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The Cognitive Cost of Poverty
An anonymous reader writes "It's a common trope that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money. But a new study (abstract) makes a fascinating find: being poor actually reduces your cognitive capabilities when thinking about money. 'In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night's sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that's been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.' This makes the difficulty in climbing out of poverty much easier to understand. The researchers also demonstrated causality by showing that thinking about a very small expense led to no impairment, while thinking about a very large expense did. They confirmed this by looking at a group of farmers in India who tend to receive most of their income at one time — immediately following their harvest. Shortly before that payment, when the farmers had very little money, their scores dropped as well."
It's a common trope in USA that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money.
FTFY.
Otherwise, I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Common trope by rich people. Let them eat cake.
Here's a brilliant strategy: 1) Encourage unwanted births by making birth control and abortion inaccessible / difficult. 2) Cut welfare programs so that these unwanted births go onto become improverished adults who create more impoverished children. 3) Cut taxes on the "jobs creators". 4) Reap the political contributions. 5) Rinse and repeat.
Didn't bother reading the article, did you.
Having money problems? Are were you just born dumb?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If you're poor, it sucks for you, but you can pull yourself out of poverty, even with all the challenges. It's been done again and again, and there are support groups for you when you're really in trouble (project 90 has some amazing results with homeless drunks, for example). If you're poor you shouldn't use a study like this as an excuse to stay poor. You can escape.
I really like project 90, which I linked to before, because they do a good job helping people overcome challenges like, and move on to a better life. If we're going to help poor people, we need to help them in a way that lifts them out of poverty, not in a way that keeps them trapped in a charity lifestyle.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When it comes to thinking about money, having a lower financial IQ is a cause for being poor?
Yet another easy explanation for "this is why you're poor." Remember the studies that conflate household income and test scores? Or the ones that found that the more you read to your kids the more vocabulary they'll have and the smarter they'll be? The list of things that the poor cannot provide for their children is long and getting longer, and that has a permanent influence on their future lives.
This article is just more evidence of the same. The poor do not get (and cannot afford) sound financial advice. But what good would it do them? They have effectively "lost at capitalism" already by working for someone else.
From the article: "low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests..."
It's possible that they proved poor people are poor because they are inherently bad with money. I'm not saying it's true, but I don't think it's possible to rule it out.
...children who ate a healthy breakfast did better at an IQ test than children who were beaten the same morning.
explain that to all the tele-evangelists conning the gullible of of their money
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
30 years ago I worked with a former social worker of long experience who had just changed jobs seeking a steadier paycheck. She said that poverty produced a constant stress over not feeling safe that basic needs would be met. Her view was that that constant stress often resulted in serious mental disfunction.
"Poverty makes you crazy...or at least stupid" was her standard rejoinder whenever we ran across someone who did something stupid with what little money they had.
From the Hierarchy of Needs, to my co-worker, to this new study - has anything changed? Not really. But it seems the relevant points need to be made over and over again because they just aren't getting through.
No, it means they're preoccupied with what to them is a crippling expense, where to the rich person the expense is trifling and not worth consideration.
No, it means they're preoccupied with what to them is a crippling expense, where to the rich person the expense is trifling and not worthy of consideration.
Are were you?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
more non traditional education is need as not all people are a good fit for the memorize information, the ability to spew said information back on tests ideas as well as the overly theroy based learning vs more hands on learning.
This isn't actually really new news for some folks in the US. Public Educators have know this sort of thing in the form of other studies for many years.
For example, studies have shown that people who are low-income, tend to favor larger quantities of food. Middle-class/income favor higher quality foods, and when it comes to upper-income/class, they are more interested in the quality of the presentation of food.
We have long since known that low-income families have higher risks for needing additional aid in learning, because they do carry a much heavier mental/emotional burden than other families. They're constantly worried about if they'll have enough money to put food on the table, to keep the lights on, or even pay the rent. If low-income families first pay rent, food, utilities and transportation, they are in a completely different mental/emotional position than if they're worrying about one of those basic areas not being covered.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
I don't think it's going out too far on a limb to suggest you actually didn't read the article., the study and possibly not even the summary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
by drinking water instead of three sodas a day
I have a mental disability whose treatment requires stimulant medication. I went on Diet Mtn Dew (caffeine) at $1 per day to get off Strattera (atomoxetine) at $4 per day plus the cost of regular doctor visits to renew the prescription.
they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.
