https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/a-third-of-americans-making-250-000-say-costs-eat-entire-salary
Cash is especially tight for top earners
No it's not.
Being a top earner literally means you're among those for who cash is the least tight.
Cash is simultaneously tight and not tight for top earners. Schrodinger's cash, if you will.
Cash is tight because high income earners can invest in things and when the market is shit (like it is now) its hard for them to liquidate their investments into cash.
However, for most high income earners, this situation is temporary and they're never really at the risk of homelessness or starvation. Contrast this with how the shitty economy is impacting people already struggling with poverty and... yeah.
its hard for them to liquidate their investments into cash without taking a loss.
But if you were in the market back in 2015 (or 2005 or 1985), you rode a cresting wave with a few marginal dips. If you graduated college in 2018 and started throwing all your money into the latest Crypto fads you're a bit more fucked. But if you never had money to invest to begin with...
Its funny. I've seen particularly poor people refer to their tattoos as their wealth. And when I dug in a little, what I got back was simply that tattoos can't be repo'd. They're something of value someone else can't take away. This echoes a horrible truth about living in poverty. It isn't simply that you're "living paycheck to paycheck" but that every effort you make to stockpile a reserve exposes you to an accrued risk of being robbed. It's like the old "Marshmallow Test" to determine future success. People who are chronically anxious and deprived will grab the marshmallow for fear of losing it. People who have the luxury of trusting authority can wait.
But if you were in the market back in 2015 (or 2005 or 1985), you rode a cresting wave with a few marginal dips. If you graduated college in 2018 and started throwing all your money into the latest Crypto fads you’re a bit more fucked. But if you never had money to invest to begin with…
True, though lots of people with market brainrot think of those gains as money they've earned. Selling at a loss is, to them, no different than giving money away on a bad deal.
Time to dust off ol' faithful here
Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Candles $36,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
PMC lifestyle creep: Hiring a third servant and a personal chef for your dinner parties
My lifestyle creep: Spending $2 more to get mid shelf instead of bottom shelf whiskey
eating beans until you're full look at mr millionaire over here
I feel like beans and ammo are probably the safest investment right now. Ammo, for instance, lasts for over a hundred years and only appreciates. It's lighter and more portable than gold, and you can use it to abolish the bourgeoisie.
Look, you don't understand how rich people work. It is unbecoming of an aristocrat to handle cash, and my yacht club's bar is still not accepting shares in Tesla as payment. - :porky-happy:
Closer to $25,000
I can’t even fathom how one can spend $250k per year
That’s the thing with the bourgeois mind, enough is never enough. The number can always get higher. You can always control and own more. There’s always someone richer than you to aspire to. Money is virtue, so there’s always more virtue to be obtained
You can tell if someone has a prole soul or not by asking what they would do if they won the lottery or got an extremely high paying job. They will say they would give it to their loved ones, retire early or party until it’s gone.
If someone says they will use it as startup capital to get passive income and rent, you found yourself a bourgeois
Yeah I have no idea why these people want to work forever. I just want to power through it, amass as much capital as needed to not work as soon as possible.
Yeah unfortunately our system of social security, Medicare/Medicaid, 401ks and pensions basically hold you hostage and force you to work to a certain age - even if you otherwise have saved up a nice nest egg for yourself. The retirement investment firms have your money and they won’t let it go until you reach a certain arbitrary age they set
Yeah this part of the US system fucking sucks.
I assume Obamacare subsidies are based on some number of years' prior tax returns? Otherwise once your income is nil or close to nil you could just make use of that?
That's how I've spent the last 2 years. Dirt cheap mortgage thanks to COVID, low kWh cost from nuclear plant, 70$ fiber optic, 2 jobs, steal all food ... I've just turned 28 recently and if I play my cards right and hyperinflation doesn't occur, I might be able to retire in about 2 years.
You need between 2 and 4 million dollars to retire right now. God knows what you'll need in 20 or 40 years.
If I had those on my current income I guess they would die :shrug-outta-hecks:
Love how the media considers assets as wealth when talking about Bezos or Musk, but when they talk about landlords and these fucks suddenly they have nothing and are barely scraping by
I would simply not buy a 'top-tier home' in the most expensive region in the US.
Decent townhouses in some cities are in the high hundreds of thousands if you don't want to live way out in the burbs.
Absolute clown shit lol...I've never understood the allure of gigantic houses. I live in a 3 bedroom with my SO, we both have a bunch of hobbies that require a lot of storage space and we still have a bedroom that we would never enter if the attic stairs weren't in there.
Nah bro, you don't need a living room, family room, sitting room, and den...and they'll put $10k-20k worth of furniture in each of those rooms that they never use. Materialism is a fuck.
This 456 sq ft home in Orange County is listed for $1.25 million, so I’m not sure this automatically means a large house, though maybe this is an extreme outlier for some reason.
Eugh I would get positively round. Steak house mashed potatoes have like a stick of butter per serving and they give you enough for six people... Mmm... mashed potatoes...
Sorry what were we talking about?
I’d imagine living in an area with lots of these $250k jobs is absurdly expensive as far as housing goes, at least from what I’ve read/heard.
