Someone will mod this as flamebait - which is a shame. True, the poster to whom I'm replying could have used a bit more tact, but he has some very valid points.
I no longer have cable TV , and where I live, television reception is a cruel joke - we get one channel, very staticky, if the weather is just right. I read books, get the news from the web, and actually go to the swimming pool on occasion for my recreation these days. I've lost 20 pounds since I cancelled my cable subscription at the beginning of March, and intend to lose another 20 before the end of summer. If I do, I'll no longer be "obese", just somewhat "overweight". In another year, maybe less, I might even make it back down to the "normal" range I was in before I met the best woman in the world, who spoiled me on home-cooked meals (and I spoiled myself sitting in front of the computer all the time.)
Not only am I slowly getting back into shape, I'm also no longer feeding the Money Machine(TM) of the MPAA. I haven't weaned myself off pre-recorded music yet, but I have been listening to more indie music in addition to my normal musical diet of classic rock. Even so, doing just some of the things this person recommends has done more for the health of my body and my wallet than anything else I've done in years.
And what do I plan to do with the money I save by not paying for cable TV? Well, with my current weight loss rate, I'll be needing new clothes by autumn.
However, the "famous" among us are entitled to a certain amount of privacy
In a word: Bullshit.
Huge, heaping, stinking mounds of badly decaying bullshit. Bullshit so deep that hipwaders are completely inadequate.
The "famous" are entitled to NOTHING more than the rest of us. Period.
We have this wonderful thing in the United States called the Constitution. It has been amended 27 times. The 14th of those amendments contains a clause that is commonly referred to as the "equal protection clause." This clause states that all the people in the United States have "equal protection of the laws." It does NOT say "equal protection of the law, and a little extra protection to those who are famous."
A logical conclusion of your otherwise reasonable point is that it should be OK to publish somebody's credit card details
Credit card details are protected by 3 things: Laws that make it illegal to open someone else's mail, laws that make fraud illegal, and the caution practiced by credit card holders.
or their health records
health records are protected by doctor/patient privilege
or the government's defence plans
These are protected by the National Security Act and other laws.
Real estate records, on the other hand, are protected by none of these. It's public information, and anyone who cares to stroll into the local courthouse can find the full name and address of every property owner in the county, along with the location, description, appraisal value, and a convenient diagram showing the shape and size of each piece of property they own. If someone goes through the trouble of taking a picture of my house from the street and finding the deed to my house in the county courthouse, they have every right to publish that information. I may not like it if someone did that, but I would like it less if property records weren't public. Why should Barbara Streisand have greater protection under the law than I? Does being famous somehow give one extra rights? How famous does one need to be to get those extra rights? Or does one only need to be rich? How rich? How much does it take to buy some of those extra rights?
Back in the 80's my dad worked in Mechanical Maintenance, writing maintenance procedures, at the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant in Taft, Louisiana. This plant was once owned by Louisiana Power & Light, which was bought by Entergy sometime in the late 80's. My father actually started off as a wrench-turner, but that tangent entails many entertaining stories which are beyond the scope of my post:)
During this time, I was a teenager. The security guards didn't know me from Adam, yet I was never once stopped when I'd go visit my dad at work after school. I'd drive in, past the guard shack, with my hair down to my waist and my full beard and my heavy-metal concert t-shirt and my bag of weed in my pocket, and the guard would just nod and wave. I had to drive within 20 feet of the reactor building to get to the parking area closest to my dad's office. If I had been so inclined, I could have easily filled the trunk of my car up with high explosives and possibly blown a (small) hole in the reactor building. Or if a trunk full wouldn't do the trick, I could have gotten a van and filled that up, parked it in contact with the reactor building, and touched it off.
I don't know what, if anything, they've done to beef up security since then - probably a lot in light of Sept. 11 2001 - but to have ever had such lax security at a nuclear power plant is completely insane (in retrospect of course - when I was a teenager I suffered from Ten Foot Tall and Bulletproof Syndrome combined with Don't Give A Fuck Disease, so at the time I simply found it amusing).
My point here is, while I don't have any problem whatsoever with nuclear power, I do have a big problem with just letting any yahoo drive right up to a reactor building unchallenged.
Gotta wonder what the Humanscale folks think about PCE calling their chair "Freedom" as well. Methinks somebody didn't do the obligatory Google search.
