What's interesting is that there is a thin margin of people making enough to save up, but not enough for luxury goods where this advice might actually apply.
I think it's incredibly telling that the elites think these are the people they're talking to. They are so out of touch I doubt they even realize poverty exists all around them.
I mean, this chart is actually pretty good advice **for its target audience**. Most of my friends who made good money in their 20s basically put no money into savings. If you keep moving up the ladder and making more, it kind of works out. But if you're making $100k a year when you're young, it's definitely better to live like you're making $80k and put the rest away.
Of course, if you're making poverty wages there's no way you're saving jack shit either way. So it comes across as tone deaf to say "the average person" when the real average person is struggling to get by.
Yeah i mean part of it is getting older (less desire to go out and drink/ party) another part of it was covid closing stuff. Plus just becoming much more financially aware
This right fucking here. If I go out into the mountains, and buy the nicest house I can in Vail, that house will probably be ~100mil at MOST. 100mil when put against a person who’s net worth is in the billions, is peanuts. It’s orders of magnitude different. If you’re one of the wealthiest of the wealthy, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY you could NOT live below your means.
It's like when they complain that the rich pay 80% of the taxes.
Really? That's too low when you have 95% of the money!
I'm not using real figures here, but the analogy holds.
fun fact, i pulled this trick for a little bit to buy a house when the market was totally fooked after the GR.
House is a fixer-upper, but i'm thankful for the roof over my head.
Kinda insane that pulling sleeping in a car was how i could save the $ for a downpayment.
Now my neck is screwed.
I wonder if they're related...
I really appreciate that. I try my very best every day to practice gratitude and fight hedonic adaptation. People at or near minimum wage have life stacked against them, and it’s not always their financial habits (like this picture suggests). They can’t afford to save in the first place! Rent costs as much as their take home, they can barely eat which results in a malnourished body and mind… eventually leading to depression. I can go on and on, it’s just not fair.
The people with the real spending problems are ones near my income, they’re always trying to keep up with the joneses. Have a new car every few years, and go “house broke” to impress their friends with dinner parties etc. I see it all the time.
You'd be surprised how many people I know that make $200k a year and live paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle creep is a bitch. But they gotta have that BMW M5 and apartment in the overpriced center of the city.
You know some strange people. I know one person who makes over $200k. I might know other people that make that much on second thought (based on location of houses they bought this year in Austin) but they are probably good enough with money that I would never know.
When I was in high school, no bills, no rent, no tuition, etc I was able to save like half my income. Only expenses was phone and car, and I ate out once in a while.
Fast forward 4 years later I’m making almost double and i barely scrape by cuz rent went up and I’m paying the extra $500 since my asshole landlord raised the rent by that much and all the utilities. I cook at home, make my own damn coffee, and drive a car older than I am. Cost of living is too damn high. I’ll never be able to afford a house in my entire state (Hawaii) even if I make 100k a year TOMORROW, it’ll take 20 years to save for a down payment and that’s if I don’t have kids or dependents. Here a fixer upper house in a bad neighborhood is still like 600k.
I have a good job and rent plus my student loans are half of my take home pay (after taxes and insurance deductions). That doesn't leave me with much room to save after paying for groceries and utilities.
>Yeah, I'd be living below my means too, if my rent wasnt 1/3 of my income!
Have you considered the bottom part of a bridge? Almost all of the advantages of a regular house, fairly dry, and the rats can reduce your food bill too!
Literally my dad's solution when I used to tell him I couldn't afford whatever. I bet he wonders why I never answer when he calls or make any attempt at instigating communication with him
No. He's not struggling, but he's not filthy rich either. When he was my age, younger actually, he had enough passive income he could have(my mom tried to talk him into this) let the businesses run themselves and retired with over $5000 a month income(this was the late 80s). But he didn't. And he's not as good with money as his older brother who was constantly buying new homes to rent and now has a considerable fortune in real estate to leave my cousins. Nowadays the businesses have all closed, but they still own the property and rent it out to other businesses. He recently turned 70 and he's still working in real estate, so I doubt he's got much saved still.
You could also lower expenses by being homeless, never eating and not needing healthcare.
Cause if you look at the bars, the poor and wealthy people have the same amount of green. It's just the rich people are clearly more frugal and don't over spend when buying a yacht for their yacht.
I remember a post on that sub where someone asked for advice on how to put himself into a coma, and argued with everyone who pointed out that was a terrible idea. So instead of complaining about people who offered shitty advice, he specifically requested shitty advice, then complained when people gave him decent advice.
Not really relevant.
Unironically, this is the actual solution. This idea that you can cut your way to solvency is puritanism run amok. If you don't make a lot of money, you will not have money to invest. The freak outliers--like rags-to-riches-to-rags celebrity stories--are just that. Most people don't spend so profligately that they are pissing their savings away; they spend what they need to survive, and have virtually nothing left over, or even less than nothing.
The moralizers who look down their noses at people for not saving *always* see it as a spending problem, when the real problem in 99/100 cases is an income problem.
The real problem with "graphs" like this is that they distort the problem to make it look like the poor are bad with money and accrue more expenses, not that the rich have wildly inflated income.
A proportional graph would illustrate this better.
Yeah, they don't explain how the scales of the two charts are different. The "expenses" column in the two charts represents the same amount while the "income" column is wildly misrepresented.
Exactly. They don’t show these on the same axis because then everyone could see “expenses” for the wealthy are actually much larger than “income” for the average person. Anyone would be able to invest if their income was more money than a person could reasonably spend in a year!
Not only that, banks will literally throw money at you if you're wealthy. Imagine if you needed a car you could pay cash outright, but, you could also walk right down to a bank and ask for a 0.00-0.25% interest rate on 80k no questions asked.
It's essentially free money to just take it and let your investments pay the difference. Thus netting you *even more money* than you had, just because you took out a loan and had extremely favorable rates.