I just live in a 100 year floodplain for dirt cheap but have fiber optic and work two remote jobs. Relatively easy 300k,US before taxes per year.
But I also save literally 90,% of that because I want to stop working as soon as possible, and money is the greatest insulation from pain in a market economy. I'll probably try electoralism in the off chance it works.
I know my sibling and their partner were easily pulling in $250K+ but living paycheck to paycheck (and piling up debt!) because they lived in a high cost-of-living area but more importantly were spending gobs of money eating out at trendy places for nearly every meal (seriously, when I visited I looked in their cupboards and they were completely fucking empty), buying shittons of expensive clothing, and traveling in luxury. They were easily spending over $1K/week on food alone. It was insane for me to see...if I were making that kind of money, I'd be saving as much of it as possible so that I could free myself from work entirely. Blows my mind when people are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have so much freedom and instead chain themselves to their jobs with unsustainably extravagant lifestyles.
Mortgage/Rent a nice apartment or house somewhere expensive, then take out a loan on a really expensive sports car you don't need.
You'd be surprised.
$20,000/month. So $10k for the apartment, $5k on food/booze, $2k in retirement/savings, and $3k on various?
That's still insane
Well a good chunk of that $250K is lost to taxes. Still crazy but not insane.
And let’s not forget debt required to get to the point of earning that 250k
I think you guys should all be grateful that these 250k-earning millenials are selflessly spending the majority of all their paychecks to fund the patreons of the podcasters and youtubers that you enjoy every day
If all of that money is going to Ants Canada, fine, but I better see some wild ant farms next week.
1/3 live paycheck to paycheck
very few reported issues covering expenses
:galaxy-brain: well i get a paycheck and i pay for things with it, so you could say i live paycheck to paycheck
also asking these psychopaths to self report this is so hilariously credulous its journalistic malfeasance
It's their readership, lol, can't smack em over the head with how much brain worms they have without risking subscriber loss.
Are they saying that 2/3 of people who bring in 250k don't do so by working? Kinda cringe
Another thing that this doesn't account for is an overall difference in situations for the rich vs everyone else. As a class traitor, I have a huge support network and safety net. And that completely changes your relationship with money. Buying a house you can barely afford is very different when your parents can help you cover mortgage shortfalls, for example.
The real question is the one at the end: could you cover an unexpected $400 expense. For most people the answer is barely or probably not. For everyone making that much money, the answer is absolutely yes.
Then what must it be like for people making 40k a year? 30k? Less? Quantify that in proportion you fucks
Or they're sick, or they have to take care of their siblings bc their parents died, or they have a bunch of kids, or god knows what else.
Proles all share a common interest, even if some are doing an awful lot better or are much larger shitheads than others.
Precisely, it's a trap worth avoiding. Just 'cause the butler slave gets better rations than us other slaves doesn't mean he's the enemy.
I mean yeah, no doubt. They can totally be problematic or awful too, just saying that they are a fellow prole who too have chains to break.
they still both own exactly nothing compared to the ludicrous amounts that real bourgs own
If you frame class this way there's a whole world of real bourgeois who only see the kind of opulence those proles live in on tv.
I'm trying to say that the world, particularly the developing world, is full of honest to god bourgeois that are hilariously poor compared to those $250k people discussed in the article.
I'm not really equipped for discussion about America, but isn't it crawling with shitty business people whose shitty businesses are struggling to bring any money? What's a median US business owner?
All anectdotal: Petty Bourgeois who employ a sizable number of people (not mom and pop shop types who employ 1-2 extra people, and let’s be real these people are rapidly being put out of business by megacorps) would be in the article’s income range. Someone who owns a few subway locations is probably making as much or just a bit lower than a west coast coder. But they don’t live on the west coast they get to live like gods in Hickory Sticks, GA where things are cheaper.
Interesting. I've just looked it up and supposedly one Subway restaurant costs around $250k to start and generates about $30k of profit a year.
Start up costs sound high and profitability sounds low but subway was a stand in, it’s not the industry I’m familiar with. If you roughly halved the start up cost that sounds more accurate to me and honestly I wonder if the profits sound lower because the owners are “paying themselves a salary” which obfuscates what’s really coming over the bottom line
hexbear has been pretty good about that. I've been very transparent here about being a bourgeoisie class traitor, and there's been some hostility here and there (and some of it my fault), but mostly people have been very nice.
I wasn't saying they can't be the enemy. Anyone can be reactionary bad person. But just having slightly better conditions doesn't necessarily make a person an enemy.
I'm not a clever theory guy, but if those people are using all that money to buy rapidly appreciating assets as the article suggests, instead of doing $200k worth of drugs a year like a normal prole would, they basically join the bourgeois in my book.
Like if people make shitload of money and they're not stupid, they invest and the the bigger proportion of your wealth is tied up in uber, black rock, palantir, amazon and raytheon shares the more your interests are aligned with the goals of the bourgeois.
Honestly feeling like one of those reactionaries who tells young people to stop spending so much on avocado toast but ffs, they can fuck the absolute fuck off with 'living paycheck to paycheck'. That's not what this phrase is used for.
:agony-4horsemen: So much brain fuckage just reading this headline.
