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The sales folks at my company (sales managers, as they manage a channel of resellers) make very little. We're talking 30k to 40k plus commission, and the commission comes only if their territory meets its quota, which is usually set obscenely high and therefore is almost never achieved. Three of them purchased brand new Mercedes C250s last year. For those of you who don't know, this is a $35k+ car. I have no idea how people can justify spending a year's worth of take-home pay on a new car. I once got a ride in one of them and said to the girl, "nice car... you must have gotten a really good deal" and she was like "yeah... it's just the low-end model but we got lucky because they gave us a good deal on the financing - and each of us got a $500 referral bonus!"  We have a "food club" at work that goes out for lunch to a nearby restaurant every other week. Ever since these three purchased their shiny cars, they haven't shown up to these lunches. One of them told me she really wanted to but was trying to save money. Yeah girl, it has got to be hard to pay for $10 lunches every two weeks when you're making monthly payments on a loving luxury car with that salary of yours. 
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Jul 7, 2013 07:44
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Another thing that blows my mind is how seemingly unconcerned my generation is with saving for retirement. Most of my friends who are employed do not save a penny. Let me tell you about one of them. For the past couple of years, my roommate (25 y/o) has been working for a technology firm and making around $60k. In our area that translates to a pretty comfortable salary. Until a couple of months ago, she did not know what a 401k was or if her company offered one. I explained its importance and told her she should ask HR. I was talking to her yesterday and she said they have a 401k but no matching, and that made her decide against contributing to it. I was like, OK, no match, I guess that means she must be putting money into a Roth IRA first. So I asked her. Her response: "What's a Roth IRA?" So I once again explained to her what it is. Turns out she has around $10k in her savings account, which I guess is good. I suggested she should open a Roth IRA and start contributing to it. She goes, "Nah, retirement is so far away. I'm planning on quitting my job in December and traveling the world for a year - that's what I'm saving for."  Basically she's going to come back from her soul-searching journey in 2014 with barely any money left in her account, and will have to move in with her parents until she manages to find another job, which will be extra difficult because she will have to explain the one year gap in her resume. The earliest she will start saving is around the time she turns 27 - that is, if she doesn't blow it off till even later. I just hope she doesn't end up on food stamps when she retires. Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Jul 7, 2013 |
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Jul 7, 2013 08:06
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Poison Cake posted:While I agree she should be putting away some retirement money and I think she should have more savings in general, there's no time like your twenties for a big splashy trip. Projecting to her future retirement forty years away and how she's going to be on food stamps seems a little over the top to me. A one year gap on your resume isn't that big a deal and (IMHO) is more than outweighed by the experience. There's a work to live vs. live to work balance and everyone has to figure it out for themselves. I'm not suggesting that a one year gap in her resume will cause her to live on food stamps in retirement. Rather, it's the "retirement is so far away!" mindset. She's most likely going to come back from her trip and continue her current spending habits, and forget all about 401k and Roth IRA and all that boring stuff. And honestly, she doesn't understand the power of compound interest. She could have started maxing her Roth IRA contributions when she started working at 22. So by the time she's back, she will have missed out on five years of savings + the interest + 35 years of compounding. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this five year delay cost her around $300k in retirement.
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Jul 7, 2013 18:48
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illcendiary posted:What the hell kind of interest level are you assuming there? I don't disagree about saving for retirement, but I always kind of roll my eyes at the whole "start saving at 21 instead of 25 and you'll be $250k richer!!!" meme that assumes some ridiculous magical 8% guaranteed investment. Nothing is guaranteed. However, stocks have historically gained 7% per year on average after inflation (here). Start with $27,500 (five years of max Roth IRA) and compound that 7% per year over 35 years and you get close to ~300K. Here's a nice calculator that I used. So yes, those few years early on in someone's career make a tremendous difference in the end result.