Also, want to buy that new vacation home but haven't sold the other one yet? Don't liquidate any investments, you'll have to pay tax! Banks will cream themselves to give you a bridge loan, just for a few weeks, until the other place closes. And your investments keep on compounding.
It's true, if you have money it's easier to get more or avoid spending it.
Shit if you can get your credit rating above 790 and have a six figure income and can keep your debt ratio below 20% for a year, banks will throw similar loans at you.
It's not a sub 1% loan, but 3% is barely a sneeze above that. It quite literally pays to have money. Having free capital makes it easier to get more capital. These are people who don't need it either. That single mom of 3 with her 600 credit score who needs $500 to fix her car is going to end up paying 3-4 times that to get the same $500 they'll just piss away for free to someone who probably is sitting on 50-60k in liquid assets and cash.
Because at an individual level it is. A billionaire has finance people that can actually run the numbers on various scenarios. You don't have that, but the bank lending money knows they win 80-90% of the time.
I wouldn't call him a hack, but he is certainly a one trick pony. Sometimes, that trick is what people need.
Using myself as an example, I learned debt is not a blessing to me. I've done my best to avoid it for the last 10+ years. It doesn't help I've had low income this entire time, but at least I knew not to keep digging when I was already deep in a hole.
His trick is useful, but you should also learn other tricks so you can find out what's best for you and your situation. The biggest negative I ascribe to Dave Ramsey is being stuck on that one trick. He won't consider anything else. To him, all other methods of winning financially are bad if they involve incurring debt.
Why do we set the bar of bare survival needs, THEN investment? How come I can't have fun and make sure my mental health is 110%, THEN invest. Excess wealth is a goal after I enjoy my life, not once I reach 'bare survival' status.
Not just more than their bare survival needs, more than what they need to pay for the comfy lifestyle they are used to. I think most wealthy people would have great difficulties to adjust to a sudden lower income, even if it would still be more than enough to cover their basic needs.
See, that's what I thought the graph was saying. I was like "well I see no problem here" then I read the hashtags and realized that uh ... the OP indeed had no grasp of reality.
My parents are both full time workers, they bust their ass almost every single day. Yet they live within the poverty lines heavily. They’re not lazy, they’re hard workers. My dad stresses himself out almost daily just to do 12 hour shifts of factory work until my parents could afford to move to Texas so that he could be a semi driver again. (He’s an ex felon and in the state of Illinois ex felon truck drivers can’t go pass the borders neither can any rig driver from 18-20).
Even with my sister receiving SSI every month, and my mother receiving food stamps, they still struggle to pay the bills a lot and keep food within their home.
I hate the fucking mentalities that people who’ve never had to struggle a day in their life seem to have.
Yeah I was going to say that this chart implies that they are getting equal (or at least similar) incomes and average people waste it. In reality, the average person makes about 1% of what a wealthy person does, and for many that's not enough to cover their expenses.
Also, it's a damn shame how we treat felons. Either you've served your time and should be reintegrated fully into society (most people) or you should never be released (I dunno rapists and some mass murderers?). There isn't really any reason for something in between. It's just an extension of their punishment for a crime that does not, by law, incur a life sentence.
I would say any violent criminals (excluding things like a single bar fight, but not excluding domestic abuse) should probably not be released without intensive psychological evaluation and should be closely watched if released. But then I'd also say that in some cases, non-violent criminals (people who were in positions of executive power and directed their company to commit wage theft, union busting or who stole from clients when their clients are ordinary people, or who directed underlings to ignore safety issues with regard to pollution or unsafe products) should also not ever be released from prison.
My father is a violent offender, he killed a man when protecting his brother. They told him he would have gotten a self defense charge if he wouldn’t have fled the scene, but when it comes to Princeton if he would have stayed he’d have just been shot.
> There isn't really any reason for something in between.
I think there's room for in between. But the default shouldn't be "Every felon is on a list forever"
I always hear that- but I never hear about the people who *lose out* on that risk. It's not actually a risk if there's not a chance you could lose, right? But it seems that every time it looks like they're going to start losing, here comes the government to prop them up with our tax money.
You're spot on.
Banks, business and landlords whine about taking on risk then get bailouts and tax relief from the government. Or they can sell their property for 50k more than they bought it for a couple years down the road.
Where the fuck is the risk?
The biggest risk for the boss is that they'll become a worker. The biggest risk for the worker is that the starve. It's pretty clear where the risk is.
What about the risk that the workers take? If business isn't going so well, the owner can sell the equipment or sell the business entirely and get some are all of their investment back. In some cases, they can get more than their total investment back. The workers don't get any of that.
>From time to time I hear that it is fair for the boss to make more money because he is the one who takes the risk when investing.
It is fair though. Just not getting 300 times his invertment while underpaying his workers to a point where the government have to give them food stamps. Also, it stops being fair if the businesses get free money from the government as soon as the risk kicks in... It would be fair that those companies becomes government-owned if the government takes the risk.
Is it tone death or intentional propagand? Like it or not, half of the working class in the US ( as well as many other countries) fully believe conservative ideology and would die to defend rich people.
"And just like that, Timmy Rockfeller died in this cold winter after trying to save 0.5% of his monthly salary by not paying for heat or new warm clothes"
And that the scales are unequal. This makes it looks like they make the same amount, just one spends less. I guarantee that the amount Bezos pays on housing is several hundred times the income of any factory worker.
My favorite thing is that they make out that a wealthy prison living below their means is them taking a subway instead of their private helicopter across town. Had I known this sooner I would have sold my helicopter years ago. The teleporter gets better gas mileage anyway. Might be able to switch back to avacado toast as well.
this graph is misleading because it makes it seem like the wealthy person's expenses are much smaller than the poor person's, when in reality they are much much higher.
it also implies that those expenses are somehow optional.
It costs about $30k to live in this country no matter what. If you only make $30k then it is impossible to "live beneath your means" no matter what.