But would that cover textbooks, room and board, and the like? If you mean that the kids should go to school in town and live with parents, that would require the parents to spend even more to move within public transit range of the school.
one working themselves when they are of age
I don't see how that would help much. A lot of students have their birthday late in the school year, which means they're applying for college before they turn 18. I looked into child labor law in Indiana, and the state appears to give the principal of the child's high school absolute power to veto a work permit. Or do you mean that parents should plan their sex based on the state's kindergarten cutoff so that their kids turn 18 earlier in the school year?
I thought one still had to visit a doctor to get birth control. Good luck affording that on minimum wage after rent, food, and utilities.
Being poor involves constant threats to status and welfare, and constant stressors that people with more means don't have. One thing I've learned is that a lot of problems simply vanish if you throw money at them. Without the money to throw, you're facing a huge cognitive and emotional load that the financially secure are not burdened with.
Not having insurance is a choice.
Not for people who applied for a few dozen jobs offering health insurance, were turned down by all, and faced the Hobson's choice of a job with no health insurance or no job. Or to put it another way, having insurance but no home is also a choice.
I disagree. The article is merely spinning the results based on their own bias.
“We’ve definitely worried about that,” Shafir says. Science, though, is coalescing around the opposite explanation. “All the data shows it isn't about poor people, it’s about people who happen to be in poverty. All the data suggests it is not the person, it's the context they’re inhabiting.”
Shafir is making a non-statement here. "poor people" == "people who happen to be in poverty". This statement does not disprove that people's monetary reasoning is a factor.
Also, science does not coalesce, nor does data suggest; these ideas are derived by the people running the study.
I do not see where in the study people who were good with money were subjected to the demands of poverty had their IQ decrease: that would be more telling. Merely saying that people who are recently working with or comfortable with large amounts do better with on-the-spot questions about large amounts, than people who are not as familiar with those sums is not proof of an IQ drop due to "poverty load".
They don't actually know what's in the bible. It's comical.
My dad grew up dirt poor, as in the floor of his parents. By making decisions like the soda decision, he ended up flying us on private jets when he was 40.
Unlikely. Anyone who's made it big in finances will, if they're being honest with themselves, say that it came down to hard work, smart decisions, and luck. Your dad may have all of those qualities you admire, but that's not why he's rich. He's rich because he had those qualities and was in the right place at the right time when an opportunity presented. Some people win this lottery early. Some win it late in life. Very many though never get a winning ticket, and so for them, it doesn't matter.
The cognitive distortion you have just used is what is called the Just World Hypothesis.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If I may intrude on your righteous indignation for a bit...
They see the money they spend on a soda, and the money they need to send their kid to college as completely unrelated.
He's talking about saving for FUTURE college education of children.
Now, I'm not trying to fight you here or anything.
You are completely correct in the math part of your assessment and in many of your other comments there.
It's just my opinion that you are perhaps a tad overinvolved emotionally in the argument here, and that it may be clouding your judgement.
Like in reply to this comment here.
From where I sit it seems like you are getting way much more from that comment, going on about education and CEOs... of which the original poster made no mention.
In fact, I don't think that his/her comment derides the poor in any way. All that poster talks about is his/her anecdotal experience with "handouts".
And frankly, yes, I can see some truth in that.
Now, I can't say at this point if "handouts" there means "welfare" or "giving change to beggars" or "being Secret Santa for the poor" or "magically creating money in poor people's pockets".
I'm not the OP and my telepathy helmet's range has been severely shortened since the hits it took during the last alien invasion.
Taking it for just what the OP says, yes - handouts are bad.
Jobs that they could work to provide for themselves would be much better.
And just to make my position on the subject clear, yes, there are those who can't provide for themselves due to illness or what ever reason, and yes, they should be provided some sort of monetary and other assistance from the government.
Not just cause it is humane, though that should be enough but this is not that kind of a universe... yer.
But because it is sure as hell cheaper for the society than letting them "fend for themselves" by turning to crime.
Back to the original comment...
Saving money on sodas makes more sense when it's for the education of one's children. If anything, it does so on paper.
