No Wave posted:

The crazy undercurrent of that article is that she seems to be just waiting for a man to rescue her from herself. Good luck with that.

spwrozek posted:

I would say going pay check to paycheck working 2 jobs to get by to having $10k is pretty life changing.

Magic Underwear posted:

It really takes a big sum to become "life changing" I'd say. $100,000, a million even, isn't going to last as long as it needs to if you want to retire.

Cicero posted:

FI enthusiasts generally assume a safe withdrawal rate is 4% (safe meaning you can withdraw this much in perpetuity even after accounting for inflation), so a million dollars means you get a free 40k income forever. You may indeed be able to retire on that in a cheap cost of living area, especially now that we have Obamacare subsidies.

Of course that assumes said million is post-tax.

edit: thanks, Obama!

drat Bananas posted:

There are a thousand different ways for people to interpret "life changing", guys. $10k could take you on a trip to another continent and change your world view, it could let you take a pilgrimage to your holy land, it can buy you your first reliable car and knock out a huge source of stress in your life, or it could buy you a couple semesters of community college credit to learn yourself some new skills and hop over a career hump.

baquerd posted:

Nah, that's just like a 60" TV and a down payment on a new SUV.

tuyop posted:

She's a writer who's read a bit too much (read: any) Twilight. Or any other loving female-oriented young adult novel.

Duck and Cover posted:

Squabbling over a dead relatives stuff/money is crass.

baquerd posted:

Talented writer gets undergrad paid for by her parents, lands a full-ride MFA followed by a fellowship, and is living in one of the lowest cost parts of the country. So of course she goes $40,000 in debt for "linen curtains and homemade granola".

http://thehairpin.com/2013/11/how-my-obsession-with-furnishing-a-future-put-me-nearly-40000-in-debt

silvergoose posted:

But a lot of people rent, so if the money literally removes all of their CC debt and thus frees up a large amount per month that lets them change how their life works...that sounds life changing.

canyoneer posted:

My wife's sister once had a boyfriend with a good job. He worked for one of the sports networks, working in the camera room for NHL games and drew a really nice salary. He was a nice guy too. This sister spent over $10k on credit cards at Pottery Barn and antique stores furnishing their apartment.

Then she cheated on him with an unemployed, fat and creepy 19 year old (she was 30) from her community college improv class who she played World of Warcraft with. As part of her breakup with the cool hockey boyfriend, she threw away or destroyed all those designer decorations she had bought less than a year ago, including a set of two antique Tiffany chairs that were worth over $1,000 each.

They're still together, and he has never had a job (except for 2 weeks at Blockbuster, then he decided that was "beneath him"). He used his only paycheck from Blockbuster to fly out to New Mexico to visit a 15 year old WoW guildmate who was depressed because his mom was cutting off his subscription for getting bad grades. Moms just don't understand, man. I'd like to think that the kid saw that he was on the path to being a pathetic manchild and got scared straight.

They also have two kids now, and have been floating for the last few years a few months at a time mooching off various family members. They are also the most ungrateful mooches ever.

She was shopping for a birthday present for him, and wanted to get him "pajama shorts", because "he gets so hot wearing his long pajama pants all day" as he plays Playstation and Warcraft. Most people's solution to that is to, y'know, shower and get dressed.
He withdrew $2,500 from an account his mom had set up for his education so he could "get a laptop for school", and bought a $2,500 gaming laptop and never registered for any classes.
A family member used some connections to get her a sweet job working in the marketing department for the newspaper. Really stuck their neck out and pulled in some favors to get her set up here. In the 15 work-days she was employed there before she quit, she called out for 7 of them and rigged one of the newspaper's promotional giveaways for a 2 night stay at a nice resort in town so that her boyfriend would win it under a fake name. With her one paycheck from the newspaper, she spent all of it on $8/bag organic snacks from Whole Foods, gourmet beer/soda, fake nails and hundreds of dollars in lingerie.
She's waiting for "the credit card debt to drop off" when the statute of limitations expires. She says it's completely immoral for the debt collectors to keep harassing her, because she doesn't even have the stuff anymore! Checkmate, creditors
By some miracle, her own $20k+ private student loan debt (for a degree she didn't finish) from Washington Mutual disappeared during WaMu's bankruptcy and sale to JP Morgan Chase and she hasn't heard a word about it since 2008.

