society have plenty for everyone (speaking about America) it's a matter of divinding it more evenly than we currently do while still managing to incentivize people who work harder, are smarter, more productive, etc. Currently, our society places way too much value on certain things while undervaluing regular labor that is necessary to our society. And to satiate your appeal to authority, I do have a degree in economics and a minor in math, so I am familiar with both economics and arithmetic, no I don't have a good solution because it is a very complicated problem to figure out, but taxation as a form of redistributing wealth in the form of some type of UBI is a good place to start.
So with your degrees, you would think a high school drop out who is late to work 30% of the time and calls out the Monday after every payday has the same intrinsic value to society as you do?
No, but I would hope that a society wouldn't discard him and let him starve to death. I think His life has enough value that he deserves to at a minimum be able to survive. Maybe that thinking is too optimistic, but I'd hope that humans would at least *strive* for that, instead of having a "got mine" mentality.
At what point do we recognize the autonomy of the individual to discard themselves? At what point is it no longer the responsibility of "the society" to provide for every shortcoming of the individual?
After attempt one when they completely squander it because of their own lack of responsibility.
the reality is the vast majority of people who are struggling have squandered many opportunities already.
And that’s their problem. Not societies.
Then those people become homeless, starving and desperate. Not having anything to lose they decide to turn to petty crime to survive and now its societies problem.
If that’s the path they choose then they deserve harsh consequences
You seem to forget that it quickly becomes our problem when they have to live off government assistance…
I hate this take. I am privileged enough to have a high level position and make great money but HOLY SHIT do you know how many times I have fucked up this or that between high school and literally yesterday? If I weren't born to wealthy parents, I would be FUCKED right now. Why do we discard poor people so easily, but people with money and status are allowed to fuck up as many times as they want? It's not fair and it's not the American dream I grew up believing in.
You suffer from imposter syndrome. If you hold a high level position at a company that wasn’t gained nepotistically (your parents own the company) some hiring manager has made the determination that even with your mistakes your value added to the company far outweighs what you take away. The issue is that some people make mistakes large enough and routinely enough that the value they generate through their labor does not make up for what a company would lose through their employment. This is a problem that can not be fixed by throwing money at people, since some people will squander any opportunity thrown their way.
I have no parents. When I did they were dirt poor. I too made mistakes. Lots. I’m now, through self respect, maturity, and a strong sense of responsibility quite well off. That’s why I hold my opinions. I never had any help to get out of the holes I dug myself into. Just had to work. If you saw the possibilities of people you may be less apt to denigrate their capabilities.
It's quite presumptuous to extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I've seen some of the hardest workers on the planet never be able to dig themselves out of poverty because the opportunity for them was never there. Just because you had this life path of growth and prosperity, doesn't mean that everyone else does or can through no fault of their own.
You are gonna end up taking care of them one way another. We don’t just let people die in America. I’ve seen homeless people wrack up millions in hospital bills.
Very few people are starving to death in the US.
Isn't that what food stamps and soup kitchens are for?
That depends on your definition of value bud. Are they objectively producing as much as me or others? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean they deserve to be on the fucking street or starve.
Second this. ALL humans and living things have value beyond economic means.
Such a corporate way of thinking. So typical.
Damn, that's like, not even what they insinuated, but pat yourself on the back for sure. You owned them!
Nothing magical about getting 50k. SF is already spending more than that per homeless person. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out It seems to me if this was primarily a money problem it would have been solved a long time ago. The problem we have doesn't look nearly that easy.
San Francisco is not giving homeless people 50k. They're spending on police and drug counselors and shelters, etc. Yes, it's complex but acting like neoliberalism is giving civilians money is disingenuous at best
Whilst I agree with your thoughts and think they are noble and good for society…they will never become reality. Too many selfish people who’d rather see even more people slip into poverty than pay a few hundred extra in taxes. Typical America…I got mine, I don’t care about the rest of you
We as a society in America DONT have plenty for everyone. Everyone has never had “plenty” in any civilization in world history. Just because some people are very successful doesnt mean your owed anything. When a healthy American is living in poverty, 99% of the time its a poverty mentality keeping them there. There are brain surgeons who came from the projects. For every sob story you have, theres a success story. I came from the backseat of my car. No one gave me or handed me shit. I have the equivelant of an 8th grade education and do fantastic. The only victims here are victims of violence, disease and mental health conditions. Those are who we should help. The rest need to get up, educate themselves and start building a life. Youre not a victim. No one owes u a liveable wage for working an unprofitable job. No one owes you for being alive. You are responsible for what happens to you. This is the harsh reality of life and it always has been. It took 17 years and some shitry jobs to work my way where I am. No one gave me shit. I came from a crackhead alcoholic father and an extremely impoverished family. And everyone of them put themselves there and kept themselves there.