I fear that the problem is not in the overabundance of expenses on sodas or cigarettes but in the fact that there is a high chance of that money melting away on some other necessity that may arise many times before those kids reach the college age.
Stuff like rent, medicine, food...
And then there's the situation where you have a single parent with three small kids who can't afford any other gift for them than that soda.
Should he/she really put them on the lap and explain each of them that they're not getting any sweets that the other kids are getting so that one day, three or four of their entire lifetimes away, they could go to even MORE school?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We did finally get a plausible explanation for both Batman's and Lex Luthor's extremely high intelligence.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Bad nutrition reduces mental capacity. Who woulda thunkit.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
All that means is that someone else is supporting your ass (oh the irony). Lets see how well you sleep on a bench.
to the right parents.
I counter with the fact that capitalism requires the opposite. In the search for profit, a corporation does not care who or what it exploits.
This is totally false.
Companies produce products, they do not exploit anyone. It is up to the consumer if they buy a product or not. Any "exploitation" is purely in the head of the buyer.
The companies also take on the risk that they will make a lot of something and no-one will buy it, or after a while of making something no-one will buy it, or over time they are not able to keep up with other companies in producing something anyone wants to buy. You obviously think of every dime of profit as "exploitation" when it's really overhead just to exist.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I worked at after-school jobs when I was fifteen, I never had to get permission from my school.
That depends on what state you lived in. Some states, such as my native Indiana, require the school to issue a work permit for any employee under 18 who hasn't graduated from high school.
What point are you actually trying to make with the 'planning sex' comment?
Planning for a birth soon after the school cutoff date ensures that the child will be 18 for most of his or her senior year.
This is the kind of idiocy that keeps poor people poor. Wise decisions with money can move someone out of the poor house just as easily as they can keep them in.
In the soda example, at 3 soda's a day per $1.50 a piece or $4.50 a day, if you were to open an account stating with $4.50 then add a equivalent of $4.50 per day for the duration of a month (about $135 a month)- every month, earning just 3% interest would give you about $38,457.00 in 18 years. That certainly is not a small number. But how many other choices are made that could equate to similar savings? Suppose that you could save the same amount per month by packing a lunch instead of eating at fast food joints and skipping a movie from time to time (135+135). This new savings gives you a total of about $76,907.00 in those same 18 years.
So while you will not be driving around in a Bently due to this savings, thanks to compounding interest, you certainly could be sending your first born to college or perhaps placing a down payment on a retirement home or any number of things that would make life much more enjoyable than a soda and BigMac might.
Take a man who's only learned to fish with his hands (poor), and consumes whatever fish (money) he catches immediately. You can throw a fishing rod (lottery win) at him, but on his own he's more likely to lose the rod entirely or break it long before he catches enough fish to last him more than a day or two (long-term savings/investments). Teach that man to use the rod (money managers/consultants), and he will have enough fish to last him into his childrens' and grandchildrens' lives.
The real issue is the Catch-22 at the start. You need to have money before you can learn to manage that money, but you won't know how to manage your money until you've got enough to hire someone who can teach you.
You do not really have to pay all your costs of the degree up front the first year in [Indiana] do you?
No, but a part-time minimum-wage job isn't always enough for tuition, fees, textbooks, room, and board either.
Finding work that pays enough to save and live off of might be difficult so living at home during those years might be a necessity.
So you propose to eliminate the "room" and part of the "board" (meals). But this would require the parents to move within bus range of college.
the state appears to give the principal of the child's high school absolute power to veto a work permit
the school can also over ride the work permit
I think that's what I was referring to.
If your parents put the equivilent of $10 a week (40 a month) back and earned just 3% interest over 18 years
When I discovered that JPMorgan Chase was paying 0.01% on savings accounts and 0.35% on a 5-year certificate of deposit, I looked into other banks. As of right now, for example, Ally is paying 1.50% for a 5-year CD. Where are you finding this 3%?
Diet Mtn Dew (caffeine)
skip the massive amounts of sugar that'll slowly destroy your insulin response
I'm one step ahead of you, buddy. I chose a diet drink because it lacks "massive amounts of sugar".
Getting back to the relationship between poverty and intelligence, I saw something on TV this week which said the number of words spoken to young children each day was directly related to the parents income.