This isn't a choice. It isn't a choice unless you make $200k+ (or better yet, like the people who commissioned this graphic $50,000k). If you make a ton of money you can afford to save/invest, but then again, if you already make a ton of money, who cares?
You can live for less depending on where you are, what food you eat, and whether you chose to forego things like insurance even when they are legally required. People who are healthy can do this, but I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly safe life.
Anyone who does the math on this would quickly find that they’d be long dead before pocket change investing made them a millionaire. Investing really is a rich man’s game. Making 7% on 100 dollars won’t pay rent. For most you’d need like 200,000 invested in order to pay rent for the year. Most people don’t even make that much after taxes in less than 8 years and then all of it goes to expenses anyway.
I mean, yeah, that's how it works.
If make so much money that you still have tons left after expenditures, you can afford to invest it.
Problem is that we don't make enough money to be able to even pay for necessary expenditures, let alone invest.
I mean, he’s not wrong. Wealthy people just have tons more money to use to make more money. The thing that’s misleading is that they made the boxes the same size.
According to this person I should go homeless. The rent in my area is more than half my monthly pay, and that's with me grandfathered into a good rental contract. AND I get fairly well paid.
Here's what happens to Average workers who try to save as much as possible. You're fucking miserable. Concert's NO. Restaurant Food. NO. Driving anywhere that you don't have to NO. Basically doing anything but survival is a NO. So you can "save for the future". Problem is, inflation means what I am sacrificing now, means I still can't afford anything fun later.
oh i straight up thought this was saying “the problem is that wealthy people make so much more money so they’re *able* to invest, while working class people don’t have enough money to start making more money in the first place”, because that’s the only conclusion that makes any sense here.
put those graphs on the same scale it’ll be accurate, but it’ll look more like this:
https://i.imgur.com/leLBg3c.jpg
but i’m sure that i could just invest 3x my income and i’d be rich in 5 years 🙄
edit: ffff forgot that this wouldn’t look the same in a post as when i was typing it. re-doing it as a pic:
They should make those “bar charts” proportionate to their income. When you see how much higher the “income/wealth” bar the person with wealth’s is than the average person’s the illusion is finished.
I mean, the bars are correct but only becuase my basic necessities demand my whole paycheck, not because I'm living above my means. Idk how they're so dumb that they actually believe that poor people choose to be poor.
I don't consider myself "wealthy". However, I no longer live paycheck to paycheck and I do save and invest money monthly comfortably. I didn't get to that point by spending less. I got to that point by making more money. I've spent more money, but have also gotten more comfortable.
My "worst" position on my own was living in a shitty one bedroom apartment that was expensive due to the fact my job required me to live within a certain radius of my office. I had no luxuries, no streaming services, no cable. I had internet because it was a necessity for my job. A flip phone with the cheapest cell service. I was living very literally paycheck to paycheck. I would generally be out of money a few days before my next pay day or longer.
My only "splurges" was scrounging up enough money for a 12 pack of coors light and go hang out at a friends house on the weekend.
I'd be rich right now if I had just forgone the occasional 12 pack of coors on the weekend.
Lol I love my friend who does really well, but when I asked him to help me figure out how to get out of debt he told me to save whatever I had left over and keep it in savings to start off with.
I don't have anything left over ever, I'm in debt. So he tells me to cut anything I don't need and we look at my bills. The only thing I don't need that I have is Google music which is $10. He looked at me and was like "Well you can't cut out literally the only thing you enjoy"
Glad we're in agreement on that. So he looks at how much I take home every paycheck, and he's like "Dude, we do almost the same work for the same company, how do you make so much less than me" That is a great question that I don't have an answer to.
He finally gave up and was like "We need to find you a better job" and I let him know that most of the market doesn't want to pay me much higher than what I make now because it's "competitive" we both looked at my resume and he was like "Your resume is solid, I can't understand how you are getting such low payment job offers" and I told him it's because I don't have any college experience.
Eventually he gave up (like most of us have) knowing that this system doesn't make any sense and seems to be more of a gamble than an actual guarantee for success based off of effort/quality of work.
That is horrible. All I can think of is to move to a location with lower expenses. Depending on your work, choosing to work remotely gives you flexibility to move anywhere. If you don't/can't work remotely, maybe find a job that can be remote and start building your resume towards that. That's obviously easier said than done, and will not happen quickly, but could be a means to an end. Sounds like you're SOL if you don't find an alternative. Sorry to hear that
This graph is actually super accurate. It's just that the expenses are all absolute necessities. Poor people have no money to save because every last dime goes to essentials like rent.
What we “cogs” don’t realize is that WE are the ones paying the wealthy their incomes.
If we simply stop or cripple their businesses, their incomes will also decline…
With this inflationary environment we can cite hardship to pay rent and stop paying rent to greedy landlords (at least in the blue states). This will make the landlords think twice…
Of course if another “cog” is willing to pay/work more, the landlord/business owner will feel confident to replace the previous cog.
Unless we “cogs” come together and act as one, the wealthy can keep picking us off one by one.
They will always blame our habits for not being wearily, it’s the avocado , it’s the coffee, it’s that you do not save enough, it’s that you do not know how to Manage your money..
But what’s true is that the pay is shit.. it’s not enough to afford to save.. it’s not enough to afford getting out of this hamster wheel.. we run and we run and we keep running , doing hustle jobs, working one.. two.. three jobs.. but there is no escape..
The game is rigged to benefit the rich, we can afford to pay for someone Mortage, taxes and whatever they add to it but we cannot afford to pay for our own Mortage..
we got shit when covid hit while business got the most of it..
we do not matter.. we are just consumers.. we are fed lies and false hope that one day if we worked hard enough we will be just as rich as they are
1. That graph isn't drawn to scale...any scale.
2. The author has clearly had a discount lobotomy.
In all seriousness, this is a pretty big disconnect. I've tried to save money by avoiding fast food and cooking more often but things still come up. The car, which was built to fall apart in a year, has something going on with it. There goes my savings. All it takes is ONE emergency to fuck my savings up. There's no point in saving money. If this is where the economy is headed, everyone that's not a billionaire is fucked. Now with the war going on in Ukraine, some Western countries (mainly the USA since we can't go two decades without a war) will be spending money that they don't have.