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Jul 7, 2013 20:06
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froglet posted:I used to read "frugal lifestyle" blogs. For the most part they were normal people who were doing it for reasons such as they never knew any other way or they were worried about the environment, but there were some who obviously had some serious issues surrounding money and just kept stocking up their emergency funds out of paranoia. I stopped reading after I reading a post by somebody who said they couldn't attend a wedding or a family holiday because she 'couldn't afford it' despite the fact she was completely debt free, stocking up her retirement funds to the max and had plenty left over. She admitted she told people she was poor and couldn't go because she didn't want anyone knowing she had money. I found it so sad that somebody was so willing to deprive themselves constantly for 'someday', yet never stopped to smell the roses. Family and friends don't live forever, enjoy the time you have with them. I read two such blogs - Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme - and both of them advocate a frugal lifestyle in order to be able to retire early. Which I think is a fantastic goal. Mine is different though, as I won't be able to retire early unless I get a significant raise in income soon. Rather, I save as much as I can so that I can leave my future kids and grandkids as big of an inheritance as possible. I want them to have a good life, and not have to worry about taking out giant-rear end loans for college or ever find themselves in a situation where they are living paycheck to paycheck. If that means I don't enjoy the fruits of my own labor, so be it. I'm a minimalist anyway, and it doesn't take much to make me happy. (That said I would never do retarded poo poo like berating my significant other for buying a $800 wedding dress. Special events like weddings/honeymoons are worth spending some money on. Especially honeymoons.) Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 18:57
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canyoneer posted:To me, that's just as sad as people racking up piles of debt in their early 20's on clothes, booze, furniture, and autos that will hobble them for the next 20 years. It may be just as sad, but it's definitely not just as bad. Extreme frugality is much easier to abandon - you just start spending some money. Whereas with extreme spending comes extreme debt, and that can cripple you for years, sometimes decades.
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Jul 15, 2013 20:25
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Cicero posted:Sup Mr. Money Mustache buddy I would love to, but I'm on vacation until end of July. So guess who will have to create the thread!
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Jul 17, 2013 07:52
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One of us should totally make a general Frugality/Early Retirement thread. (and by "one of us" I mean you)
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tiananman posted:I worked in sales with someone who, by a total fluke of luck, ended up with a $25,000 commission check one quarter. He immediately booked a trip to Vegas, bought ridiculous suits and within a MONTH was back to payday loans and asking friends for $5 for gas money to get home. This is how most people treat end-of-the-year bonuses at my company. The funny (sad?) thing about windfalls is that they magnify people's poor financial habits.
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Jul 24, 2013 20:03
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ghostwriter80 posted:Why isn't financial literacy a substantial aspect of the public education curriculum? I worked as a volunteer for several years teaching financial literacy to high school kids and their families after school. Questions like this were asked often by those who attended, because people a) found the information very useful and b) were stunned that it wasn't part of regular curriculum. Why isn't it part of regular curriculum? The simple answer is that there aren't many teachers who are qualified to teach the subject. Many teachers are themselves terrible with money. They are either up to their eyeballs in debt, or are married to rich husbands and have never had to create a budget for anything in their private lives. If they tried to teach the subject, it would be like the blind leading the blind. Cultural factors also play a big role. A lot of financial literacy advice is frugal in nature: eliminate unnecessary spending and debt, watch out for hidden costs, live within your means, etc. In my experience, American families have huge problems with this, because they have been conditioned from a very early age that money exists to be spent, and the more you spend it in visible ways, the higher your social status becomes. We have had many kids confide in us that they learned something useful in class, shared it with their parents, only to be told that it was nonsense. To make things worse, these kids were almost always from low-income families.
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Jul 25, 2013 22:43
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Haifisch posted:It doesn't help that every adult they know is likely still pushing the "getting a degree=job, not getting a degree=work at mcdonald's forever, learning a trade is for the dumb kids who never really amount to anything" fallacy. What is really horrible is that the fallacy goes a lot further than you think. I know several young people who work as recruiters, and they are well aware that there are people without college degrees who still have the ability to do the job. They just aren't being hired, because no HR manager ever wants to have to explain to the CEO (who is a baby boomer) why their team is hiring people without college degrees.
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Jul 26, 2013 20:59
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canyoneer posted:Whoa. Nothing to feel bad about. They made stupid decisions early in life and those decisions bit them in the rear end later on. At least now they are more likely to tell their kids cautionary tales about how to manage one's own money. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 27, 2013 08:41
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My dad is pretty good with computers. Earlier this year, my uncle (mother's side) asked him for laptop recommendations for my cousin, who just started college. Usage is pretty typical college student: browsing the Internet, word processing, and maybe a few simple games on Facebook. So my dad gave them the specs for a pretty decent $500 laptop - something that would be light, sufficiently powerful and can last her for two, maybe three years. Apparently, this offended the poo poo out of my uncle, who thought that my dad was trying to say that my uncle's family was "too poor for something better" and that a laptop that costs "a mere $500" was way below his daughter. Instead, he went and bought a whopping $2,500 laptop. And get this: not only is it five times more expensive, it's also worse in specs than the one my dad recommended, and much heavier. I'm just sorry for my cousin because she's the one who has to lug the piece of crap around everywhere.