Children of the lowest income families were only hearing about 600 words a day spoken to them by parents and carers, while children of high income families were hearing 2000 words a day. Middle income families were somewhere in the middle. Also, I suspect many of the low income parents were saying "sit down" and "shut up" as much of their conversation.
Adequate and appropriate interaction with their parents is crucial for development of a child's intellectual and social skills, so here's another area where these kids are behind the eight ball from the start.
College saving really should be a family affair. From the moment you are born, your parent or parents should be putting away something regularly. That something over the course of 18 years and coupled with one working themselves when they are of age should amount to a fair chunk of change.
I don't want to do the numbers, that's hard :)
And we probably make numbers that says both things... In any event for this plan to succeed you need not to have any unexpected problems.
Medical issues, job issues, loss of spouse, disability, car accident, really any form of bad luck...
And when that's done, you need to be perfect... Meaning you can't make any mistakes, sign a bad contract, buy Christmas presents, go on a vacation or just pop a soda...
Please don't tell me you want people to be perfect, nobody is perfect, I know sodas are bad, but I pop one every now and then anyways...
The difference between me a poor person is that if I make a financial mistake, sign a contract on a phone, apartment, TV, cable...
Then it might cost me a lot of money, I'll be pissed, I'll feel stupid, I'll learn, but fees and interest won't land me in bottomless dept.
A poor person who sign a bad contract for an phone will likely end up in bottomless dept, considering late-payment fees, interest, etc.
My baby will be born soon. If I drop the soda money into a Roth for five years, that's one year of tuition. I then stop saving. In seven years, the investment doubles. In another seven, it doubles again
So you'll be getting greater than 10% interest consistently over the course of decades. If you want to be realistic about inflation, you'd actually have to be doing better than about 13% interest. Then there's the fact that college costs are rising faster than inflation... Just doesn't sound realistic.
Why do people keep on talking about 3% compound interest as if it's gaining you money. Inflation is typically close to 3% over the long term. You have to subtract the rate of inflation from the interest percentage you're getting to get a real idea of how much you'll be getting from compound interest. You might actually end up losing money.
Over the last 80 years or so, and over any 20 year period, the market has averaged about 8.5%. That's what you'd expect from a boring old index mutual fund. Subtract inflation and that leaves about 4%. Though it'll be close to 4% / year for any 20 year period, the period that matters to you may be a particularly bad one, so figure 3% to be on the safe side. (Or equaliventally use a hedge or other guarantee to lock in 3%).
my dad worked overtime scrubbing toilets while going to college. that shows his dedication to hard work and learning. he was the kind of guy you want on your team. Most Americans would choose unemployment before they would scrub toilets. About 15% of Americans don't work. They "can't" find a job, or "can't" work because they are "disabled", though they can still build themselves a new deck. So they sour around complaining that they're not lucky. Guess how often my dad the janitor couldn't find a job, no job at all?
You have a very hard choice to make. So long as your life is the result of luck, or of what the illuminati decide or whatever, you have an excuse, but you're SCREWED. You can't change THEM. The moment you decide that your life is of your own making, you can have any life you want, but you're accepting your responsibility to.
I prefer a solution rather than an excuse .
Listen, I know people who can manage on $400 a week a lot more comfortably then I was at $600 a week when I had medical problems. Our fixed expenses were about the same (rent was the same, cars are paid for), they just made better decisions then I did. This isn't about moral decisions, it is about prudent decisions that can improve the financial quality of life. I have a good portion of my income that I had no idea where it was being spent. I went joyriding in the car when gas was at $5 a gallon, I hit the bars and partied it up, I spent money on fast food and junk food, cigarettes and snuff, and the occasional woman. When I decided to cut a lot of that out, I ended up with about $250 a week extra. Granted I make more then minimum wage but I was wasting a lot more too.
IF the person whose life already sucks refuses to do anything (or at least simple things) to improve it, then I shouldn't have to hear them complain and demand more. It will never end if they will not do anything to stop the hemorrhaging of money and end up getting more because they will lose with poor decisions too.
They don't have to follow any advice given to them. Just don't expect me to have much empathy for someone stuck in a hole who refuses to stop digging.