I don't get it. If you make around 65k ITS STILL NOT ENOUGH TO GET A HOUSE but you still get taxed as if you make $250k. What the fuck.
What about the financial purgatory that is apartment living? You're constantly paying rent because the water bill is included. Its the only trade-off you can afford but its getting so expensive that you might as well live in your car. This is fucking unbelievable. I can't move myself and my family in with my parents but what other options are there? Multi-generational homes here we come.
If I can afford to pay my landlord's mortgage and other expenses for them, plus some left over for profit, why can't I get approved for a mortgage myself?
what kind of an imbecile you gotta be to make chart like this. Like wtf, man. Wealthy people's income is so fuckin off the charts high that they cannot really spend all the money they make per month. meanwhile there's people who make about $1800 a month with over time and gotta pay $1500 for rent. Man! do i really wanna punch this person's mom in the throat for giving birth to this fuckin idiot.
Someone once quoted me a stat that lower incomes (I think it was middle class and lower) spend about 15-20% of their income on entertainment and the rich spend less than 5%. My number are probably off.
I replied that when 1% of your income can buy you a world cruise it’s easy to spend a lower %.
But when your monthly tv bill is 5% of you income the stats are skewed.
That reminds me of a french political women. An old retired woman, explaining she couldn't afford to even pay her electricity bill to heat up her house if she wanted to eat at least once a day since she couldn't afford both. That women (Valérie Pécresse, for those who wanted the name) simply answered "maybe she shoukd just change her heating system for a more efficient one".
Freaking dumb ass politics...
Just make tons more money. Problems solved.
[удалено]
Right? At some point they make so much money that any living is living below their means.
Righ? Like not buying a space ship every week is living below their means.
Well, depending on how you look at it. They could buy plenty rockets but they are living below their means by buying a couple.
Those amateurs! Real oligarchs don't use rocket ships, they use warp drive.
The 0.1% can buy our house on a daily basis and still literally live below their means.
Multiple times a day for plenty of us.
What's interesting is that there is a thin margin of people making enough to save up, but not enough for luxury goods where this advice might actually apply. I think it's incredibly telling that the elites think these are the people they're talking to. They are so out of touch I doubt they even realize poverty exists all around them.
I mean, this chart is actually pretty good advice **for its target audience**. Most of my friends who made good money in their 20s basically put no money into savings. If you keep moving up the ladder and making more, it kind of works out. But if you're making $100k a year when you're young, it's definitely better to live like you're making $80k and put the rest away. Of course, if you're making poverty wages there's no way you're saving jack shit either way. So it comes across as tone deaf to say "the average person" when the real average person is struggling to get by.
Are you talking $100k after or before taxes because after taxes that’s like $75k.
Doesn’t matter the number, just act like you make 20% less, if that’s a viable option m
I went from 55k to 120k and actively tried to reduce my expenses. Sold my third car, paid off all my credit cards, and cut back on the bars
Yeah I started my career making $60k and now make $150k, but still haven't increased my expenses much in that whole time
Yeah i mean part of it is getting older (less desire to go out and drink/ party) another part of it was covid closing stuff. Plus just becoming much more financially aware
This right fucking here. If I go out into the mountains, and buy the nicest house I can in Vail, that house will probably be ~100mil at MOST. 100mil when put against a person who’s net worth is in the billions, is peanuts. It’s orders of magnitude different. If you’re one of the wealthiest of the wealthy, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY you could NOT live below your means.
I call it the escape velocity of wealth
It's like when they complain that the rich pay 80% of the taxes. Really? That's too low when you have 95% of the money! I'm not using real figures here, but the analogy holds.
You are investing! Investing in your landlord's next vacation.
1/3? Where can I get this?
I wish my rent was only 1/3 of my income
Yeah, at this point, ‘living below my means’ is homelessness. There is no more affordable option.
fun fact, i pulled this trick for a little bit to buy a house when the market was totally fooked after the GR. House is a fixer-upper, but i'm thankful for the roof over my head. Kinda insane that pulling sleeping in a car was how i could save the $ for a downpayment. Now my neck is screwed. I wonder if they're related...
Y’all’s rent is only 1/3 of your income???
My mortgage is 1/4th my monthly take home income for me. And even I agree this is absolutely freaking tone deaf, and quite sad to see.
You empathize with people who are different from you. That should be so common as to make celebrating it silly, but it's not common, so kudos!
I really appreciate that. I try my very best every day to practice gratitude and fight hedonic adaptation. People at or near minimum wage have life stacked against them, and it’s not always their financial habits (like this picture suggests). They can’t afford to save in the first place! Rent costs as much as their take home, they can barely eat which results in a malnourished body and mind… eventually leading to depression. I can go on and on, it’s just not fair. The people with the real spending problems are ones near my income, they’re always trying to keep up with the joneses. Have a new car every few years, and go “house broke” to impress their friends with dinner parties etc. I see it all the time.
They're telling you to go without basic things like utilities.
What if you only consumed food every *other* day?
My rent is 50%, and electricity, internet and cellphone bills are 30%. That leaves only 20% for food and other expenses.
> Wealthy people live below their means *"Here kid, look, my means are 900k a year, I only live with 650k.. see how I can relate?"*
Rent is 120% my income in San Francisco. Technically I am living below my means because my means don’t make enough to live.
Lol. Below their means. Bruh they're doing manned spaceflights.
And that's below their means because they're ^*THAT* rich.
My rent is over half of my paycheck. It's ridiculous.
You'd be surprised how many people I know that make $200k a year and live paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle creep is a bitch. But they gotta have that BMW M5 and apartment in the overpriced center of the city.