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Jul 31, 2013 03:41
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I have a coworker - we'll call her Karen - who moved in with her boyfriend last year around this time. But instead of moving out of her other place, she kept paying rent on it, because she was never fully confident in the relationship and wanted a place to "fall back to" in case things didn't work out between them. This is SoCal, mind you. So over the course of a year she blew over $10k for a place she didn't live in. And when she and her boyfriend finally did break up, instead of moving back to her other place, she found a more expensive single bedroom... two blocks from said boyfriend.
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Aug 19, 2013 03:52
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BigDave posted:This article has some more information about how it works. Looks like it only disables ignition, doesn't turn the engine off. It's still dumb and risky as gently caress. It's basically a lawsuit time-bomb. Think about it: "we were sitting at home and my wife unexpectedly went into labor but I couldn't rush her to the hospital because the lender disabled the ignition on the car."
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Jul 21, 2014 00:28
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Cicero posted:How is this different from "we were sitting at home and my wife unexpectedly went into labor but I couldn't rush her to the hospital because the lender had repossessed the car."? Because most people don't expect the ignition of their car to be disabled minutes after missing a payment?
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Jul 22, 2014 03:37
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Spermy Smurf posted:Dumb question, but how do you read reddit threads? You don't. Trust me on this.
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Aug 2, 2014 04:36
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Thesaurus posted:FYI for the "ugh! Why you have children! You bad with money!" crowd: sometimes even the best birth control can fail. Even IUDs have a 0.4% failure rate. Speaking from experience One kid maybe. But two? 6 in 1,000 chance for it to fail for the first kid. 36 in 1,000,000 chance for it to fail a second time.
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Aug 5, 2014 04:31
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Good odds, but some of us will be those 6 of 1000 couples.
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Old Fart posted:After it fails the first time, it's 6 in 1,000 for it to fail a second time. Yes, but 36 in 1,000,000 for it to fail for both first and second kid.
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Aug 5, 2014 06:10
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In a thread titled "Tell us stories about people bad with money," leases are always bad. 
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Aug 10, 2014 18:27
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.Z. posted:The link in that thread to the kid who borrowed $100k @ 8% to bet on the Facebook ER, doubled it, then lost it all. Just wow. The guy's subtitle is, "I'm a day trader with just enough knowledge to be dangerous." Dangerous only to himself, apparently. 
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Aug 11, 2014 01:18
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Engineer Lenk posted:Towing - boat or horse trailer. Not all pick-ups are work trucks. Yeah, it would be even more awesome if the guy bought the $35k truck to tow the $50k boat he bought the previous weekend, right?
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Aug 19, 2014 07:04
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poopinmymouth posted:I agree these are ridiculous decisions, but at some point when enough people do it, we have to stop harping on *personal choices* and wonder if the system that drives people to make these horrible decisions is hosed. (and it is) A lot of it is psychology too. Tons of people are stuck in dead-end jobs where they get little or no raises or promotions for years. To feel like they are progressing in their career (and to give that impression to others), they spend whatever little money they manage to save to upgrade their cars every few years. And then, to avoid feeling guilty, they tell themselves that they "have been working really hard lately" and that they "earned it." Of course, it doesn't help that those sentiments are reinforced by friends and family.
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Aug 20, 2014 05:59
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Speaking of LA, one of my college friends moved there last year from NY. He and his girlfriend got a really nice one bedroom house right on the hills overlooking Dodger Stadium. A year later they broke up when he found out that she was cheating on him with a celebrity. So he kicked her out, but instead of moving out himself, he decided to keep living there and just pay the $1650/mo rent by himself. Keep in mind that this guy is no Slow Motion. He is an aspiring actor. As in, he doesn't have a full-time job. He goes from one temp gig to another, doing various odd jobs six, sometimes seven days a week. He confided in me that he has to borrow money from relatives often to make ends meet (none of whom are wealthy themselves), and every now and then he has to AirBnB his place and crash at his neighbors' couch. I told him multiple times that he needs to move out and find a place that's as cheap as possible, but he keeps saying that the house is so amazing he just wants to hang on to it (pretty sure it's so that he can bang chicks more easily). Fortunately, he kinda sorta came to his senses about a month ago and realized he may need to give up on his acting aspirations and get a full-time office job somewhere and build a career like most other people. It remains to be seen however whether he will stick to it. Either way, he's 31 years old, has zero savings and probably some CC debt. He does know a ton of people though, so maybe that will help.