That's still an average though, and there can still be boring old index mutual funds that lose money. We're still talking about gambling here, even if it's a relatively safe form of gambling.
> In the soda example, at 3 soda's a day per $1.50 a piece
Good god, where you people getting your numbers? A soda is more like a quarter. Even if you get it out of a machine, it's still not likely not going to be as much as $1.50.
Informative? Informative my ass. You're trying to sell a total fantasy based on completely out of whack numbers.
"skipping a movie from time to time"
You simply don't get it. You have absolutely no clue what working stiffs (or the poor) have to deal with or how to relate to them or their challenges.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, my dad was in the right place at the right time .
If you've survived to adulthood, you proably realize that you jump off enough buildings, you'lo eventually get seriously hurt. It might happen on the first building, it might happen on the tenth. That's luck.
Everyday we decide whether to hit the snooze button or get up and get going, whether to iron our shirt or wear something with a few wrinkles. We choose to leave for work 10 minutes early or five minutes late. Thousands and thousands of good choices over the years created thousands and thousands of opportunities for luck to shine. I have made thousands of decisions, like not brushing my teeth some nights, that made it much harder to get lucky.
My dad was in the right place at the right time because he made a habit of being in the right place all the time, all day every day until the right time came.
When you work really hard both on today's work AND on becoming better prepared for five years from now, such as education, some people are going to want to hire you. Whether my dad got promoted on Monday or on Friday was luck, but he did promotion worthy things everyday. It was luck whether he got hired by company A or company B. He treated the people in both companies extremely well, so SOMEONE was going to want him working with them. That's luck - do you get hurt jumping off this building or that one, does the inevitable happen today or tomorrow.
Dyson came up with just the right vacuum design. After building and testing over a THOUSAND prototypes, he got it right and now he's rich. That tends to happen when you keep trying over a thousand times - eventually you hit it. Some call that luck. Dyson calls it hard fucking work. Since Dyson's way of thinking about it WORKS, I think I'll listen to him.
Exploding college costs are a bubble inflated by government money. It won't last. For one thing, free and low cost college education for many fields is expanding, which undercuts and limits what colleges are going to be able to charge.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
He grew up WAY back woods, as in he'd never heard of a toothbrush until he was seven years old and the floor of his parents house was dirt.
He got out of there by taking the bus. He went to Austin, where he worked as a janitor. Ghetto? Maybe. He worked overtime and moved. He kept working overtime and moving. When I was seven years old, we had Easter at the country club.
It woils be another 25 years before I understood HOW he ended up at the country club, with me doing a lot of short-sighted, dumb, and lazy stuff to make myself poor. Sometimes bringing in good money for short periods, but still doing poor things. For example, at 25 I didn't have a high school diploma. I sold a business for $100K and DIDN'T use the money to go to school, so four years later I was poor again, evicted from my rented house. My dad didn't do dumb like that, he did whatever was necessary to get an education.
FYI my dad WAS one of those veterans. Not a "former vet" as you said - there's nothing former about being a Vietnam vet.
> You didn't have as much as the other people in school did because of your toilet-scrubbing father, and you felt ashamed because of it. So you vowed you'd to anything you could to "make it". You've got a big chip on your shoulder.
You mean when I was seven, flying around on the corporate jet?!?!? You're far too busy arguing your preconceived notions based on political idealogy to read anything I'm writing, aren't you? Obama doesn't care about your well being. He and Jon Stewart feed you whatever line serves their interests. Here we're talking about you're real life. Stop parroting Stewart long enough to read what I'm saying.
You truth is, we all get some good hands and some bad hands. We get thousands of cards in our life, and make thousands of decisions. I got birth defects requiring dozens of surgeries, a 100% rate of alcoholism in the family, and an extremely high IQ. Those I was dealt and a thousand more, good and bad. During the years I make good decisions, I prosper and have much to give. During the years I do dumb things, short sighted, lazy and selfish things, I do not prosper.
Invite a professional poker player over. You might win the first pot; one pot just depends on the cards. Play against a pro for six hours and they'll take all your chips. Why? Because they make their good cards count and don't use the bad ones as excuses.
burning through $2000/week ($124,000/yr gross if you add 20% for taxes) isn't 'bad with numbers' it's mental illness. But hey, don't let a little thing like RTFA get in the way of perpetuating Libertarian myths.
