“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
The problem is that for many folks the amount they are making isn’t enough for them to live a very reasonable life AND they have nothing to invest in the first place. Suppose a household in a given area needs $100,000 to afford a VERY modest house in that area, health insurance, savings, healthy food etc. Now suppose the house has one disabled breadwinner and one fellow working for $40,000.
Because of this they live in shit town in a tiny apartment a building full of drug addicts in a not so great part of the state wherein the average life expectancy is about 10 years less than one of the good parts of the country.
The first 40k of “excess” would be spent on having a decent life, working a sane number of hours, moving into an actual home. For fully half the country the idea of having excess is laughable. It’s a crass joke.
Most areas don’t need $100,000 a year to afford a “very modest house”, you could get a nice mobile home and afford to pay off the loan in just a couple years.
the areas where most people live, however, do.
nobody wants to live in trailer park in Mobile, AL.
Everybody wants everything at no cost. That’s not how the world works, though. If you earn $X a month and want to save some of it as a long-term investment, you simply cannot spend $X a month. You can’t have both.
There are indeed some people who have no choice but to spend $X a month, their basic expenses just can’t go any lower without literally ending up on the street or straight up dying. Those people do have a real problem and I sympathize with them.
People who say “I want to save money but I also want to live in the nicest possible house in the nicest possible neighborhood” I have less sympathy with, because they have a choice. I face that choice myself and instead of griping about how I can’t have everything I want with no sacrifice I just go ahead and make the choice. I don’t spend all my money each month, and as a result I don’t take vacations as nice as I could take and I don’t have as nice a car as I could have. But in exchange for that I’ve got plenty of savings built up.