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tuyop posted:So should you not save money because this one guy has a weird attitude about not buying a boat and braces for his nonexistent daughter? Don't be obtuse. The argument being made is that living like a penny pinching miser is just as unhealthy and pathological about money as it is to spend every dime you get your hands on. If you save enough to meet reasonable retirement goals and refuse to get your minor children dental work, that's probably an indication someone has some unhealthy feelings about money that need to be addressed. It's like driving 20 minutes out of your way to save 3 cents on gas. Things other than money have value.
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Oct 12, 2013 16:23
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Who is this MM that won't get braces for his daughter?
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Oct 12, 2013 16:53
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NancyPants posted:Don't be obtuse. The argument being made is that living like a penny pinching miser is just as unhealthy and pathological about money as it is to spend every dime you get your hands on. [snip] It's like driving 20 minutes out of your way to save 3 cents on gas. Things other than money have value. That last part is such a great way of putting it. There are so many rear end-backward things that I've seen people do under the guise of "savings money". And holy hell- they're stubborn. Nothing you can say will convince them otherwise. In my previous role as a financial advisor I've seen:
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. There are healthy savings habits, then there are unhealthy and destructive "savings" habits. melon cat fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 17:14
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If you insist on keeping a lot of cash in bank accounts(which I agree is dumb), then it probably is best to keep it in multiple bank accounts. (I'm assuming you have more than the FDIC limit.)
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Oct 12, 2013 17:20
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Harry posted:I was talking more along the lines of something like this: There is a goldmine of bad-with-money stuff in there, including people who are very proud of their financial acumen but fail to understand the concept of "insurance:" quote:I was concerned that this thread might turn into a discussion of the genius/stupidity of dropping health insurance. I'm not a person that will simply pay whatever they choose to charge me. In order to cimply BREAK EVEN, I would need to incur $20k in charges a year. I haven't paid more than $1k a year for the last decade. I'll take the risk. Remember, kids, the only thing that matters is your monthly and yearly balance sheets. Risk management is for suckers!
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Oct 12, 2013 17:29
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I think around $750 a month premium and 11k deductible you have to start seriously weighing risks.
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Oct 12, 2013 18:10
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If a person is young and healthy and paying $20k a year minimum in insurance costs, sure there's a pretty good argument against taking it. No one is paying $20k minimum as a single person though. The only people paying those kind of premiums are people with kids. Kids are a financial game changer, not because they're inherently that expensive, but keeping them alive if something goes wrong is and kids are both accident and disease prone. If you are forsaking health insurance with kids, you are a bad parent! Harry posted:I think around $750 a month premium and 11k deductible you have to start seriously weighing risks. I don't think 11k deductibles are eligible plans under ACA. Edit: nevermind, that's for single people, family deductibles can go up to 12k and change. baquerd fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 18:31
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Jeffrey posted:If you insist on keeping a lot of cash in bank accounts(which I agree is dumb), then it probably is best to keep it in multiple bank accounts. (I'm assuming you have more than the FDIC limit.) I guess there's just some people who want to look like a hot shot who's got a wallet full of debit cards.
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Oct 12, 2013 18:35
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Harry posted:I think around $750 a month premium and 11k deductible you have to start seriously weighing risks. Sure, but "I haven't had a [medical emergency/house fire/at-fault auto accident] in the past few years" is a loving terrible way to seriously weigh risk. The whole point of insurance is to protect you against improbable catastrophes. If the past few years were a good way to evaluate the risk, then you wouldn't need to buy insurance, you could just budget for the expenses in the first place.