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No kidding and no partisanship either. He closed most of our nations publicly run mental heath clinics and let thousands of severely mentally ill people out on their own. The worst thing is he probably meant well (we were constraining their freedom). They promptly wound up homeless because they're not functional human beings. When you see the crazy lady with the bags yelling at martians on the street you've got well meaning libertarians with no understanding of what mental illness is to thank...
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I guess you missed the part "over any 20 year period". Since the Dow was first calculated in the 1800s, noone has ever held it for 20 years and lost money.
It's never happened. Same with the NASDAQ composite. Nobody has ever put their retirement or college money in a major index for 20 and not made just about as much as they'd expect.
The same can be said of any 10 year period, except the period 2000 - 2010 and if you pick specific dates at the great depression.
I suppose there COULD be a losing 20-year period, even though it's never happened before. Eating a banana could kill you by choking too. You wouldn't call eating a banana "gambling". Bananas HAVE killed people, "buy diversity and hold for 20 years" has never lost for anyone, making it safer than bananas.
Sure you CAN gamble with the stock market, just as you can gamble with a Coke bottle, but you need not. Buy broad and hold long term works every single time.
Kind of boring, yes, a boring way to get rich slow.
I do Assigned Counsel work with poor folks here in NY. Let us see if I can do this in less than the study in TFA.... You have no money. You need to get to work. You drive there in a borrowed car. The car has an expired inspection. You get pulled over. The car is towed and you end up with misdemeanor tickets for the lack of registration and insurance the car didn't have-you didn't know this, you just thought you were lucky enough to talk your neighbor in letting you use the car and not have to bus to work that day. The car's registration is suspended. Now you have to go to Court. This wastes a day each time, and your employer has very limited sympathy. While there, a few other open, but minor, traffic tickets come up....you didn't have the money to pay those either which is why you ignored them. Now you have to pay the whole lot off, so you can get a plea deal....or if you can't, you plea "as charged" and eat a misdemeanor, which goes on your real "permanent record", meaning you have to answer "yes" to "have you ever been convicted of a crime" on the next job application... All for an amount of money (three figures, very low four figures) that most folks reading this could pay with minor hassle....I have two folks now who have about a $1k in fines to pay DMV, for minor traffic offenses...they won't ever come up with the money, and be able to get a clear license. You can't make a client "have money", so they will end up with a plea as charged, but a lower fine. The underlying problem won't get fixed, the snowball is too big. Without that, the rest falls rapidly. Legislatures pass Driver Assessments, and these "super fines", designed to raise revenues, serve to hammer the poor. Michigan and NY are examples. I see a lot of legal problems with the poor which aren't strictly legal issues.....debt collection, divorces where lack of money (and child support) are issues. Some is "the fault" of the individual, but oft it is the overall situation. No one has much money. If you have stable housing (public) you have real wealth, simply because it is stable. When your relative loses a job, surprise ! You are now "doubled up" when they move in. You don't want them but you know there's no where else to go. I've had landlords with six unit properties with twelve families...and in NY you can't get eviction for that. I do not understand why we as a society cannot have a minimum wage that one can modestly live on, real health care, and some investment in education...... Good Jobs mean stability. Decent housing. Marriage, not "baby daddy" nonsense. Thriving businesses that aren't exploitative. A lack of jobs gets up what we have now.
Soooo... where are you getting this mystical 3% interest account that can be opened with zero initial deposit?
Because in my experience, opening even a savings account with no initial deposit and no direct deposit means you're going to get charged *at least* $10/month in maintenance fees, and you're not getting anything even remotely like 3% per year.
FYI my dad WAS one of those veterans. Not a "former vet" as you said - there's nothing former about being a Vietnam vet.
That's nice. Here's a cookie. You're still taking your own personal experience and putting it above large studies being done that say you're wrong. This is a cognitive fallacy; And at this point, I don't think anything anyone can say is going to convince you otherwise. I suspect you're one of those people that would insist they aren't on fire right up until the moment they turn into a carbon scorch mark on the pavement, all because they are made mostly of water, so there!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The math is harder when you're poor. It's been shown that it costs more money to be poor. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-05-18/news/36823675_1_poverty-line-middle-class-milk
I agree that it won't last, but bubbles tend to be cyclical and it's hard to tell how long the current cycle will last and when the next one will peak. College is something that's a little difficult to reschedule for five years out when the outlook may be better.