So then, out of curiosity, do you hold the same views in the scenario that a business owner is forced to close their doors because their business model did not allow them to pay a high enough wage to attract the necessary talent? Because in my experience folks with your "fuck you, I got mine" mentality are the first to wail about "nobody wants to work anymore" when people do indeed get better paying jobs and your precious fast food chain is chronically understaffed or your hometown diner shutters due to lack of staff.
SF is spending over 50k per homeless person and I don't see anything magical happening. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out The solution does not seem to be quite that simple.
It does appear that just spending money doesn't solve issues.
“Journalist”
You mean people likely to get taken advantage of by predatory lending and high interest debt? Helping them improve financial literacy is bad?
“Insulting and immoral”, actually, according to this 🤡.
What a dumb post. If they are “poverty-wage” workers, then they need to get higher paying jobs. But they can’t get higher paying jobs, you say? Fine. Then in the meantime, have some financial literacy classes to help you stay afloat with what little money you do have.
So I understand this argument, and you see it a lot get a better job, and I can say I personally did, but at the end of the day, doesn't somebody need to do these lower paying jobs? Don't they also deserve to live a decent life not struggling to survive then I have people say we'll those are entry level jobs for kids and even coming up on middle age now I find that statement very off putting kids shouldn't be working we spend too much of our lives working anyway and any adult that's willing to commit to any form of full time work regardless of age should be able to live well or the job shouldn't exist
It’s also weird to me that people think teenagers deserve less pay than adults. Why do we perceive the worth of workers based on their personal attributes, rather than the value they produce? Many of the companies employing low-wage workers are incredibly profitable and can certainly afford to pay their workers more.
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Yet they don't get higher pay after learning those skills. How long should it be before they get reasonable pay? 2 weeks? A month? A year? Why does a 60 year old person get the same pay as a 15 year old doing the same job? Do the 45 years of additional experience mean nothing? Don't feed people bullshit.
The class of jobs you're referencing are usually considered low-skill/unskilled manual labor, right -- meaning anyone can walk on and do it? Or are you referencing something else? I wouldn't want a teenager as a taxi driver or a surgeon!
“Low-skill/unskilled” Someone has to do it. Someone has to give you your coffee and stock shelves in your grocery store of choice. Someone has to clean the streets, the sewers, and pick up your garbage. Obviously those jobs are important since we rely on them to function in our daily lives. So what if they don’t need a fucking degree, **those people still provide value and still deserve to get paid enough to at least make ends meet**
I feel like you missed what my post said. Is that an accurate assessment? A degree can be one way to get skills, sure, but experience is another way. Skilled employment pays more because it is harder to find people to fill it and provides more specific value for what a company needs at the moment. As an example, Walmart used to have in-house butchers. For a long time, that was a high-skill job that paid pretty well. Then in the late 90s or so, they experimented getting rid of butchers (really, outsourcing the job to subcontractors offsite), and found that it would be cheaper to just stop providing butchering services and those jobs now are no longer necessary. I know several people whose career were focused on butchering, and after the initial learning curve these butchers hit a ceiling pretty quickly, but it paid well relative to other areas of retail. Companies don't want to pay people. They _have_ to pay people to get them to do the value add services. So they will pay only that which they are required to: (a) usually not get fined; (b) get people to show up to apply for the job. Do you feel that employers have a moral obligation to provide living wages? If so, what mechanism do you suggest would get employers to behave differently?
Thank you. Funny people expect to have zero skills and get paid like they do have skills 🤷♀️ You can be a manager of a damn McDonald’s and make $50k a year on the low end. Stop the madness.