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Oct 12, 2013 18:43
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melon cat posted:
I used to work with someone who kept opening passbook savings accounts. One after the other. Why? I don't know, except I think he really couldn't keep track of different funds unless they were in different bank accounts.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:29
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Space Gopher posted:Sure, but "I haven't had a [medical emergency/house fire/at-fault auto accident] in the past few years" is a loving terrible way to seriously weigh risk. The whole point of insurance is to protect you against improbable catastrophes. If the past few years were a good way to evaluate the risk, then you wouldn't need to buy insurance, you could just budget for the expenses in the first place. Well, it is reasonable to expect that there are going to be a lot of people who pay in more than they use. That is the point of the individual mandate, market pricing doesn't work for insurance if they don't discriminate based on preexisting conditions. It isn't THAT unreasonable to start questioning having health insurance if it is super-expensive relative to one's expected healthcare costs. If everyone who didn't get more out than they put in stopped paying, the price would have to rise, and then the cycle would repeat. This is stopped by forcing everyone to buy in. The fact that people are bad at estimating their expected healthcare costs is a related problem, but it isn't the central one. Sometimes foregoing health insurance is a reasonable move, and that's what the mandate wants to prevent. Free markets with a fixed price for insurance don't even work in theory, you need either price discrimination or a mandate. Price discrimination is pretty drat unethical when it comes to people's health, so here we are.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:38
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Is there a Godwin's Law equivalent for Obamacare/ACA?
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Oct 12, 2013 20:13
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Poison Cake posted:I used to work with someone who kept opening passbook savings accounts. One after the other. Why? I don't know, except I think he really couldn't keep track of different funds unless they were in different bank accounts. I'm also pretty sure that they got their tax advice from Joe at the watercooler.
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Oct 12, 2013 20:18
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If someone wants to forego $750 a month health insurance with a $11,000 deductible then they should at least seed an account with $11,000 and pay $750 a month in to it.
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Oct 13, 2013 04:22
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:To be fair, his current budget (with the kid) is $27,000, which is roughly 50% of the current US median household income. That's a pretty all inclusive demographic.
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Oct 13, 2013 05:41
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cowofwar posted:If someone wants to forego $750 a month health insurance with a $11,000 deductible then they should at least seed an account with $11,000 and pay $750 a month in to it. This would require people to understand what a deductible is and how it works, and as a person who does the insurance/patient billing for a doctor's office, I assure you that they do not. They also do not understands copays, coinsurance, or noncovered charges. They'll pay these huge monthly premiums with no clue what their insurance actually covers or what the rules are. It's kind of astonishing.
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Oct 13, 2013 15:00
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:This would require people to understand what a deductible is and how it works, and as a person who does the insurance/patient billing for a doctor's office, I assure you that they do not. They also do not understands copays, coinsurance, or noncovered charges. They'll pay these huge monthly premiums with no clue what their insurance actually covers or what the rules are. It's kind of astonishing.
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Oct 13, 2013 20:42
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:This would require people to understand what a deductible is and how it works, and as a person who does the insurance/patient billing for a doctor's office, I assure you that they do not. They also do not understands copays, coinsurance, or noncovered charges. They'll pay these huge monthly premiums with no clue what their insurance actually covers or what the rules are. It's kind of astonishing. I'd argue that this isn't because people are stupid, but rather that insurance was deliberately made so confusing the average person just responds with "gently caress it."
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Oct 13, 2013 22:00
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cowofwar posted:If someone wants to forego $750 a month health insurance with a $11,000 deductible then they should at least seed an account with $11,000 and pay $750 a month in to it. What kills me about the ACA is it removed some bad things from health insurance, but still allows the insurers to sell garbage insurance that's of absolutely no value to the vast majority of people. A $11,000 deductible? That's something that that most Americans certainly don't have. So, now you have to buy insurance that STILL results in you being bankrupted if you get cancer, as opposed to dying, which I guess is a slight step up, but not a very big one. Edit: good lord, that thread promptly devolves into instructions to commit fraud, and 'oh just go to korea no big deal'. cstine fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 13, 2013 23:32
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cstine posted:What kills me about the ACA is it removed some bad things from health insurance, but still allows the insurers to sell garbage insurance that's of absolutely no value to the vast majority of people. I dunno, I think having an $11k hospital bill would be preferable than a 300K hospital bill if poo poo really hit the fan. My mom had to have emergency surgery just about a year ago that saved her life, and she was in ICU for like three weeks. The entire bill was just shy of $500,000. Half a million dollars. And yes my parents have good insurance through my dad's work. But those kind of "catastrophic" things can, and do happen to healthy people.