> The simple fact of the matter is that the minimum wage earner who squirrels away a little bit of money into an investment account every day would be much better served by searching for a job that pays twice as much. It's frankly a lot more realistic than gradually earning interest on a pittance invested in the stock market.
90% of millionaires earned less than $100K from their jobs. They got a million dollars by saving slowly over time and letting investment do it's thing (growth).
That said, yes a "minimum wage earner" would be better served by focusing on graduating high school. Their next investment should be a low-cost college or excellent trade school. THEN it's time to start docking away for retirement.
Graduated high school and still making minimum wage? A wise investment might be chemical dependency treatment or otherwise dealing with their specific problem.
That's the fact. Sorry if it doesn't fit with some politically
Trivially true, there's no such thing as heaven.
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I think all you really demonstrated here is that you're out of touch with reality and are really bad at math. Let me point out the flaws of your plan.
1. Where are you going to get 3%? The average 5 year CD rate is 1.5%. The average money market is 0.6%. Where else are you going to put it? The market? There are no safe (i.e. guaranteed principle) investments that will earn you 3%.
2. Historical inflation rates indicate your 3% will lose money. The inflation rate for the last 18 years comes out to about 3.6% per year.
3. On average, college tuition rates are increasing at around 8% per year.
4. A full time minimum wage job grosses about $15K per year. Your assumption here is that someone trying to make a living on a minimum wage job can save 11%-30% of their GROSS INCOME and still manage to pay all the bills. To show you how out of touch with reality this is, the national average rent for a 1 bd apartment is $700 if you live outside of a city. Your monthly net on minimum wage is about $1000. It doesn't take advanced math skills to see where this is going.
You're not sending anyone to college.
~X~
It's surprising how little it takes with the right decisions. With a vacuum cleaner, a bucket and some detergent, earn $30 an hour cleaning houses. With a clientele of only 20 houses visited for 2 hours each week, gross $60,000 a year. Some customers are so desperate for such service that they'll even transport the worker both ways and let him use the homeowner's equipment.
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What about poor people that win the lottery? They now have all of their needs met yet so many end up broke again.
According to the theory this shouldn't happen because since they don't worry about money they are suddenly smart.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It sounds like you're doing the things that will get you where you want to be, the same things my parents did.
I never said anyone would be on a Lear jet at 26. I said that working hard, no matter what, and education will get you far and that's what you're doing. I bet you'll really enjoy the payoff in a few years if you stick to it. You've even recognized that the consumer debt is something you want to avoid as much as possible.
I actually did talk about myself a couple of times in this thread. The short version is that when I started college at 16, did dumb things and ended up living under a tarp behind KMart, then worked hard, stopped doing some of the dumb, and got a place and built a business. Sold the business, didn't use the money to finish school and that was dumb. Struggled with no degree, started wising up, bought a house, took a great class on money, now finishing school twenty years after I started.
Granted I make more then minimum wage but I was wasting a lot more too.
Fun fact: People making minimum wage don't have money to waste. Or invest. Or do anything except exist. I'm happy you were able to earn more than minimum wage and then lose it all on hookers and blow... and I think that also explains your lack of empathy for others quite well. Good day, sir.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I am homeless. I work when possible. I pay my taxes when I work. I do not stand in a breadline. I help others when possible. I have given away laptops to those I feel need them. I work on people's computers for free if I believe they need the help. I am in my situation because of having depression. I will stand up for others that are not able to do so for themselves. It is difficult to get back on your feet when you lose everything. I know of people that work to support their families and choose to be homeless so that their children are not. It is easy to condemn others when you are not in their situation.
Because here in the US mortgage companies and loan companies have known about this for a LONG time. It's what they used to help crash the economy.
For example, a relative went to get a home loan. They talked details, percentages, payments. The loan officer gave them the documentation to sign. The documentation didn't match what the loan office told them - he was trying to pull a fast one.
Instead of talking it out with the corrupt loan officer, they simply walked out after rightly accusing him of fraud. The next morning HE WAS AT THEIR DOORSTEP with the corrected paperwork with the correct percentages for the correct loan they had discussed.