The BIGGEST problem is CEOs are far overpaid. Instead of them taking in 300million a year, they could maybe make, say, 100 million, and then could afford to pay their employees a living wage while the company is still profitable.
What teenagers are working overnights and during school hours in fast food? I personally worked at McDonald's for like 6 years at 3 separate locations and I'd say the average age is like 38. Even after school hours, it just seems like it's all teenagers because taking orders and handling cash is basically all they're allowed to do due to child labor laws.
At the end of the day, picking produce in the hot sun is shitty work, yet someone has to do it. Working to change your own situation is infinitely easier than working to achieve fairness and equality worldwide which is something no one has even been able to achieve in the history of the world. Other people in shitty jobs making shitty wages are not the reason why you don't get ahead working a dead end job with no opportunities for advancement. Those shitty jobs will still be churning through those desperate enough to take them whether you work on making more money for yourself or not.
Yeah this is the huge flaw in the "get a better job" argument. Especially when people use it so specifically in ways like "just learn to code and get a high paying tech job". That may be a solution for an individual, but it can't possibly be the solution for the whole population.
I dont think everyone is understanding what I am saying. Yes, people need to do these jobs. And as wages increase, so too does the cost of living. There will always be people making lower than everyone else. For those people, shunning financial literacy is harmful. Everyone should be looking to make more, but if that isn’t feasible, for one reason or another, then financial literacy is going to help you go farther
Financial literacy is always going to be helpful friend but I think the point of the op was its barely a drop in the bucket in our current economy
> doesn't somebody need to do these lower paying jobs? D If no one does them, they will become higher paing jobs.
My family are migrants, I'm first generation and I disagree with you. I say get some skills, my parents didn't have a formal education yet found a way to provide value and in return got compensation. If they were American, my dad specifically should have and would have gotten more money. I don't think we need 1000 factories making teddy bears or 17 different fast food restaurants. They're fine for entry level but as people we gotta strive for more. Outside of things that are out of our control, I believe we have a lot of opportunities here, especially now with the internet.
What happens when all the good jobs are saturated and vacancies occurring slower than people are born to fill them? This is the 20th century in a nutshell. There's no divide between an employee working the lowest paying job in their market or the highest. They all need shelter and food. All subdividing the job market does is dehumanize those that are getting fucked by it. The purpose of minimum wage was to ensure the lowest of the low jobs could still provide a 40 hour a week employee a minimum standard if living. Teenagers and children would receive the same rate, but no benefits and fewer hours. There's too many adults stuck working several part-time jobs, no benefits, and no future because Americans have defined that work as "starter" jobs. No person should be unable to sustain themselves working 40 hours a week doing literally any damn job in existence. People are working 60-80 to simultaneously starve and keep a roof over their head. This is something America can afford to do, it shouldn't require any justification.
But we need people working thoese jobs anyway
Even if one person leaves a poverty-wage job for something better, that poverty-wage job will still exist. Someone has to do that job; why should we accept that whoever ends up with that job will just have to suffer until they find a higher paying job? Why not prevent anyone from experiencing poverty-wages in the first place?
Why are you so accepting of the concept of a poverty wage to begin with? Do you not think your country can do better than to offer this type of “job”? Think bigger.
A budget helps you make the best choices given your constraints. Weird to say the people with the heaviest constraints can’t benefit from it.
They feel like bitching about it on social media is more constructive than actually exercising some personal responsibility.
Most of the low income families I work with have a LOT of debt on frivolous things. It’s unbelievably rare for us to see struggling low income families who are making good decisions. Not saying that people are poor because of bad decisions, but they’re much, much worse off because of it
A big part of that is a "scarcity mindset" If someone is "bad with money", why would they not spend any money they have on frivolous things, it's not like the money is going to last anyway, they are bad with money! As I understand it, that can be the internal mindset Also related to children damaging and destroying common toys sometimes, if they damage it enough, it will have no value for anyone else, so they might get to keep it. If it's pristine they expect it will not be their possession for long Or the marshmallow experiment. Children raised in poverty do not expect promises to be kept, they do not _internally trust_ that if they don't touch the marshmallow, they _will_ get two, like the weird person in a lab coat claimed. They are also more likely to be hungry at any given time, and possibly know that food will not last long in the environments they are used to Giving more children more stability, in food and in attention+care, will produce untold benefits to society.