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Oct 14, 2013 02:32
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razz posted:I dunno, I think having an $11k hospital bill would be preferable than a 300K hospital bill if poo poo really hit the fan. Oh, I'm in total agreement it's *better*, it's just still not good enough.
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Oct 14, 2013 03:12
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Edit: This is a subject I'm somewhat ignorant about, so please enlighten me: It does make you wonder exactly how some of these things really sum up to $Eleventy Billion sometimes, though. Educational inflation? Rising med school costs -> Rising healthcare costs to cover? Or rising insurance bureaucratic costs leading to increased care cost? I can't imagine that treatments are getting that real-world more expensive that quickly, unless we're always throwing the absolute best diagnostic and treatment options at every problem, instead of what is a good value.
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Oct 14, 2013 06:06
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SpelledBackwards posted:Edit: This is a subject I'm somewhat ignorant about, so please enlighten me: Drugs have mark-ups of like 50,000%.
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Oct 14, 2013 07:29
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cstine posted:What kills me about the ACA is it removed some bad things from health insurance, but still allows the insurers to sell garbage insurance that's of absolutely no value to the vast majority of people. I don't think "most Americans" would be sent into bankruptcy by an $11,000 bill.
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Oct 14, 2013 07:34
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This is terrible. I came here for my catch up on stories about people who are bad with money and instead got an entire page of debate over american health insurance. Therefore I'm going to tell you all about my in-laws. My In-Laws My in-laws are frustrating in that they were dealt a pretty rough hand, but through their own stupidity made the situation so much worse for themselves and their family. Firstly, my in-laws are Catholics, and like good Catholics my in-laws have a ton of kids. When they only had kids 1-4 they actually traveled a bit and lived in the UK, but just before kid 5 they were financially tight enough that they had to settle somewhere for good. So, they moved to NZ and bought a big house about an hour's commute from a city. My father in law had an alright job in the computer industry, and my mother in law was a stay at home mum. Life was pretty good. They had two more children. Then, when the stock market crashed in 1987 my father in law lost his job, and this is where it all started going to hell. Commendably, the first thing my father in law did after he lost his job was immediately get a job flipping burgers, but the cost of having six kids was more than he could earn. But the Lord commands that his faithful must multiply, so with that divine directive they didn't want to let a little thing like having no money get in the way of expanding the brood. A couple of months later, my mother in law got pregnant with child 7. Then they had child 8. Father in law is still flipping burgers. The eldest two were able to move out before it got really bad financially, but the youngest 6 grew up dirt-poor. They also had dogs which they fed table scraps because they couldn't afford dog food. If the house wasn't freehold I don't know what they would have done. I'm also pretty sure the only reason they stopped at 8 children was because of age-related decline in fertility. Finally, my father in law got a lovely job actually in the computer industry (which he's stayed in ever since). Life wasn't exactly comfortable, but they finally had disposable income again. They decide to buy a smaller rental property, with the idea that the mortgage will pay itself off in rent and will give them somewhere to retire to after selling their big family home. All fine, right? Except that a woman at their church needed to buy a house, but couldn't afford one. Their eldest son usually handled their financial affairs, but went overseas for a weekend and during that time God told them that they had to sell this woman their freehold family home for one third of its value - which they did in the space of that single weekend. They got enough money to cover the rest of the mortgage of their TINY rental, and that was it. No legal advice sought. Unsurprisingly, the woman flipped the house six months later, selling it for in excess of its market value and making herself a few hundred thousand dollars in profit. This leaves Ma and Pa in law with a tiny house to live in with their two remaining children at home. Not to be put off by this latest setback, they get a loan for a NEW rental property, which was meant to eventually supplement their pension/superannuation. They went in with low equity, so the mortgage payments are higher than the rental value, and their tenants do not pay rent reliably. They decided at this juncture that the best possible thing to do was to draw down on everything they'd paid off to finance a trip to Europe. I ran the numbers on their rental and told them that at their current rate of repayment, they won't pay off the mortgage until my father in law is 80 years old. However, they will NOT sell the place because it is an INVESTMENT. PROPERTY. As it stands right now, my mother in law is working in checkout at a supermarket and my father in law is still plodding away at his crappy job. All their money is being eaten by interest on their rental house mortgage, they have no retirement savings, and can't afford to retire even if they did sell the rental because there's almost no equity. It depresses the poo poo out of me that they have put themselves into a position where they literally have no choice but to keep working until they die. Tamarillo fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 08:30
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Tamarillo posted:It depresses the poo poo out of me that they have put themselves into a position where they literally have no choice but to keep working until they die. What are the odds you and your wife will be supporting their retirements?
