this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
903 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59345 readers
5583 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You and I have had remarkably similar lives, actually.
Same. I was a cashier and then a pharmacy tech.
Close. I think about half of my cousins have a degree; the other half went into trades.
—same, but—
Here's where we differ. My neighbors are not poor, but the neighborhood is not yet completely gentrified. We have some K12 teachers, some construction workers, a few military people, alongside some people in more white collar high-earning-potential professions.
Same. And it's happened enough that there's no way I can attribute it solely to bad decision making.
Same, though I had access to down payment assistance.
Thank you for being honest about this. I would personally suggest that you talk with some people who are in situations like you're talking about. Some of them knowingly made poor choices that led to their current struggles, but more often they were dealt one major blow or a series of minor blows at a time of high risk.
I say this without malice: many (if not most) people who are struggling have never been able to make that choice meaningfully. I'm glad to have been able to, but it's not common.
I wish you luck in that, I truly do. Please consult with people who have been in the situations you're talking about before you draw up a wonderful, shiny plan for their finances.
Sometimes, maybe. But the point I'm making isn't that no one ever makes mistakes. It's that one or two such mistakes can end up catastrophically for people who don't have far to wiggle. A person who is generally attentive to their finances but makes a couple of bad calls before they have a safety net can end up on the back foot for the rest of their life.
Hindsight being 20/20, you're always going to say you'd make different decisions when you have perfect vision as to the outcomes of the bad outcomes. But to avoid these in the first place, you'd have to have perfect view of the future.
I've been in a position several times where the job opportunity I accepted was the only one I was offered. Having a "doo doo plan" is great, if you have multiple options to begin with.
I agree with this to a point, but (hyperbole) nobody has ever gotten married truly thinking that they didn't know their spouse well. Even family and friends can be wrong.
The case in point that I'm thinking about for this one was a person who entered a front end web development training program with the promise of job search assistance upon graduation. Reviews of the school were good, personal anecdotes from graduates were good. It was only after the program that my friend discovered the cracks in the process (as he was falling through one). Due diligence was done, to the satisfaction of most reasonable people. In this case, I think he was taken advantage of. Speaking of which...
100% agree with you here.
I apologize, I was unclear about this. None of the people I've mentioned are complaining or blaming others for their current state. Every single one of them is actively working to improve their situations. I'm saying, as a person who watched the trajectory of their lives from the outside, they weren't the primary cause of their financial troubles.
I realize that it sounds like I'm leaving myself out of that, and I suppose I am blaming others here. But to be clear, I'm probably the most well-off of the people I'm talking about. In comparison to the people I'm talking about, my concerns are very minor. We'll be ok, and we're already working on improving our situation. And even I am not blaming any one person; I think the problem with my finances lies in historic inflation, a global pandemic, and corporate greed.
...if you know what the future holds.
[Ok, Lemmy is saying that this is too long, so I'm going to try to split my reply up.]
[1/2]
And that's where I disagree.
These people having financial problems haven't had some crazy emergency happen (that I know of), but they do have obvious, expensive hobbies and habits. Some of them use tobacco products (cigs and dip), some collect expensive board games, most eat out a lot, and they drive late model cars. Compared to me, they have fewer kids, live in a similar area, and are often dual-income family (we're single income), so the glaring difference is lifestyle. I also look at other coworkers who are more similar to me (single-income, kids, etc), and they have been able to buy a house.
If I do some back-of-the-napkin math, the spending delta is tens of thousands more vs me. So to me, it's more a question of priorities than means, which would constitute "bad" decision making if they're not meeting their goals.
An FHA loan only requires 3-5% down, and non-FHA loans can often be as low as 10% with PMI. Houses in my area are pretty expensive now, many running $500-700k for something near-ish to work (mine isn't). At 10%, that's $50-70k, which is a lot, but people in my office should be making six figs, so saving $10-20k/year should be feasible (so 3-5 years saving). But that's a lot harder if you're paying $500+/month on a car payment (or worse, multiple car payments), eating out multiple times per week, and spending hundreds/month on hobbies.
Agreed, and I certainly intend to. The issue is, most people don't like to talk about finances, even with people they know very well. I would love to lend an objective second pair of eyes (completely free) to help spot areas they may have missed in their budgeting.
Here are my plans (please critique/provide more if able):
My ultimate gold standard
Be involved with a non-profit/charity that:If the org is a credit union, there are a lot more options, and my research shows that a credit union may only need a few hundred thousand dollars to get started.
What I've already done
I actually started working on something like this w/ a family member, the plan was to pull money from customer's accounts and lock it away until they meet their goals. If they withdraw early, they'd lose whatever transaction fees I charged, which would be waived if they meet the target.I would invest the money at rest to recoup the transaction fees and fund any cash bonuses. Once I got that working, I wanted to open an individual consulting part that would offer loans after a budget review, so this app would feed that non-profit.
But after I had a POC, the transaction processing org I was working with changed their pricing and made it non-viable for small transactions. I thought about releasing it w/o the bank account link, but that wouldn't be particularly interesting as an initial product.
I'd like to remove the "able" part of this, which is often an excuse. Yes, some people legitimately get stuck in a negative feedback loop, but a lot of people (perhaps most) could make meaningful changes to free up some cash flow. The difference between people who get out of bad situations and those that don't often comes down to discipline, not luck, yet so many people blame luck.
There are some things we could (and should) do as a society to make upward mobility easier (e.g. I'm in favor of something like UBI), but waiting for that is a fool's errand for those currently struggling and they should evaluate things based on their current situation. That means their choices are:
So when posting online, I always assume there's an opportunity to get out, and I go into any discussions with that assumption in mind.