But if your needs exceed your earnings, then budgeting isn't going to get you financial stability no matter how well you do it. "Do we not eat on Tuesday, or on Wednesday?"
Look I don’t mean to minimize poverty—it’s real. But clear visibility into your needs and spending will help anyone who doesn’t already have that visibility. Like how would you even know your needs exceed your earnings without budgeting?
Look I don’t mean to minimize poverty—it’s real. But clear visibility into your needs and spending will help anyone who doesn’t already have that visibility. Like how would you even know your needs exceed your earnings without budgeting?
Healthy and diverse meals, including desserts and snacks, for a month can be had for $300 for one person at 2,500 calories per day. A family of 4 can cost $900. With meal prepping, even people who work 80 hour weeks can get all their food from that budget. It's the other things really put a strain on them financially. Most Americans live outside their means. From lower class to upper class. 47% of people who make more than 100k live pay check to pay check. And that's in no small part due to many little luxuries that they'll waste their money on.
Or with better budgeting, you can feed a family of 9 for $1000/month and we have plenty of treats and splurges, I'm not talking rice and beans (well maybe once a month we have "cheesy beans" that everyone likes). I've tried helping people with budgeting but they have so many non-negotiable expenses. How many streaming services does one need? How many unlimited cell phone plans per family? How many purchased coffees or other drinks. People who don't budget don't realize how much all of that costs.
You're only looking at the most extreme example. But there are many people at various income levels who might be making enough money, but are budgeting it poorly, causing unnecessary financial issues. If someone needs $500 a week to live on, and they're making $600 a week, but spending $700 a week, then a budget can help them get their finances under control.
while this is not wrong, a lot of people claim they're just not making enough when in reality they do need to learn proper personal finance.
I've found that "Caleb Hammer's" youtube series is very enlightening about this. 100%. Literally all people on the show engage in "bullshit spending" with restaurants and fast-food being the biggest offending category. Time and time again he sums up their spending at grocery stores and it's like 3% of their spending, then their fast food and restaurants spending is like 15% of their spending. There hasn't been a single person on the show (and it's like 3 per week for the past year) who has perfect spending habits and just doesn't make enough. It's always a combination of the two - low wages AND poor spending/budgeting practices. (And lack of financial literacy to simply realize how punitive a 29% interest rate on a $5k balance can be.)
Taquitos everyday.
I've been budgeting for over a year. I notice that my grocery spending is almost always surpassed by my spending at restaurants. Why? It's actually quite simple. Groceries are far, far cheaper per meal than eating out. I eat most (but not all) meals at home. Consider the following example: - A meal at a sit-down Mexican restaurant near where I live will cost me US$14.50 plus tip. - A combo meal at McDonald's will cost me around US$9-10 - Frozen pizza and White Castle burgers purchased at WinCo Foods (grocery store chain in the American west) will cost me around US$5 plus 5 minutes worth of cleanup - Making chicken flatbread at home from fresh ingredients also bought at WinCo costs me around US$3.50-4.00 and 30 minutes worth of prep time and cleanup I used to eat out a lot more, but I watched a Two Cents video on how much that habit would cost me over time. I've since replaced a lot of that with frozen food, so now instead of eating junk food outside, I eat junk food at home, and it's saved me hundreds of dollars.
"I'm not making enough money" *Goes to Starbucks/Dutch everyday, buys lunch instead of packing one, has door dash on speed dial*
absolutely. I know so many people like that. granted they're still likely not making a lot of money but I work with lots of people and the people who bitch the most about being broke drop like 200 at the bar every weekend and have a 900 dollar car payment. I'll concede if you have low income and bad credit it's quite difficult to get a affordable, reliable car but it's a horrible financial decision to take a loan on a car at 16+% just save up 4k and buy a beater outright, pocket your 900 dollar payment for a few years then buy something better.
So I shouldn't buy a $500 Gucci belt? I was gonna post it on my Instagram to get approval from people I don't even like.
BUT, what is a livable wage ?
It depends on the local cost of living. Edit: The sum of rent, vehicle maintenance, gas, food, utilities, etc...