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Oct 14, 2013 08:57
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INTJ Mastermind posted:What are the odds you and your wife will be supporting their retirements? My husband and I  and pretty likely, unfortunately. We're the most financially able out of the kids who are still in the country, but we also have our own mortgage to pay and want to have children of our own soon. We've talked about it with some of the siblings and when they do need to retire we'll set up an account where all the kids (or as many as can afford it anyway) put in an automatic payment for a small amount each week. With 8 kids, a little from each adds up to a semi-respectable amount.Put it this way - I would never let them get to the point they were going hungry or unable to pay bills, no matter our own financial commitments. But I do find it galling and frustrating that they not only got themselves into this mess through blatant stupidity, but haven't learned, refuse to listen to advice and continue to make incredibly poor financial decisions.
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Oct 14, 2013 09:15
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SpelledBackwards posted:Edit: This is a subject I'm somewhat ignorant about, so please enlighten me: That said, you're expected to negotiate costs instead of just paying the sticker price(insurance already does that, with each plan making an agreement with the hospital for what they can charge for each procedure, but you can still haggle over the remainder & set up payment plans). Some hospitals even have entire departments dedicated to helping patients manage their costs.
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Oct 14, 2013 15:52
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greasyhands posted:I don't think "most Americans" would be sent into bankruptcy by an $11,000 bill.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:09
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It's $11,000 + the $740 premium. Then you include whatever coinsurance you have to pay and other things not covered it's probably more like $21,000 in a year.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:22
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I am OK posted:Drugs have mark-ups of like 50,000%. Over the cost of manufacture, or including R&D expenses? It takes upwards of 5 years to go from the lab through the clinic and get approved for public consumption, and even then maybe 1 in 10 drugs (that all looked promising) actually make it through. So there's a considerable front-end you're paying for. There may be some price-gouging on top of it, but the costs are heavily front-loaded, few drugs are blockbusters, and comparing to generics is pretty unfair.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:26
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Engineer Lenk posted:Over the cost of manufacture, or including R&D expenses? Dogpiling on this, I once heard someone say the same thing about software. "It only costs Adobe maybe $4 to print up a box and discs for the new Photoshop, only a rube would spend $800 on it!" Related dumb with money story: People who use  software to earn an income. There's so much risk there. Consider the difference between how Microsoft treats a home user and a business violating software licenses. One of them gets a "please buy a legit copy" and the other gets nailed for cash damages.Then again, there are people who hire dirt cheap contractors to do work on their home and those individuals aren't licensed/bonded/insured. Have fun being liable if one of the painters falls off a ladder and splits his head open or if someone lops their thumb off with a tile saw.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:45
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Engineer Lenk posted:Over the cost of manufacture, or including R&D expenses? Pharma companies would be able to significantly lower the cost of drugs and still come out with a wider profit margin if they didn't spend billions WITH A B on advertising/feeding clinic staffs/buying doodads. Countries other than the US understand this. I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of the sense in advertising directly to the patient when a doctor is needed to prescribe and determine whether a drug is appropriate. Drug companies look at people like customers, not patients. There's a problem there.