No, that's a defeatist perspective.
What you need is to learn from your past. Mistakes happen, what matters is what changes you make going forward to avoid those mistakes in the future. For example, let's say your car gets repo'd, the solution isn't to do better at making payments on the next car, the solution is to buy a cheaper car or go without (bus, bike, etc). Cleaning up the mess would probably require some uncomfortable changes, but it is usually possible.
The "doo doo plan" isn't necessarily having a backup job offer, it's just whatever your backup is if the primary plan falls through. A signed offer letter and a start date isn't a job, you only have a job when you actually start. Some ideas:
A legitimate company will never require any form of payment from you for a job, whether that's equipment, uniforms, etc. If you see that, it's a fraudulent job offer.
Sure, but plenty of people get married while ignoring advice from family and friends. Yes, family and friends can be wrong, but they can also see things you don't. In any case, you can always continue courtship until you're comfortable with the other person.
The tricky thing is that hormones go crazy for the first few weeks and sometimes months of a relationship, and those hormones can blind you to the faults of the other person. Ideally, you marry someone for more than just "love" (however you define that), and you need to be capable of listing personality defects as well as positives so you can decide if there are any deal breakers. You need to assume the other person won't change the flaws you see, and you need to be okay with that. Essentially, approach it like a business contract (i.e. are you getting a fair exchange), but one where both parties currently like each other.
Of my friends, most of those that got divorced did so because of flaws others close to them pointed out, but they ignored, or assumed the other person would fix. One almost got divorced due to a flaw, but they were able to work through it and rescue their marriage. Those that didn't get divorced either got lucky (fairly common) or did their due diligence before getting married. I've had friends and family end a relationship after considering engagement because they decided those flaws would become deal breakers down the line. Unfortunately, most people don't do that, and for some people, it takes multiple failed relationships to figure that out.
That's certainly possible, and maybe he can seek recourse (lawsuit) depending on what they promised and what they actually delivered.
That said, the thing I think your friend could've done better is to find someone in the business and ask them about the training program. Most of them are complete crap, and a competent FE dev could tell you that you can't just learn to do their job in 6 weeks or whatever. Part of my job position is interviewing and hiring software engineers, and I see a lot of these applicants. Most of the time, their portfolio is only the work they did in that course, and they show zero initiative in exploring beyond it. I'm happy to recommend someone for an internship if they show that initiative (and we have hired a couple that worked out), but so many think completion implies there's a job waiting for them.
Let's look at each of those:
It can take a while for salaries to adjust to inflation, so hopefully the issues with your finances are resolved, or close to resolving. Mine hasn't yet caught up to inflation, but I think I'll be there this raise season.
I think we understand each other, and disagree. And that's fine. I don't need to convince you. Though I would suggest that you start from a more neutral perspective (at least outwardly) when interacting with someone who needs assistance in the future.
Anyway, I don't think I have anything more to add to the conversation that hasn't already been said, so I'll wish you luck.
Thank you for your calm and level-headed discussion. Those are frustratingly rare online. I look forward to talking with you again.
You as well.
And yeah, when someone asks for assistance with finances (almost always online), I definitely wait until I see the details before pointing the finger at where the issue is. But when talking about generalities, it's really not something I can reasonably do, because there's no hard data to actually look at.
[2/2]
Again, same. Though for me, it was December of 2019 and a son, and I was laid off in late January. Wild times.
We had carved away at our cash reserves building a house that our larger family could actually fit in, and they hadn't built back up yet. It was a calculated risk to do that rather than buy, and I wouldn't have changed the calculation in hindsight, but the one-two-three-four punch of house-child-layoff-pandemic within the span of a few months isn't really something you expect when you're doing the numbers.
I'm glad for you. And also: your situation is not normative.
A couple of things to note:
Those numbers end in 2010, which means that they're actually almost as far away from today as the beginning of that study is from the end of that study. A lot has happened in the last 14 years.
Those numbers also end right as the country was digging its way out of the 2008 financial crisis, which was largely caused (as I'm sure you recall) by debt mismanagement (specifically subprime mortgages). Those numbers, in and of themselves, are signposts of the very institutional and systemic changes I'm taking about.
It's impossible to disentangle the chicken and the egg here. Were people in more debt in 2010 because rates were low? Or were rates low because the economy was burning, largely because more people were in bad debt situations?
Actually, the data suggests that private per capita spending in the US has tracked more or less with inflation since at least 1960.
My parents used credit in the 90s. We had car payments and a mortgage (and their mortgage rate was in the double digits, no less—but it was still a smaller percentage of their single monthly income than my 2.8% mortgage is today, in a better field, with a second income.
Again, the chicken and the egg: do people not save up because they don't want to? Or because they can't? If our car dies, I can't save up to buy another. I have to buy now and pay later.
With your caveat, I'm amenable to entertaining your argument for a significant portion of the population. I just don't recognize it in practice.
I just don't see the numbers bearing that out. And anecdotally, it might be easier to sign up for a credit card online, but I was getting junk mail about credit cards on the day I turned 18, in 2003. One of my first jobs included trying to pitch a private label grocery store credit card to everyone who walked in. When I got to college (also in 2003), a credit card company had a booth there and was offering students free pizza if you signed up for a credit card. I didn't bite, but there was a substantial line at that booth. So it might be quicker now, but I haven't received a mailer for a credit card in years.
Me too. I think we might be the same person. This is honestly kind of weirding me out.
Housing costs as a factor of monthly income are back up to 2008 Financial Crisis levels, though; and over the last two decades that growth you're talking about has been concentrated largely at the top. The numbers support peoples' assertion that we're getting poorer.
Thanks for chatting with me about this. It's a really interesting topic.