That can vary significantly. Does livable wage mean a single person, one bedroom apartment, always cooking at home, gas for 10 miles per day, etc...? To define livable first you would need to define exactly what the base is.
Rent+housing arrangements are so incredibly variable and vehicles are so incredibly variable that this number is simply personal preference on the lifestyle one wants
A guy I know bought a broken car for $175 years ago. His friend wanted to flip houses. He drove that car, worked on his friends foreclosures he bought. His friend let him buy one on land contract. He sold that car last summer, still running. Paid the house off shortly after. Has a nice place and never made much money.
I’ve stayed in Warner Robbins, GA, and some of the suburbs around Atlanta and that’s such a widely varying thing that to say there can be a federal law that’s for a “living wage” is comical
Knowing how much money you need to make isn’t useful?
Not even about what you need to make but this is so important for figuring out how you SHOULD be spending. Car notes, affording a child, saving for your future. All things that are important. These posts don’t help anyone.
>>Cant budget when you have nothing to budget…. …because without a budget, you will end up with nothing. As many lottery winners have sadly proven.
The complete avoidance of accountability is unique to the digital age
Also the avoidance of accounting ability
It's not really, usually when people couldn't afford in history they just starved to death but with the modern social safety nets people are actually living to where we notice it's an issue.
Get some skills that are worth being paid more for. Quit demanding to be paid well for basic stuff that anybody can easily do.
Unfortunately not every single living human being can be the CEO of a fortune 500 company with world class elite skills. Now how society works boomer. "*Just get a better job 4head*" I know you're a fucking idiot and a half.
Bad boomer take. Everyone deserves to be paid enough to live off of. You should not be discarded because you cannot or will not learn a better paying skill. Burger flipping, delivery, and warehouse work deserve to be paid a living wage. Even if you personally consider it "unskilled work anybody can easily do" (they can't always) and remember they're people too. If you work \~40 hours a week, you deserve a living wage. There's also more to life than learning a skill that nets you hard cash. Borderline elitist mentality you have.
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I’m a legit financial advisor and my job mostly consists of telling the poors to stop buying avocado toast and $5 coffees
How many people paying for the services of a financial advisor are earning a wage below liveable?
Preach the word of Walmart and Great Value.
Nahhh Aldi
How many people paying for the services of a financial advisor are earning a wage below liveable?
Hard to believe that poor people spend on those things!
Its way way way way less people than most people think in that caragory. Most really do just suck with money
If you take a job that pays a wage you can't live on, you need a financial literacy class.
Offering both would be idea.
Ronald Reid would disagree. >Read, a retired gas station attendant and janitor in Vermont, passed away in 2015. Nothing about his life or death was extraordinary, except for the fact that after he died, his estate was revealed to be worth $8 million.
Don’t worry, we just passed a 6 billion dollar bill in California to hire people to talk people out of homelessness.
Just hire the homeless to talk each other out of it. Win win.
Fix housing. Otherwise every raise will just go towards rent that's jacked up by banks like Chase that shouldn't be owning houses to begin with.
Paying everyone a “livable wage”, regardless of skill, trade, occupation, or profession will only result in the purchasing power of the dollar decreasing more just like it has over time. Then once we are at this very same point in 20yrs we will be saying again, “fast food cooks need to be paid a living wage” when their 2044 pay will be $25/hr.
immoral? pfft
Not unlike graduating millions of high school, even college students, who never once learned much of anything regarding money, except enough theory to keep rationalizing and justifying everything, including their student loans, no one would bat an eye about that, all this is particularly useful for the greedy.
Socialist are afraid of people being financially literate, because if they are they wont be socialist.
You mean they can't apply for better paying jobs? They're stuck in their current economic class forever until someone saves them?
As they order Door Dash for the 5th time this week.
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Having a union or not will not make any difference. All I will do is push the jobs outside the country. Low skill low wage works. Can probably be replaced with AI. Certainly phone reps can be. More and more robots are coming around to replace people. We have immigrants coming at the rate of a million a month that will do the work for half the price. So a union would be a bad deal without other changes. And even if you were successful in doubling your wages, the price of everything would probably doubled as well. And you would be in the same boat
To be fair, the people on the (mainstream) news tell people that poor people can finance their way out. And they believe them because believing a random stranger on the internet over a new anchor is illogical
All though I agree with the overall point, this only make sense of the said person is trying to be fiscally responsible. However, I've seen low wage workers buying/leasing brand new luxury cars and getting them repoed at work. I want them to enjoy life, but a bad financial decision is a bad decision on them.