If you click the blue one and hover the mouse over the bottom right photo in the resulting page, you get this text:
"PCE provides 2 options for seating: FREEDOM CHAIR, by HumanScale, provides maximum ergonomic benefits with a minimum of manually adjusted controls" followed by the description for the other option, a racing seat.
So I suspect HumanScale is very happy that PCE is buying chairs from them...
I was always more a fan of Loony Toons and Tom & Jerry. There's nothing like Yosemite Sam yelling "Say yer prayers, varmint!" and firing a fusilade of rounds at Bugs at max volume on Saturday morning around 7:30am to get the parents out of bed and into a bright, cheery mood *grin*
The venerable Mauser Kar-98k also uses a clip as opposed to a detachable magazine. Pictures available here. The pics are not of my rifle, but of another example of the same model.
Context Sensitive Menus (that's the right button on your little mousey thingy)
MIT did this with X in the mid 1980's IIRC - and they used all *three* mouse buttons!:-)
DHCP, yes they came up with this
Ralph Droms (Bucknell University) and Ted Lemon (Internet Software Consortium) invented DHCP.
Task Bar
fvwm had this option 2 years before Windows 95 was unleashed, again IIRC (Remember fvwm95? That was fvwm configured to look like Windows 95 - a singularly bad idea, but it shows that this capability was there, ready and waiting, when Win95 was released - some misguided individual just wrote some configuration files and voila - your X desktop looks like the Beast from Redmond)
The "Show Desktop" button
Not exactly an earth-shattering invention, and anyone can (and probably did, long before MS thought of it) bind a button in (insert your favorite WM here) to a 6-line script that does the same thing, but I'll give them that one...
If you read the post you replied to more carefully, you might notice that it mentioned Solaris - not Linux - as the OS that routinely runs on 32+ processors. I can name one vendor off the top of my head that sells 32+ processor boxes that run Solaris as a single system image - Sun Microsystems
My numbers for New York were for a single person, so yes, without doubt, having a family will spike your expenses significantly. However, the previous poster made absolutely no mention of having a family, so I assumed he did not.
My whole point was that the original poster grossly underestimated costs of living. I did exactly the same thing when I moved out on my own, so that's forgiveable. But it makes for a rude awakening when you realize you forgot to budget for things like soap and doctor visits.
For cars: you can car pool, or leave a little earlier and both ride in one car. That cuts out one car payment, half the maintenance, and half your gas mileage.
Car pooling usually requires one to work the same shift every day as each coworker participating. Most people don't have that sort of situation. I have to be at work 2 hours before my wife gets home from work - should we ask her boss if she can leave almost 3 hours early so she can get home, pick me up, and drive me to work? Or maybe I should get up at 7am, drive her to work, come home, sleep for 6 hours, get up, go to work, work for an hour and a half, leave, pick up the wife, drop her off at home, go back to work, and so forth? What happens when one of the kids needs to go to the doctor while one of us is at work and the boss says "You can't leave early today and still have your job tomorrow"?
Cable: Time Warner in Ohio charges forty dollars/month for basic cable (and I did say month in my post), if those numbers are different from Atlanta, well, I don't know that.
If you check the original post, you'll see that it does say $40/month, though on further inspection I see that your math seems to account for it being a monthly charge. Here in Turner-Town it's $52.00/month
Lots of other places you could cut items, if you really want to get into minimum cost of living, but let me ask you a question.
There's actually far more expenses involved than I enumerated. Things like "Janet has fluid in her middle ear, the doctor wants $8200 to fix it ($2040 after the insurance pays its part) or she'll be half-deaf for life." And let's not forget daycare for the kids in the afternoons (unless you condone leaving a 6 year old and an 8 year old alone for 2-3 hours every day). $10.00/hour/kid from the time they get out of school (or the time I go to work, during the summer) till the time their mother gets off from work. This adds up to $40/day, 5 days a week, during school, and $60/day, 5 days a week during the summer, Christmas break (excepting Christmas Day itself, when we're off from work), and so forth.
You account for the minimum wage in your scenario as being 55-60k. For one person, that would be minimum. However, you said you had a wife, and that she works as well. That cuts your per capita income to a 30k minimum. That's still under the 50k the first poster said.