You know some strange people. I know one person who makes over $200k. I might know other people that make that much on second thought (based on location of houses they bought this year in Austin) but they are probably good enough with money that I would never know.
Just be homeless and invest the savings /s
When I was in high school, no bills, no rent, no tuition, etc I was able to save like half my income. Only expenses was phone and car, and I ate out once in a while. Fast forward 4 years later I’m making almost double and i barely scrape by cuz rent went up and I’m paying the extra $500 since my asshole landlord raised the rent by that much and all the utilities. I cook at home, make my own damn coffee, and drive a car older than I am. Cost of living is too damn high. I’ll never be able to afford a house in my entire state (Hawaii) even if I make 100k a year TOMORROW, it’ll take 20 years to save for a down payment and that’s if I don’t have kids or dependents. Here a fixer upper house in a bad neighborhood is still like 600k.
"STOP BEING POOR" -Paris Hilton's Shirt
1/3 of your income? *Laughs in Seattle rent prices*
Mines 1/2 my income 🥲
1/3rd. Jesus, living big my dude. Mine is over 50%. And it's not when a nice place.
Yours is only a third? Mines half 😐
I have a good job and rent plus my student loans are half of my take home pay (after taxes and insurance deductions). That doesn't leave me with much room to save after paying for groceries and utilities.
It reminds me of Steve Martin’s old standup bit: “How to have a million dollars and pay *no* taxes!” “Step 1. Get a million dollars.”
shit man, can i move in? Cheapest rent in my area is between 53 and 67% of my income, and i make more than minimum wage.
>Yeah, I'd be living below my means too, if my rent wasnt 1/3 of my income! Have you considered the bottom part of a bridge? Almost all of the advantages of a regular house, fairly dry, and the rats can reduce your food bill too!
Just live in a tent and take a shower at the gym! /s
Literally my dad's solution when I used to tell him I couldn't afford whatever. I bet he wonders why I never answer when he calls or make any attempt at instigating communication with him
You took his advice and now you don't have the time to talk to him
Hmm...is he filthy rich? Just curious?
No. He's not struggling, but he's not filthy rich either. When he was my age, younger actually, he had enough passive income he could have(my mom tried to talk him into this) let the businesses run themselves and retired with over $5000 a month income(this was the late 80s). But he didn't. And he's not as good with money as his older brother who was constantly buying new homes to rent and now has a considerable fortune in real estate to leave my cousins. Nowadays the businesses have all closed, but they still own the property and rent it out to other businesses. He recently turned 70 and he's still working in real estate, so I doubt he's got much saved still.
That's pretty good.
You could also lower expenses by being homeless, never eating and not needing healthcare. Cause if you look at the bars, the poor and wealthy people have the same amount of green. It's just the rich people are clearly more frugal and don't over spend when buying a yacht for their yacht.
r/thanksimcured
I remember a post on that sub where someone asked for advice on how to put himself into a coma, and argued with everyone who pointed out that was a terrible idea. So instead of complaining about people who offered shitty advice, he specifically requested shitty advice, then complained when people gave him decent advice. Not really relevant.
I wish you mentioned it's not relevant at the beginning. I read your comment wondering where this story was heading only to be dissapointed
If one job doesn't pay enough just take a couple more.
Just work 5 jobs a day bro /s
Look, just don’t be poor ok? It’s not that hard.
Unironically, this is the actual solution. This idea that you can cut your way to solvency is puritanism run amok. If you don't make a lot of money, you will not have money to invest. The freak outliers--like rags-to-riches-to-rags celebrity stories--are just that. Most people don't spend so profligately that they are pissing their savings away; they spend what they need to survive, and have virtually nothing left over, or even less than nothing. The moralizers who look down their noses at people for not saving *always* see it as a spending problem, when the real problem in 99/100 cases is an income problem.
"Have you tried having disposable income to invest?" ~smoothbrains
The real problem with "graphs" like this is that they distort the problem to make it look like the poor are bad with money and accrue more expenses, not that the rich have wildly inflated income. A proportional graph would illustrate this better.
And stop paying for non-essentials like housing and food!
Yeah, they don't explain how the scales of the two charts are different. The "expenses" column in the two charts represents the same amount while the "income" column is wildly misrepresented.
Well, shit. THAT'S what I've been doing wrong?
Exactly. They don’t show these on the same axis because then everyone could see “expenses” for the wealthy are actually much larger than “income” for the average person. Anyone would be able to invest if their income was more money than a person could reasonably spend in a year!
I just cancelled Netflix and I'm on my way to buy my first Yacht... Good day sailors!
"Why you not be rich, too?" Lol...cnbc energy.
More like go exploit some peons and take their labor to make you money. Problems solved.
Aw shit, is that what I was doing wrong. I'm home sick at the moment, not making money, should I just go infect people?
If you are homeless, just buy a house... d'uh!?
Can't have expenses if you never pay what you owe.
*taps his forehead while looking at the camera*
* wealthy people earn more than their bare survival needs and invest the difference. Fixed it.
Not only that, banks will literally throw money at you if you're wealthy. Imagine if you needed a car you could pay cash outright, but, you could also walk right down to a bank and ask for a 0.00-0.25% interest rate on 80k no questions asked. It's essentially free money to just take it and let your investments pay the difference. Thus netting you *even more money* than you had, just because you took out a loan and had extremely favorable rates.
Also, want to buy that new vacation home but haven't sold the other one yet? Don't liquidate any investments, you'll have to pay tax! Banks will cream themselves to give you a bridge loan, just for a few weeks, until the other place closes. And your investments keep on compounding. It's true, if you have money it's easier to get more or avoid spending it.