Mother in law has got some financial problems of her own due to all the mooching adult children and stepchildren. I had to talk her out of buying another car and giving them the old one (7 year old Altima with maybe 50k miles). They didn't need the other car they were looking at, they were just going to buy another one so they could give away the old one.
The daughter got in a huge fight with mom a couple years ago and swore she'd never speak to her again, "I'm divorcing this family and want you out of my life", etc. Mom had been sending checks for a few hundred a month and paying her phone bill, and wouldn't you know, someone's still cashing the monthly checks....

canyoneer posted:

canyoneer posted:

sordid woe

olylifter posted:

Is this your sister in law's house and husband http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3453028

Magic Underwear posted:

Is it? You'll still be working two jobs. If you spend more than you make you'll eventually run through that 10k and end up where you started. If you spend exactly as much as you make 10k is a really nice buffer but you still aren't getting ahead, not exactly life changing. The real way to change your life is to increase your earning power and to some extent decreasing your spending. A one time smallish cash infusion is at best a good buffer to keep you from spiraling into debt, at worst it simply delays the inevitable.

It really takes a big sum to become "life changing" I'd say. $100,000, a million even, isn't going to last as long as it needs to if you want to retire.

Volmarias posted:

- Don't just up and take a vacation when working at a job that wants advance notice (also, don't call in sick from Monaco)

Volmarias posted:

- Financial education really should be taught in schools

Bloody Queef posted:

About half of US states have a financial literacy requirement. Like most things in our public school system, it doesn't work that well. Look how bad people are at geography and that's mandatory.

Financial education should be taught at home.

Saeku posted:

To clarify, there wasn't much she could've done better involving the firing -- boss cleared her vacation time, then harassed her into quitting because she was sick and couldn't do her work well (yelling at her, forcing her to do stuff that aggravated her condition even though there was no reason she had to be the one to do it, etc.) Illegal as heck.

Bloody Queef posted:

Financial education should be taught at home.

Nail Rat posted:

Since most parents are absolute poo poo at it, is everyone just supposed to bootstrap themselves into being responsible with money and learning how to use different investment vehicles? Some of us here have, but we're aspergers goons. Trying to convince my friends/relatives who are paying 1-1.5% for a financial advisor to spend a week and read Four Pillars is dishearteningly futile.

Yeah the public schools are awful at teaching in general, but I'm sure one or two of the six different times you learn about the Civil War or the Revolutionary War could be tossed aside for some very basic investment overviews.

Trilineatus posted:

And to be fair, even when you have good financial education, there's no guarantee that it will stick. I had an 11th grade economics teacher who spent months teaching us about credit, interest rates, and student loans. He even went through the process of a house mortgage and credit union vs bank. I learned the word 'usury' in that class

Most of us were still gently caress ups in college. It's a messed up developmental stage. But hey, maybe he's the reason we eventually grew out of it?

tuyop posted:

I'm starting as a student teacher in September and I have no idea how to make finances meaningful for 15-19 year olds. The rhetoric of freedom and fear and sustainability that worked for 24-year-old me would not have worked on 18-year-old me. I'm really drawing a blank trying to imagine how to present this poo poo as compelling in the face of early-twenties endless credit and instant gratification in the form of basically whatever you want.

baquerd posted:

Sell the dream. "Who wants to be a millionaire here? Guess what? You don't have to be super smart or win the lottery to become a millionaire. If you just save a little money in the right places you can be a millionaire even if you spend your entire life working at McDonalds."

tuyop posted:

I'd rather say, "Yeah, you can be a millionaire doing whatever job you want, but by the time you get there you won't give a gently caress what your net worth is because you'll have found ways to live a meaningful existence without ~things~. YOLO, guys, don't waste this one chance chasing the needle of bullshit plastic noisemakers."

tuyop posted:

Nobody wants to "be" a millionaire, though, they just want to live like one. That's the problem, not the dollars and cents of budgeting and saving. The idea that the best life is the life full of hedonistic excess and instant gratification.

SlapActionJackson posted:

Eh, not everyone is going to find happiness in an aesthetic life, either.