The day my wife makes $30k a year as a freight dispatcher will be cause for an extravagant celebration. She makes $9.50/hour, which is pretty average for her job, and takes all the overtime her boss lets her. Last year, her gross (before tax) income was just a hair over $20,000 - in other words, she earns just enough to buy her own lunches and to pay for the daycare, and to sock back a couple thousand a year for those times when the kids get sick, the cars break down, etc. I make just under $40,000 a year ($15/hour plus all the overtime I can get), and that's considered a pretty good wage around here. We're treading water - our net worth is actually a little lower now than it was 2 years ago, thanks to our shrinking 401(k)'s.
If you think I can cut expenses to less than they are, please tell me how - I'm serious here - I'd *love* to be able to put back more savings so that the next ear infection or broken car doesn't drain the savings and add to my credit card debt in one fell swoop.
If you feed yourself, your wife, and your kids for $60/week, please tell me where you shop so I can shop there too! I prefer to eat something a little better for me than McMeals on occasion - call me crazy.
Let's figure, however, on both husband and wife having fast food for lunch every day to minimize expenses - $5 per day, 5 days a week. That's a total of $25 each per week, or $50/week total - for just lunch for 2 people. Add in 2 growing kids, breakfasts, real home-cooked dinners, and real lunches on weekends, and we get about $240 a week in food costs for a family of 4. This adds up to $12,480 per year.
Now let's move on to health care. After all, very very few jobs provide any health coverage at all without a significant payroll deduction. Mine is fairly cheap at $64/week, or $2288/year, to cover 2 dependents. My plan has a deductible of $500, and covers 80% of everything above that. With 2 kids, you can be assured of at least $1000/year in medical bills. After the $500 deductible, the plan pays for 80%, or $400 of that, leaving me to pay the $500 deductible and $100 on top of that. So, we get a total estimate of $2868/year as a minimum for health care - way way more if I happen to get sick or injured, or if the kids develop more than 1 cold or flu per year each.
Living 15 miles outside Atlanta, where it's fairly cheap, I pay $780 a month rent on a 2-bedroom apartment in a fairly lower-class neighborhood. That adds up to $9360/year.
My electric bill is generally around $115/month average - more in the summer and winter, less in the spring and fall. That's $1380/year total for electricity.
Water is provided with the rent here, so I'll leave that out.
Car payments come next. So let's assume I buy one really cheap car for myself, and one for the wife (public transportation in Atlanta is a cruel joke, and we don't happen to work right next door to one another). So, for 2 really cheap cars, we pay $150/month each, or $300/month total, or $3600/year.
Small, cheap cars get pretty good gas mileage, say around 25mph in the city (32 highway). The wife and I each live 15 miles from work, making it a 30 mile round trip each. At $1.50/gallon, just getting back and forth to work costs $960/year (30 mile round trip times two, times 5 days per week, times 52 weeks per year, divided by 25 miles per gallon, times $1.50) - on top of which we add the occasional trip to the store for food, to the in-laws for the kids to see their grandparents, to school to see the kids' plays, and so forth. Let's pull a number from an orifice and call that 100 miles total per week average, at 25 miles per gallon, with $1.50/gallon for gasoline. That leaves us with $312 plus the commute to work and back, or $1272/year total for fuel.
Now let's move on to maintenance. Cars still require an oil change every 3 months minimum, at $30 each, times 2 cars, for $240/year for just oil changes. Add in another $200/year for tire budget, $200/year for brakes every now and then, and we get $640/year for maintenance - and hope nothing breaks.
Car insurance is next - we carry the bare minimum insurance, which sets us back $140/month total, or $1680/year.
Ah, clothing! Kids need new clothes every year, adults every 2 years. No brand-name stuff, just the standard Wal-Mart fare lovingly handcrafted by a Malaysian 12-year-old making $0.25/week. For 2 adults and 2 kids, that adds up to about $1200/year, including church clothes, work clothes, school clothes, and relegating older work clothes to "Saturday Scrap Clothes".
Add in internet access, Christmas presents for the kids (spending a paltry $100 each every year, for the sake of my argument), payments on appliances and a computer, auto registration, annual dentist checkups, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, annual trips to the optometrist, and cable TV (TV in this area means cable TV - no can receive over-the-air broadcasts this far from the city center for some reason - and if you think cable only costs $40/year, you're insane, intellectually-c
Automotive manufacturers are in business to make money. That is their reason for existence. Without profit, the company ceases to be. See the dot-bomb of 2000-2002 for reference. GM lost thousands of dollars on every EV1 produced. And no, it's not as simple as a golf cart. A golf cart doesn't exceed 15 mph. A golf cart doesn't need a 100-mile-plus range to be practical. A golf cart doesn't need to be rechargeable in 10 minutes or less to be practical. A golf cart doesn't need to reach 60mph by the end of the onramp to be safe to drive on the freeway. A golf cart doesn't need to haul a family of four, plus luggage, for hundreds of miles. As for costs of R&D, take a look at the money NASA has spent on developing means of producing electricity to keep space vehicles operating - and the heating and lighting of a space vehicle likely draws far less electricity than is required to move 3,000 pounds of plastic, steel, and ass up and down the steep hills common in much of North America.