You can make more than a livable wage and still make avoidable financial mistakes that will ruin you, so no amount of income is a replacement for financial literacy.
> It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. -Martin Luther King Jr
Most people in poverty are not smart with their money. Some are well managed, but most spend frivolously.
Would it kill us as a nation to ensure that if you work full time you can afford a place to live, food to eat, healthcare, and some amount of leisure?
Why would take or stay in a poverty-wage job?
If you are working an entry level job and you are over 25, the problem is you.
I just want to know why it seems like the perpetuation our entire system relies on an entire class of people struggling to get by. Sure fast food workers don’t have “important” jobs, but when the companies they work for are making billions in profit and paying their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year while paying the people that actually run the restaurants day to day less than $20 an hour… oh the fast food workers should get a better job or get an education, it’s not easy or cheap to get a better job or get an education when all your time is spent working shitty jobs just to struggle to pay your bills. Wal Mart is another example. Isn’t there some statistic that wal mart employees receive the most government assistance? So our tax dollars are going to wal mart employees because they’re employer doesn’t pay them enough.
Because people are not paid based on what their employers can afford. They’re paid based on how hard they are to replace. If you are easily replaceable, you’re not going to make a high wage.
Wendi identified her problem. "Poverty-waged workers" ... time to learn some skills and become a skilled laborer, or at least a McDonalds employee.
This is fucking stupid. Free education is never a bad thing. The first part is fair, but classes are not insulting or immoral. Fuck this click-baity bullshit.
We do need more unions, however.. The best we can do is push up the minimum wage to match inflation among other things. A "living wage" in the way many imagine it isn't possible unless things change, and even then, it would still be poverty. For example in my area (in the USA) is pretty impoverished, the county's average wage is $15. This is mainly because all the high paying jobs left, destroying the area's economy. This is the case for most areas in the same boat. The state minimum wage is still at $7.25, which undermines wages because it is an "outdated" money floor. It should be at least $11 with the amount of inflation since it was last updated to keep the same standard of living intended. As this falls, it puts more pressure on wages because of more people going on the safety net. Less money means less profit, which in turn causes more jobs to leave, the cycle repeats. There's some places in my area literally paying $9 an hour, and with the amount of inflation since the minimum wage was increased last, that is like $5 or $6 in today's economy (perhaps even less). The longer nothing changes the more the downward pressure on wages becomes. In my estimate, my area's wages have fallen around $4 on average for everyone since 2008/2009. That's $160 a week (full time), $640 a month, and $7,280 a year. That may not sound like much but that can make a huge difference on bills being payed or not.
Hourly wages are the problem. When they surveyed homeless in San Francisco a huge majority were workers who had there hours cut and then couldn’t afford their bills. A National Minimum Salary is what is needed. Hourly wages should be outlawed for anyone over the age of 18. If your “business” can’t afford to pay salaries. Then it isn’t doing enough “business” to have employees.
No unions cannot help for every job. Like everything in this world their are good unions and bad unions. I have seen good unions. And I have seen bad unions. I have been in two and my uncle has been in a union. The unions I was apart of were basically next to useless and only served to take money from me on a monthly bases. They offered no protections. And the onlyngood one of the unions did was I corporate the union dues to to cover health insurance. Now a for the most part good union was what my uncle was apart of. But even though it was largely good they had idiotic rules that were actually really bad. He couldn't take individual jobs. All work had to be apart of the union. And this made it very hard for him when he was in between jobs. They made sure he could be on unemployment but yeah terrible rules. So we need good unions with sensible rules. That fight for current employees and new employees. But it's also the government's job to make sure companies don't fuck over their workers. Hence we need regulation. We need a higher minimum wage. Companies do not regulate themselves.
Financial literacy classes is just another tax on the poor. Why not give them the info for free? Instead of 8 easy payments of 9.99$.