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Oct 14, 2013 18:39
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canyoneer posted:People who use Fun story there! I worked as a contractor for a company doing that, once. It was for an unrelated matter, but they stole EVERYTHING. Windows desktop clients, windows server, office, exchange, photoshop, acrobat - everything. I did mention it to the management, once, and they threw a shitfit about how much it'd cost and that it wasn't my problem (which was true) and to not bring it up. Well, turns out that if you're sleeping around in the office and someone gets mad about something and for revenge decides to call Microsoft about it, they actually show up and drag your rear end through court, whereupon you lose, and end up out of business. Seriously, Microsoft's business licensing guys are much like the IRS in terms of how much you can get hosed if you dick with them.
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Oct 14, 2013 18:44
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cstine posted:Fun story there! I worked as a contractor for a company doing that, once. It was for an unrelated matter, but they stole EVERYTHING. Windows desktop clients, windows server, office, exchange, photoshop, acrobat - everything. I did mention it to the management, once, and they threw a shitfit about how much it'd cost and that it wasn't my problem (which was true) and to not bring it up. Turn them in next time. You can get a huge payout depending on how much they settle for with the BSA. Check out the chart here: https://reporting.bsa.org/r/report/usa/rewardsconditions.aspx
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Oct 14, 2013 19:02
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cstine posted:Fun story there! I worked as a contractor for a company doing that, once. It was for an unrelated matter, but they stole EVERYTHING. Windows desktop clients, windows server, office, exchange, photoshop, acrobat - everything. I did mention it to the management, once, and they threw a shitfit about how much it'd cost and that it wasn't my problem (which was true) and to not bring it up. A computer store I used to go to in the 90s got massacred due to selling people computers with pirated versions of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. The store was gone overnight and reopened a year later owned by someone else. It makes even less sense now since Microsoft Office doesn't cost like $600. Harry fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Oct 14, 2013 |
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Oct 14, 2013 19:54
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Engineer Lenk posted:Over the cost of manufacture, or including R&D expenses? The same drugs are cheaper in other countries.
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Oct 14, 2013 23:10
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I am OK posted:The same drugs are cheaper in other countries. They're also cheaper when sold within the US for veterinary purposes, I've heard.
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Oct 14, 2013 23:14
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Enough with healthcare details derail for a bit. Back to people that are bad with money! Like my lovable co-worker who bought way too much house, bought a BMW and whose idea of birth control is "whatever happens, happens." In the past few months: - Taught him what PMI is since he literally didn't know if he was paying it or not (he is) - When asking for advice on if the new BMW he wanted to get was a good purchase proceeded to ignore everyone's advice to not buy one given his current financial position - Had a second girl, much to his surprise - When asking for advice on if his wife should go back to work, proceeded to ignore us when we said it might not be a bad idea for her to work at least part-time. His reasoning being that "it's his duty as a man to provide for his family" I can only imagine as to what his debt load currently is and I have to assume that he gets financial assistance from his parents. I know how much he makes since we started together and are in the exact same professional position and I can't fathom how he is able to afford what he has.
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Oct 14, 2013 23:18
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Shadowgate posted:Turn them in next time. You can get a huge payout depending on how much they settle for with the BSA. Check out the chart here: https://reporting.bsa.org/r/report/usa/rewardsconditions.aspx Sure, but contracting is all reputation - and frankly, the payout isn't nearly enough for what would amount to a career-destroying move because doing poo poo like that certainly gets around when you're working in a slightly small niche.
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Oct 14, 2013 23:43
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