There are about 400 places in the United States to charge an electric vehicle. There are probably about 750,000 places in the United States to purchase gasoline (This number has been pulled from an orifice - I don't know the actual number, but they're on just about every street corner and offramp out there. It's hard to throw a rock in a suburban area without hitting a gasoline retailer). Sure, we could just plug the thing in - but what about those of us who live in apartments? You know, the people who live in cities and thus could make the most use of an electric vehicle. We don't have outdoor outlets on the side of the apartment building, and even if we did, leaving an expensive charger outdoors and unguarded overnight in an urban area is to invite repeated theft. Not to mention the illegal-immigrant lawn-care people who would run over the cords with the lawnmowers. And what happens when we need to drive beyond the paltry range of an electric vehicle? Do you want to spend the night in a hotel every 150 miles to charge up the car when you take the family to see relatives out of state?
Finally, while some (many) people like the technology in theory, there aren't enough out there willing to shell out $50,000 or more for the functional equivalent of a Honda Civic to make the product line profitable. I know I can't afford $10,000 for a car - much less $50,000. So I buy used. Which means I buy internal-combustion. I plan to purchase a pickup truck this summer to haul materials for a house I'll be refurbishing this fall. It'll probably get about 10-15mpg. It'll likely have been built while George Bush Sr. was president. It'll also cost me less than $6,000. And it'll get me where I'm going, along with half a ton of building materials. And do it cheaply, in comparison to an electric. Even assuming free electricity to recharge an electric, and assuming $2 per gallon of gasoline (it's currently $1.45 or so here in Georgia), I'd have to get 200,000 miles of use out of a $50,000 electric car to break even, compared to a $10,000 gasoline vehicle that gets 10mpg. Some people may be in favor of electric vehicles, but the average consumer thinks with his wallet.
My current vehicle is a 1991 Nissan Sentra with 247,000 miles on it. It cost about $12,000 new. At an average fuel cost of $1.30/gallon over its lifespan, with an average fuel economy of 25mpg, the total cost of the car plus fuel is $24,844. I'll guesstimate that I've spent $7000 on maintenance (oil changes, new timing belt every 60,000 miles, new alternator a few years back, new heater/AC fan motor last year, and new tires every couple of years). Add in about $35/year for registration fees, and we get $32,264 as the total cost of ownership over a 12-year span. This is a little less than the purchase price alone of a Hybrid Civic. Since the EV1 was leased rather than purchased, I'll leave that part of the math to those people who have leased one. Yet I somehow believe that the monthly payments were greater than $224.06 (which is the TCO of my Sentra per month over its lifespan) - and remember, GM lost money hand over fist on those cars. The day it becomes cheaper to own an electric will be the day I own one. Until then, I will own a smog-belching, gasoline-swilling, internal-combustion vehicle. I can't afford to own anything else.
I didn't see any laws referenced in your post - just court decisions. And the judges work for the government which is collecting the money. Gee, I wonder why they found in favor of the government in each of those cases...
Slashdot Mirror
Why hire young?
Because it's easier to treat a younger worker like shit and get away with it.
You didn't go to a Catholic school, did you?
Oh, wait, you actually meant rain coat, like you wear to keep from getting wet when it's raining. Nevermind.
Why, when I was your age, I ran a BBS on an abacus hooked up to two tin cans and a piece of string! And we liked it that way!
I no longer have cable TV , and where I live, television reception is a cruel joke - we get one channel, very staticky, if the weather is just right. I read books, get the news from the web, and actually go to the swimming pool on occasion for my recreation these days. I've lost 20 pounds since I cancelled my cable subscription at the beginning of March, and intend to lose another 20 before the end of summer. If I do, I'll no longer be "obese", just somewhat "overweight". In another year, maybe less, I might even make it back down to the "normal" range I was in before I met the best woman in the world, who spoiled me on home-cooked meals (and I spoiled myself sitting in front of the computer all the time.)