Contrast that with a close friend who went to take out a SMALL second mortgage to do come improvements on his property. He spoke to the loan officer, came to an agreement, and when he went in to sign the paperwork it was for a loan for 20K MORE than what they had agreed upon. My unfortunate and timid friend let himself be exploited by the scumbag, who told him it was either that or nothing. Yes, he was stupid, he didn't know any better, didn't realize it was just a scam, and believed the guy when he told him that he couldn't get a loan for a smaller amount from anybody.
So you see, this "research" isn't a huge breakthrough at all, it's something we've already knew, that's been used to exploit people for years, and no doubt will continue to be used that way.
That sounds like it's pretty darn challenging. I feel for you.
You have a list of things you can't do. It would be nice to see a list of what you're good at, but whatever. It seems pretty obvious that someone who is deaf isn't going to be a composer or a talk show host. Other things are better suited to their abilities. Beethoven went right ahead and became one of the best composers who ever lived. He couldn't hear the music he was composing, but he went right ahead and did it anyway. The most successful talk radio host in America is 90% deaf. He just keeps on using his talent for being obnoxious on the air anyway.
Ask Temple Granden about disabilities and bigotry.
If you haven't seen the biopic about her, please do.
She, like you, had some really good, perfectly valid excuses. The thing about valid excuses is that they're still excuses, not solutions.
How far can you walk in a day?
The farthest I've ever walked continuously on foot is eight miles, but I've done 25 miles on a bicycle. What does that distance imply, other than that I'm out of shape?
In any case, I was referring to places with expensive housing like the northeast and California areas, where housing costs tend to run double the U.S. average according to this slideshow.
A more fun fact, someone who makes minimum wage a career strategy needs to rethink their strategy. That is after all, what this thread is about, making choices and illustrating the faults of those choices compared to other choices that could be made.
Good god, where you people getting your numbers? A soda is more like a quarter. Even if you get it out of a machine, it's still not likely not going to be as much as $1.50.
I just purchased a 20 oz Coke at the local gas station and it cost me $1.49 our the door.
Oh, I get it. What you don't get is how to get out of that situation. Crying that everyone else is stupid will not help either.
You need to move to another area. I rent a 3 bedroom home on 2.5 acres of land for $600 a month. I would spit in the fact of any landlord who attempted to charge $700 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment. One bedroom apartments around here go for between $200 and $350 a month.
Looking at the methodology of this study, it's not very robust. I generally believe that the state of poverty is a complex mix of one's surroundings and own choices. But this really isn't very convincing. The poor people in the study could easily have more trouble with the question because if your car is worth less (probable for poorer people), then deciding whether to scrap the car in an expensive repair is harder to figure out. Plus, the authors suggest that the poor are constantly under this cognitive strain, yet the study itself showed that they do ok so long as they aren't (at that moment) dealing with a difficult financial decision. Very weak proof if you ask me. Here are the study's details: researchers performed two sets of experiments. In the first, about 400 randomly chosen people in a New Jersey mall were asked how they would respond to a scenario where their car required either $150 or $1,500 in repairs. Would they pay for the work in full, take out of a loan, or put off the repair? How would they make that decision? The subjects varied in annual income from $20,000 to $70,000.Before responding, the subjects were given a series of common tests (identifying sequences of shapes and numbers, for example) measuring cognitive function and fluid intelligence. In the easier scenario, where the hypothetical repair cost only $150, subjects classified as âoepoorâ and âoerichâ performed equally well on these tests. But the âoepoorâ subjects performed noticeably worse in the $1,500 scenario. Simply asking these people to think about financial problems taxed their mental bandwidth.
it does make a little sense since every second you need to spend thinking about NOT HAVING money is a second wasted that could be used on creativity, self-improvement or in general thoughts that lead to less stress whereas the stress, which is afaik caused by incapability to adapt to changes fast enough, obviously prevents clear thinking as a whole. Yup, for once i shall grant my narcist credit to the overpaid, overdegreed basterdz overthere
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
As a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, it's an indirect stimulant. It's not a controlled substance because it's so indirect. But I've seen it listed in the "CNS Stimulants" section of at least one edition of a drug book.