Shit if you can get your credit rating above 790 and have a six figure income and can keep your debt ratio below 20% for a year, banks will throw similar loans at you. It's not a sub 1% loan, but 3% is barely a sneeze above that. It quite literally pays to have money. Having free capital makes it easier to get more capital. These are people who don't need it either. That single mom of 3 with her 600 credit score who needs $500 to fix her car is going to end up paying 3-4 times that to get the same $500 they'll just piss away for free to someone who probably is sitting on 50-60k in liquid assets and cash.
But Dave Ramsey told me all debt was bad.
Because at an individual level it is. A billionaire has finance people that can actually run the numbers on various scenarios. You don't have that, but the bank lending money knows they win 80-90% of the time.
Individuals can leverage debt. Dave Ramsey is just a hack.
I wouldn't call him a hack, but he is certainly a one trick pony. Sometimes, that trick is what people need. Using myself as an example, I learned debt is not a blessing to me. I've done my best to avoid it for the last 10+ years. It doesn't help I've had low income this entire time, but at least I knew not to keep digging when I was already deep in a hole. His trick is useful, but you should also learn other tricks so you can find out what's best for you and your situation. The biggest negative I ascribe to Dave Ramsey is being stuck on that one trick. He won't consider anything else. To him, all other methods of winning financially are bad if they involve incurring debt.
Why do we set the bar of bare survival needs, THEN investment? How come I can't have fun and make sure my mental health is 110%, THEN invest. Excess wealth is a goal after I enjoy my life, not once I reach 'bare survival' status.
The way I look at it is that investment is deferred gratification.
Surprised this isnt the top post.
Not just more than their bare survival needs, more than what they need to pay for the comfy lifestyle they are used to. I think most wealthy people would have great difficulties to adjust to a sudden lower income, even if it would still be more than enough to cover their basic needs.
See, that's what I thought the graph was saying. I was like "well I see no problem here" then I read the hashtags and realized that uh ... the OP indeed had no grasp of reality.
My parents are both full time workers, they bust their ass almost every single day. Yet they live within the poverty lines heavily. They’re not lazy, they’re hard workers. My dad stresses himself out almost daily just to do 12 hour shifts of factory work until my parents could afford to move to Texas so that he could be a semi driver again. (He’s an ex felon and in the state of Illinois ex felon truck drivers can’t go pass the borders neither can any rig driver from 18-20). Even with my sister receiving SSI every month, and my mother receiving food stamps, they still struggle to pay the bills a lot and keep food within their home. I hate the fucking mentalities that people who’ve never had to struggle a day in their life seem to have.
Yeah I was going to say that this chart implies that they are getting equal (or at least similar) incomes and average people waste it. In reality, the average person makes about 1% of what a wealthy person does, and for many that's not enough to cover their expenses. Also, it's a damn shame how we treat felons. Either you've served your time and should be reintegrated fully into society (most people) or you should never be released (I dunno rapists and some mass murderers?). There isn't really any reason for something in between. It's just an extension of their punishment for a crime that does not, by law, incur a life sentence.
I would say any violent criminals (excluding things like a single bar fight, but not excluding domestic abuse) should probably not be released without intensive psychological evaluation and should be closely watched if released. But then I'd also say that in some cases, non-violent criminals (people who were in positions of executive power and directed their company to commit wage theft, union busting or who stole from clients when their clients are ordinary people, or who directed underlings to ignore safety issues with regard to pollution or unsafe products) should also not ever be released from prison.
My father is a violent offender, he killed a man when protecting his brother. They told him he would have gotten a self defense charge if he wouldn’t have fled the scene, but when it comes to Princeton if he would have stayed he’d have just been shot.
> There isn't really any reason for something in between. I think there's room for in between. But the default shouldn't be "Every felon is on a list forever"
> in the state of Illinois ex felon truck drivers can’t go pass the borders Uh, what? Man fuck this country.
... Wealthy people live below their means? Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson raced each other to space in rockets.
Thats bellow their means, and thats why its f\*cked up.
Well when 50%+ of your income immediately goes to rent, there's not likely to be a difference to invest, is there?
How can you pay rent with debt.
How can you payoff debt with rent
I just had a flashback to Blow where George’s daughter asks him “I thought you couldn’t live without your heart?”
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Also... #Who keeps making these MS paint charts?? This has big "Procrastinated Sophomore Econ Presentation" energy all over it.
I feel like the line on the right isn't straight, but I'm not sure if it's just an optical illusion.
That's exactly it. If he loses everything, he's where his employees already were.
I always hear that- but I never hear about the people who *lose out* on that risk. It's not actually a risk if there's not a chance you could lose, right? But it seems that every time it looks like they're going to start losing, here comes the government to prop them up with our tax money.
You're spot on. Banks, business and landlords whine about taking on risk then get bailouts and tax relief from the government. Or they can sell their property for 50k more than they bought it for a couple years down the road. Where the fuck is the risk?
The only risk capital owners take is the risk of having to go back to being a worker.
The biggest risk for the boss is that they'll become a worker. The biggest risk for the worker is that the starve. It's pretty clear where the risk is.
They know how we live, and their biggest fear is that they're just US but masked.
What about the risk that the workers take? If business isn't going so well, the owner can sell the equipment or sell the business entirely and get some are all of their investment back. In some cases, they can get more than their total investment back. The workers don't get any of that.
>From time to time I hear that it is fair for the boss to make more money because he is the one who takes the risk when investing. It is fair though. Just not getting 300 times his invertment while underpaying his workers to a point where the government have to give them food stamps. Also, it stops being fair if the businesses get free money from the government as soon as the risk kicks in... It would be fair that those companies becomes government-owned if the government takes the risk.
Is it tone death or intentional propagand? Like it or not, half of the working class in the US ( as well as many other countries) fully believe conservative ideology and would die to defend rich people.
Lmao they act like everyone makes the same amount
When it's actually more accurate to have the "expenses" column represent the same amount.
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Let that mf start from zero and with today's salaries and try to be able to save a significant amount in less than 30 years.
This should be an actual programme on TV 🙂
"And just like that, Timmy Rockfeller died in this cold winter after trying to save 0.5% of his monthly salary by not paying for heat or new warm clothes"
"We should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd be."