Not only am I slowly getting back into shape, I'm also no longer feeding the Money Machine(TM) of the MPAA. I haven't weaned myself off pre-recorded music yet, but I have been listening to more indie music in addition to my normal musical diet of classic rock. Even so, doing just some of the things this person recommends has done more for the health of my body and my wallet than anything else I've done in years.
And what do I plan to do with the money I save by not paying for cable TV? Well, with my current weight loss rate, I'll be needing new clothes by autumn.
In a word: Bullshit.
Huge, heaping, stinking mounds of badly decaying bullshit. Bullshit so deep that hipwaders are completely inadequate.
The "famous" are entitled to NOTHING more than the rest of us. Period.
We have this wonderful thing in the United States called the Constitution. It has been amended 27 times. The 14th of those amendments contains a clause that is commonly referred to as the "equal protection clause." This clause states that all the people in the United States have "equal protection of the laws." It does NOT say "equal protection of the law, and a little extra protection to those who are famous."
A logical conclusion of your otherwise reasonable point is that it should be OK to publish somebody's credit card details
Credit card details are protected by 3 things: Laws that make it illegal to open someone else's mail, laws that make fraud illegal, and the caution practiced by credit card holders.
or their health records
health records are protected by doctor/patient privilege
or the government's defence plans
These are protected by the National Security Act and other laws.
Real estate records, on the other hand, are protected by none of these. It's public information, and anyone who cares to stroll into the local courthouse can find the full name and address of every property owner in the county, along with the location, description, appraisal value, and a convenient diagram showing the shape and size of each piece of property they own. If someone goes through the trouble of taking a picture of my house from the street and finding the deed to my house in the county courthouse, they have every right to publish that information. I may not like it if someone did that, but I would like it less if property records weren't public. Why should Barbara Streisand have greater protection under the law than I? Does being famous somehow give one extra rights? How famous does one need to be to get those extra rights? Or does one only need to be rich? How rich? How much does it take to buy some of those extra rights?
And a trailer to haul it on
And a Ford Excursion to pull it with
And a boat ramp at Lake Allatoona big enough to put this baby in the water
[X] Buffet
[ ] Bush II
[ ] Reagan
[ ] Kennedy
[ ] CowboyNeal
But you spelled the name wrong. It's Jimmy Buffett, with two T's.
I'm just a son of a son, son of a son, son of a son of a sailor...
During this time, I was a teenager. The security guards didn't know me from Adam, yet I was never once stopped when I'd go visit my dad at work after school. I'd drive in, past the guard shack, with my hair down to my waist and my full beard and my heavy-metal concert t-shirt and my bag of weed in my pocket, and the guard would just nod and wave. I had to drive within 20 feet of the reactor building to get to the parking area closest to my dad's office. If I had been so inclined, I could have easily filled the trunk of my car up with high explosives and possibly blown a (small) hole in the reactor building. Or if a trunk full wouldn't do the trick, I could have gotten a van and filled that up, parked it in contact with the reactor building, and touched it off.
I don't know what, if anything, they've done to beef up security since then - probably a lot in light of Sept. 11 2001 - but to have ever had such lax security at a nuclear power plant is completely insane (in retrospect of course - when I was a teenager I suffered from Ten Foot Tall and Bulletproof Syndrome combined with Don't Give A Fuck Disease, so at the time I simply found it amusing).
My point here is, while I don't have any problem whatsoever with nuclear power, I do have a big problem with just letting any yahoo drive right up to a reactor building unchallenged.
That's one BIG woman!
Yeah, that the NHRA acceptable fuels list doesn't include electricity or batteries...
Oh, wait, it wasn't a poll. Sorry
If you click the blue one and hover the mouse over the bottom right photo in the resulting page, you get this text:
"PCE provides 2 options for seating: FREEDOM CHAIR, by HumanScale, provides maximum ergonomic benefits with a minimum of manually adjusted controls" followed by the description for the other option, a racing seat.
So I suspect HumanScale is very happy that PCE is buying chairs from them...
I was always more a fan of Loony Toons and Tom & Jerry. There's nothing like Yosemite Sam yelling "Say yer prayers, varmint!" and firing a fusilade of rounds at Bugs at max volume on Saturday morning around 7:30am to get the parents out of bed and into a bright, cheery mood *grin*
for $foo in $bar_association; dodone
exit 0
# NOTE: This is a quick and dirty script and lacks proper error trapping, such as
# dealing with potential weapon jams or misfires.
The venerable Mauser Kar-98k also uses a clip as opposed to a detachable magazine. Pictures available here. The pics are not of my rifle, but of another example of the same model.