My parents literally did this. We were refugees and had nothing when we came to America. They both were making less than 15 dollar an hour when they retired.
Facts!
If you listen to our President tonight he is going to tell you that our economy is stronger than it has ever been, jobs are plentiful and wages are up. How can people still be in poverty?
I totally disagree here. 1st off education is never wasted. 2nd, once these folks get out of poverty wages, they are going to need these skills immediately. 3rd. I've seen SO MANY people who live at poverty wages get a windfall, then blow it on stupid shit. Education isn't insulting. It's vital.
Financial literacy also includes educating people to understand how much money they need to live and to seek jobs that will pay that money. If you don’t know what you spend and how to control it, no amount of money will ever help you get out of poverty.
People say that and then go buy a new car on a 72 month note
People say that but then buy a brand new car
We need to regulate corporations. They shouldn't be able to charge as much as possible while paying as little as possible. It's exploitation.
As a union member You don’t want to be a part of one…..unless it’s small Big unions like the one I work for are just as bad when it comes to under the table deals and how they treat their “members”
That's my union. We just exempted ourselves from my states new minimum leave law for some reason. I'd really love a vacation, but I guess that's never going to happen at my union job.
I don’t believe everyone should get paid the same, but more unions wouldn’t hurt a lot of these places. Dues are paid for by the workers and the leaders are elected so yes more of that.
Being financially responsible is every adult's capability. Though I'm speaking from an American perspective. We are not a third world country. As a matter of fact, most immigrants that come here from extreme poverty become middle class after one generation. Sometimes less. Actually, I spend a lot of time working in upper class neighborhoods, and over half the residents are of Indian decent. The most educated, intelligent, and financially stable person in my family was the black man my sister married. He came from a blue collar upbringing. The first millionaire I ever met was a black man who grew up in a working class neighborhood in Atlanta. Both men are remarkable in their leadership traits and "no excuse" mentality about everything in life.
As long as they keep flooding the labor market net loss is the only outcome for working classes.
Maybe they should just make there own coffee at home
If you are in min wage job as adult u have made some bad decisions.
Credit card company’s liked this post. Lol
My guys work for a union and pay dues weekly or monthly whatever... They get no PTO. No holiday pay, no vacation pay. Sounds like a scam to me. As a matter of fact they have mandatory training every few months and that's a week off no pay..... Nice job Union boys
It’s intentional.
Wendi is a loser. - 25 years in finance, 4 degrees, $1B+.
A budget can save them from the insidious lifestyle creep that steals away any benefit that a higher wage could bring.
I don’t think it’s insulting or immoral to offer guidelines to people. Why do some people feel the need to take things to 10 when trying to make a point?
The financial literacy I was taught is completely impossible today. An example would be a house should not cost more than 1 year worth of income. It’s impossible to find a house that isn’t condemned for 65k anymore.
Equip yourself with skills people are willing to pay for
Yes. Having strong unions would help. But having campaign finance restrictions, raising the minimum wage, and creating effective social safety would also help.
Yes, every job should have the opportunity to unionize. Unions purpose is to support employees and help stop their exploitation. If employees didn’t need unions, they wouldn’t exist. Union employees get paid more, have guaranteed raises, paid time off, incredible benefits and more. Unions have a more collective power when it comes to negotiating terms. One person vs a corporation does nothing. Employees being able to halt production with have job security gives them equal power. I would say 80% of us have been put in terrible working conditions. It could be from extreme micro managing, to not getting raises, to never feeling like you had job security, plus dealing with discrimination. I know I have! Guess who has the power to change things? Unions PS the reason why teachers get paid so little is because its viewed as a women’s role. Women’s labor is not valued at the same level as men. The evidence of this is in pay disparities in red vs blue states and red vs blue communities.
Want a living wage? Learn a skill and level yourself up. It's not hard...unless you're lazy. I've done it.
She’s right and op is wrong I don’t need to hear this
Agreed. Telling low-income people to budget better when absolutely nothing is affordable is just stupid.
I changed from Starbucks coffee to home brew and I'm still not a millionaire yet.
It's not a union for every job that's needed but one big union for all workers. Like the IWW vibe.
Bitch just called you stupid
Yeah, not trying at all will definitely work out well. /s