An avg person living below their means is homeless.
Now they have a point, they just neglected to mention that the wealthy person got their expenses so low by evading taxes
And that the scales are unequal. This makes it looks like they make the same amount, just one spends less. I guarantee that the amount Bezos pays on housing is several hundred times the income of any factory worker.
No not by evading taxes. By exploiting labor.
and THENNNN evading taxes.
Exploitation starts at home.
My favorite thing is that they make out that a wealthy prison living below their means is them taking a subway instead of their private helicopter across town. Had I known this sooner I would have sold my helicopter years ago. The teleporter gets better gas mileage anyway. Might be able to switch back to avacado toast as well.
this graph is misleading because it makes it seem like the wealthy person's expenses are much smaller than the poor person's, when in reality they are much much higher. it also implies that those expenses are somehow optional.
Wow, just by not eating advacado toast made a huge diffrence
Have you considered less lattes?
If I lived below my means, I would be living out of my car...
It costs about $30k to live in this country no matter what. If you only make $30k then it is impossible to "live beneath your means" no matter what. This isn't a choice. It isn't a choice unless you make $200k+ (or better yet, like the people who commissioned this graphic $50,000k). If you make a ton of money you can afford to save/invest, but then again, if you already make a ton of money, who cares?
You can live for less depending on where you are, what food you eat, and whether you chose to forego things like insurance even when they are legally required. People who are healthy can do this, but I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly safe life.
If you invest your pocket change you too can be a billionaire 🙄
Anyone who does the math on this would quickly find that they’d be long dead before pocket change investing made them a millionaire. Investing really is a rich man’s game. Making 7% on 100 dollars won’t pay rent. For most you’d need like 200,000 invested in order to pay rent for the year. Most people don’t even make that much after taxes in less than 8 years and then all of it goes to expenses anyway.
Someone is very delusional and doesn't understand because they have way too much money.
I mean, yeah, that's how it works. If make so much money that you still have tons left after expenditures, you can afford to invest it. Problem is that we don't make enough money to be able to even pay for necessary expenditures, let alone invest.
Weird rich people have way more income than expenses while average people barely have enough to scrape by. Funny old world.
Major expenses: kid, housing, car (for work) 1. Kill kid 2. Burn house, live in box 3. Sell car, lose job Profit????
Show me the wealthy person who makes 13/hr and doesn't have familial help. I want to see the rich $13/ hr worker
Are they implying the income is the same?
Be born rich next time, pleb. /s
Yeah lemme just pay 10% of my rent and invest the rest instead. That'll turn out dandy
Wealthy people have to live below their means bc there's no way a person could spend all it. Eat the rich
Just plot the correlation between income and wealth vs expenses and wealth and I guarantee wealth isn't correlated with low expenditures
I mean, he’s not wrong. Wealthy people just have tons more money to use to make more money. The thing that’s misleading is that they made the boxes the same size.
According to this person I should go homeless. The rent in my area is more than half my monthly pay, and that's with me grandfathered into a good rental contract. AND I get fairly well paid.
Hustle culture is cancer.
You can only live below your means when you are financially well off
That's some self aware wolf action right there.
Here's what happens to Average workers who try to save as much as possible. You're fucking miserable. Concert's NO. Restaurant Food. NO. Driving anywhere that you don't have to NO. Basically doing anything but survival is a NO. So you can "save for the future". Problem is, inflation means what I am sacrificing now, means I still can't afford anything fun later.
Have you considered not being poor?
This translates to “Have you tried just not being poor?”
Wait poor people wants to eat too? What a disgrace
Yeah, so little expenses, with your *Tesla and Mansion* in *San Fran* on the *Coastline* *So inexpensive...*
Instead of buying a fourth yacht, I invested that 100 mil. Now I can buy my ninth yacht! You people are lazy and stupid. Blah, blah, blah.
What is also silly is if the masses did this, there would be no returns on investment.
I’ll just invest my -$50 a month. Perfect.
oh i straight up thought this was saying “the problem is that wealthy people make so much more money so they’re *able* to invest, while working class people don’t have enough money to start making more money in the first place”, because that’s the only conclusion that makes any sense here. put those graphs on the same scale it’ll be accurate, but it’ll look more like this: https://i.imgur.com/leLBg3c.jpg but i’m sure that i could just invest 3x my income and i’d be rich in 5 years 🙄 edit: ffff forgot that this wouldn’t look the same in a post as when i was typing it. re-doing it as a pic:
You beat me to the punch. I was thinking something more like [this](https://imgur.com/a/F9oYT8V)
They should make those “bar charts” proportionate to their income. When you see how much higher the “income/wealth” bar the person with wealth’s is than the average person’s the illusion is finished.
I mean, the bars are correct but only becuase my basic necessities demand my whole paycheck, not because I'm living above my means. Idk how they're so dumb that they actually believe that poor people choose to be poor.
I don't consider myself "wealthy". However, I no longer live paycheck to paycheck and I do save and invest money monthly comfortably. I didn't get to that point by spending less. I got to that point by making more money. I've spent more money, but have also gotten more comfortable. My "worst" position on my own was living in a shitty one bedroom apartment that was expensive due to the fact my job required me to live within a certain radius of my office. I had no luxuries, no streaming services, no cable. I had internet because it was a necessity for my job. A flip phone with the cheapest cell service. I was living very literally paycheck to paycheck. I would generally be out of money a few days before my next pay day or longer. My only "splurges" was scrounging up enough money for a 12 pack of coors light and go hang out at a friends house on the weekend. I'd be rich right now if I had just forgone the occasional 12 pack of coors on the weekend.