MIT did this with X in the mid 1980's IIRC - and they used all *three* mouse buttons! :-)
DHCP, yes they came up with this
Ralph Droms (Bucknell University) and Ted Lemon (Internet Software Consortium) invented DHCP.
Task Bar
fvwm had this option 2 years before Windows 95 was unleashed, again IIRC (Remember fvwm95? That was fvwm configured to look like Windows 95 - a singularly bad idea, but it shows that this capability was there, ready and waiting, when Win95 was released - some misguided individual just wrote some configuration files and voila - your X desktop looks like the Beast from Redmond)
The "Show Desktop" button
Not exactly an earth-shattering invention, and anyone can (and probably did, long before MS thought of it) bind a button in (insert your favorite WM here) to a 6-line script that does the same thing, but I'll give them that one...
Good thing you're not a Patriot missile operator, eh? *grin*
If you read the post you replied to more carefully, you might notice that it mentioned Solaris - not Linux - as the OS that routinely runs on 32+ processors. I can name one vendor off the top of my head that sells 32+ processor boxes that run Solaris as a single system image - Sun Microsystems
My whole point was that the original poster grossly underestimated costs of living. I did exactly the same thing when I moved out on my own, so that's forgiveable. But it makes for a rude awakening when you realize you forgot to budget for things like soap and doctor visits.
For cars: you can car pool, or leave a little earlier and both ride in one car. That cuts out one car payment, half the maintenance, and half your gas mileage.
Car pooling usually requires one to work the same shift every day as each coworker participating. Most people don't have that sort of situation. I have to be at work 2 hours before my wife gets home from work - should we ask her boss if she can leave almost 3 hours early so she can get home, pick me up, and drive me to work? Or maybe I should get up at 7am, drive her to work, come home, sleep for 6 hours, get up, go to work, work for an hour and a half, leave, pick up the wife, drop her off at home, go back to work, and so forth? What happens when one of the kids needs to go to the doctor while one of us is at work and the boss says "You can't leave early today and still have your job tomorrow"?
Cable: Time Warner in Ohio charges forty dollars/month for basic cable (and I did say month in my post), if those numbers are different from Atlanta, well, I don't know that.
If you check the original post, you'll see that it does say $40/month, though on further inspection I see that your math seems to account for it being a monthly charge. Here in Turner-Town it's $52.00/month
Lots of other places you could cut items, if you really want to get into minimum cost of living, but let me ask you a question.
There's actually far more expenses involved than I enumerated. Things like "Janet has fluid in her middle ear, the doctor wants $8200 to fix it ($2040 after the insurance pays its part) or she'll be half-deaf for life." And let's not forget daycare for the kids in the afternoons (unless you condone leaving a 6 year old and an 8 year old alone for 2-3 hours every day). $10.00/hour/kid from the time they get out of school (or the time I go to work, during the summer) till the time their mother gets off from work. This adds up to $40/day, 5 days a week, during school, and $60/day, 5 days a week during the summer, Christmas break (excepting Christmas Day itself, when we're off from work), and so forth.
You account for the minimum wage in your scenario as being 55-60k. For one person, that would be minimum. However, you said you had a wife, and that she works as well. That cuts your per capita income to a 30k minimum. That's still under the 50k the first poster said.
The day my wife makes $30k a year as a freight dispatcher will be cause for an extravagant celebration. She makes $9.50/hour, which is pretty average for her job, and takes all the overtime her boss lets her. Last year, her gross (before tax) income was just a hair over $20,000 - in other words, she earns just enough to buy her own lunches and to pay for the daycare, and to sock back a couple thousand a year for those times when the kids get sick, the cars break down, etc. I make just under $40,000 a year ($15/hour plus all the overtime I can get), and that's considered a pretty good wage around here. We're treading water - our net worth is actually a little lower now than it was 2 years ago, thanks to our shrinking 401(k)'s.
If you think I can cut expenses to less than they are, please tell me how - I'm serious here - I'd *love* to be able to put back more savings so that the next ear infection or broken car doesn't drain the savings and add to my credit card debt in one fell swoop.
Let's figure, however, on both husband and wife having fast food for lunch every day to minimize expenses - $5 per day, 5 days a week. That's a total of $25 each per week, or $50/week total - for just lunch for 2 people. Add in 2 growing kids, breakfasts, real home-cooked dinners, and real lunches on weekends, and we get about $240 a week in food costs for a family of 4. This adds up to $12,480 per year.
Now let's move on to health care. After all, very very few jobs provide any health coverage at all without a significant payroll deduction. Mine is fairly cheap at $64/week, or $2288/year, to cover 2 dependents. My plan has a deductible of $500, and covers 80% of everything above that. With 2 kids, you can be assured of at least $1000/year in medical bills. After the $500 deductible, the plan pays for 80%, or $400 of that, leaving me to pay the $500 deductible and $100 on top of that. So, we get a total estimate of $2868/year as a minimum for health care - way way more if I happen to get sick or injured, or if the kids develop more than 1 cold or flu per year each.
Living 15 miles outside Atlanta, where it's fairly cheap, I pay $780 a month rent on a 2-bedroom apartment in a fairly lower-class neighborhood. That adds up to $9360/year.
My electric bill is generally around $115/month average - more in the summer and winter, less in the spring and fall. That's $1380/year total for electricity.
Water is provided with the rent here, so I'll leave that out.
Car payments come next. So let's assume I buy one really cheap car for myself, and one for the wife (public transportation in Atlanta is a cruel joke, and we don't happen to work right next door to one another). So, for 2 really cheap cars, we pay $150/month each, or $300/month total, or $3600/year.
Small, cheap cars get pretty good gas mileage, say around 25mph in the city (32 highway). The wife and I each live 15 miles from work, making it a 30 mile round trip each. At $1.50/gallon, just getting back and forth to work costs $960/year (30 mile round trip times two, times 5 days per week, times 52 weeks per year, divided by 25 miles per gallon, times $1.50) - on top of which we add the occasional trip to the store for food, to the in-laws for the kids to see their grandparents, to school to see the kids' plays, and so forth. Let's pull a number from an orifice and call that 100 miles total per week average, at 25 miles per gallon, with $1.50/gallon for gasoline. That leaves us with $312 plus the commute to work and back, or $1272/year total for fuel.
Now let's move on to maintenance. Cars still require an oil change every 3 months minimum, at $30 each, times 2 cars, for $240/year for just oil changes. Add in another $200/year for tire budget, $200/year for brakes every now and then, and we get $640/year for maintenance - and hope nothing breaks.
Car insurance is next - we carry the bare minimum insurance, which sets us back $140/month total, or $1680/year.
Ah, clothing! Kids need new clothes every year, adults every 2 years. No brand-name stuff, just the standard Wal-Mart fare lovingly handcrafted by a Malaysian 12-year-old making $0.25/week. For 2 adults and 2 kids, that adds up to about $1200/year, including church clothes, work clothes, school clothes, and relegating older work clothes to "Saturday Scrap Clothes".
Add in internet access, Christmas presents for the kids (spending a paltry $100 each every year, for the sake of my argument), payments on appliances and a computer, auto registration, annual dentist checkups, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, annual trips to the optometrist, and cable TV (TV in this area means cable TV - no can receive over-the-air broadcasts this far from the city center for some reason - and if you think cable only costs $40/year, you're insane, intellectually-c
My current vehicle is a 1991 Nissan Sentra with 247,000 miles on it. It cost about $12,000 new. At an average fuel cost of $1.30/gallon over its lifespan, with an average fuel economy of 25mpg, the total cost of the car plus fuel is $24,844. I'll guesstimate that I've spent $7000 on maintenance (oil changes, new timing belt every 60,000 miles, new alternator a few years back, new heater/AC fan motor last year, and new tires every couple of years). Add in about $35/year for registration fees, and we get $32,264 as the total cost of ownership over a 12-year span. This is a little less than the purchase price alone of a Hybrid Civic. Since the EV1 was leased rather than purchased, I'll leave that part of the math to those people who have leased one. Yet I somehow believe that the monthly payments were greater than $224.06 (which is the TCO of my Sentra per month over its lifespan) - and remember, GM lost money hand over fist on those cars. The day it becomes cheaper to own an electric will be the day I own one. Until then, I will own a smog-belching, gasoline-swilling, internal-combustion vehicle. I can't afford to own anything else.
[] In Soviet Russia...
I didn't see any laws referenced in your post - just court decisions. And the judges work for the government which is collecting the money. Gee, I wonder why they found in favor of the government in each of those cases...