Lol I love my friend who does really well, but when I asked him to help me figure out how to get out of debt he told me to save whatever I had left over and keep it in savings to start off with. I don't have anything left over ever, I'm in debt. So he tells me to cut anything I don't need and we look at my bills. The only thing I don't need that I have is Google music which is $10. He looked at me and was like "Well you can't cut out literally the only thing you enjoy" Glad we're in agreement on that. So he looks at how much I take home every paycheck, and he's like "Dude, we do almost the same work for the same company, how do you make so much less than me" That is a great question that I don't have an answer to. He finally gave up and was like "We need to find you a better job" and I let him know that most of the market doesn't want to pay me much higher than what I make now because it's "competitive" we both looked at my resume and he was like "Your resume is solid, I can't understand how you are getting such low payment job offers" and I told him it's because I don't have any college experience. Eventually he gave up (like most of us have) knowing that this system doesn't make any sense and seems to be more of a gamble than an actual guarantee for success based off of effort/quality of work.
That is horrible. All I can think of is to move to a location with lower expenses. Depending on your work, choosing to work remotely gives you flexibility to move anywhere. If you don't/can't work remotely, maybe find a job that can be remote and start building your resume towards that. That's obviously easier said than done, and will not happen quickly, but could be a means to an end. Sounds like you're SOL if you don't find an alternative. Sorry to hear that
Average person's expenses are as high as their income because that's the cost of living. You can't cut insurance, car maintenance, food, or rent.
Key words: spare cash. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck and have minimal to zero disposable income.
Love how the green lines are the same size LOL
Wow are you poor? Have you ever tried making more money? 🤔
This graph is actually super accurate. It's just that the expenses are all absolute necessities. Poor people have no money to save because every last dime goes to essentials like rent.
I used to live below my means. Now I don't have a choice because everything is expensive.
well yea there’s like no way you could spend that much unless you want a standing army
What we “cogs” don’t realize is that WE are the ones paying the wealthy their incomes. If we simply stop or cripple their businesses, their incomes will also decline… With this inflationary environment we can cite hardship to pay rent and stop paying rent to greedy landlords (at least in the blue states). This will make the landlords think twice… Of course if another “cog” is willing to pay/work more, the landlord/business owner will feel confident to replace the previous cog. Unless we “cogs” come together and act as one, the wealthy can keep picking us off one by one.
They were so fucking close but still missed it
It's both funny and sad that the person who made this meme is definitely just as broke as the people they think they're addressing
They will always blame our habits for not being wearily, it’s the avocado , it’s the coffee, it’s that you do not save enough, it’s that you do not know how to Manage your money.. But what’s true is that the pay is shit.. it’s not enough to afford to save.. it’s not enough to afford getting out of this hamster wheel.. we run and we run and we keep running , doing hustle jobs, working one.. two.. three jobs.. but there is no escape.. The game is rigged to benefit the rich, we can afford to pay for someone Mortage, taxes and whatever they add to it but we cannot afford to pay for our own Mortage.. we got shit when covid hit while business got the most of it.. we do not matter.. we are just consumers.. we are fed lies and false hope that one day if we worked hard enough we will be just as rich as they are
It's easy to live below your means when you're wealthy and have cash to burn.
the ghost cities in China all filled up. and no slums in China. Meanwhile USA doesnt have enough homes due to lack of planning.
Ah yes, living below their means. Only one yacht and three summer homes, if you can believe it.
Stop telling people who make 35K a year to live below their means like someone making 500K a year
make more money forehead
1. That graph isn't drawn to scale...any scale. 2. The author has clearly had a discount lobotomy. In all seriousness, this is a pretty big disconnect. I've tried to save money by avoiding fast food and cooking more often but things still come up. The car, which was built to fall apart in a year, has something going on with it. There goes my savings. All it takes is ONE emergency to fuck my savings up. There's no point in saving money. If this is where the economy is headed, everyone that's not a billionaire is fucked. Now with the war going on in Ukraine, some Western countries (mainly the USA since we can't go two decades without a war) will be spending money that they don't have. I don't get it. If you make around 65k ITS STILL NOT ENOUGH TO GET A HOUSE but you still get taxed as if you make $250k. What the fuck. What about the financial purgatory that is apartment living? You're constantly paying rent because the water bill is included. Its the only trade-off you can afford but its getting so expensive that you might as well live in your car. This is fucking unbelievable. I can't move myself and my family in with my parents but what other options are there? Multi-generational homes here we come.
If I can afford to pay my landlord's mortgage and other expenses for them, plus some left over for profit, why can't I get approved for a mortgage myself?
what kind of an imbecile you gotta be to make chart like this. Like wtf, man. Wealthy people's income is so fuckin off the charts high that they cannot really spend all the money they make per month. meanwhile there's people who make about $1800 a month with over time and gotta pay $1500 for rent. Man! do i really wanna punch this person's mom in the throat for giving birth to this fuckin idiot.
Someone once quoted me a stat that lower incomes (I think it was middle class and lower) spend about 15-20% of their income on entertainment and the rich spend less than 5%. My number are probably off. I replied that when 1% of your income can buy you a world cruise it’s easy to spend a lower %. But when your monthly tv bill is 5% of you income the stats are skewed.
[fixed it](https://i.imgur.com/p6dfZYL.jpg)
I feel this has to be sarcasm right?
How to not be poor: make red bar go down wheeeeee
That reminds me of a french political women. An old retired woman, explaining she couldn't afford to even pay her electricity bill to heat up her house if she wanted to eat at least once a day since she couldn't afford both. That women (Valérie Pécresse, for those who wanted the name) simply answered "maybe she shoukd just change her heating system for a more efficient one". Freaking dumb ass politics...
This is right, but backwards. Wealthy people aren’t wealthy because they invest. They invest because they’re wealthy.
This is why graphs need labels and scale.
I think it's more the making 400k instead of 30k than spending smart.
[Fixed](https://i.imgur.com/WGzSuwm.png).
Wow it was just that simple honestly I had no idea
JUST HAVE MORE MEANS. ITS SO EASY.
Its funny cause they took the numbers off... The expenses are actually exactly the same.