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Aug 21, 2014 03:47
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No idea, he wasn't very forthcoming about it.
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Aug 21, 2014 03:59
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Zo posted:I think there's just a portion of bfc who are poors, and the thought of someone being able to afford to drop $300 on sunnies or drive a nonshitbox or whatever literally blows their minds. The cognitive dissonance then causes them to lash out at the grownups instead of realizing "wow im loving poor". You must have some sort of mental disorder to have reached this conclusion because this thread is chock full of stories of people living way beyond their means and making horrible financial decisions. Hence the thread title. Seriously, no one gives a poo poo about Mr. CEO buying a separate yatch for each day of the week.
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Aug 26, 2014 06:47
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A coworker got married in Hawaii recently. He kept complaining (or bragging? I can't tell with him) about how much money they spent and how nice everything was. Two weeks later, I ask him what he has got planned for the weekend and he says he and his wife are holding a SECOND RECEPTION, this time here in LA for members of their extended family who couldn't make it to the first one because it was out in the middle of the Pacific. Of course, this crowd is even bigger (the bride has like seventeen cousins or something), which means spending another asston of money. The guy then turns to me and says, "fortunately though, we got the same photographer and she gave us a 20% discount this time." 
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Sep 20, 2014 05:43
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TLG James posted:How do you have the same photographer if he was in Hawaii? Did he pay for the photographer to fly there? Yes. His wife saw the photographer's portfolio and demanded that they hire her for all their wedding-related events (including the pre-wedding shoot, or whatever it's called).
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Sep 21, 2014 03:34
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Oh_Yeah posted:But gently caress this thread. Wedding and car rhetoric and analysis of the now overly philosophical concept of 'bad with money' ruined it. Thank you for your opinion.
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Sep 21, 2014 17:22
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I do understand the value of having a supportive boss and a friendly work environment, but $13k a year is a decent amount of money... If you aren't able to negotiate a higher pay, try negotiating for some perks like longer vacations and stuff.
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Sep 22, 2014 05:46
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FrozenVent posted:Speaking as someone who owns a boat, it being underwater is the best possible outcome. I remember a news story from many years ago where a Seattle dude filed an insurance claim for his sunk boat. The insurance company got suspicious (it was a brand new boat or something), so they sent some divers to the bottom of the river to investigate. The divers located the wreckage, found several large holes on the hull, and determined they were created deliberately with an axe. The guy went to jail for insurance fraud.  I'm sure this kind of thing happens fairly often, but this one got stuck in my mind because I remember thinking, jeeze, if you're gonna commit fraud, at least make it look like an accident... Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 03:24 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 03:22
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He's also paying $400/month on gas! 
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May 11, 2015 02:10
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Please ban all this dog chat nonsense thanks.
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May 12, 2015 17:51
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Not a Children posted:I suggested to my dad to use the insurance payoff from his totaled car to buy something within a reasonable budget. When I suggested he keep his budget around $15k (payoff was $11k) he laughed in my face and told me that you don't work your whole life to drive something cheap. He's probably going to end up financing a $33k used late model Acura instead. Just because he's spending a lot of money on something doesn't necessarily mean he's bad with money. My uncle is really good with money, but he also really likes cars. He worked all his life and saved a whole bunch, and now he's choosing to spend it on them. I may not agree with his choices but honestly, what else is he gonna do with his money? I don't know about your dad's situation, but this thread often equates not being frugal with being bad with money. Personally, I believe it's OK to indulge every now and then, and as long as the person is living within their means and hitting their financial goals, nothing wrong with having a few expensive hobbies.
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May 13, 2015 15:57
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But they are living in their dream house! 
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May 13, 2015 20:09
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The Mandingo posted:Not sure if this got posted to this thread or not, but guy retires and builds dream home at Lake Whitney in Texas. Unsurprisingly, the house falls into the lake, but not before they light it on fire since that was the safest way to demolish it. badwithmoney.jpg  He was living the remainder of his life on the edge, though.
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May 14, 2015 01:10
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Powerlurker posted:If you read further, he's also 40 years old. So either a perpetual student or some other dysfunctional sort. Actually, younger Ph.D. candidates are much more likely to be "perpetual students", because their age implies that they went into Ph.D. straight from undergrad, or did undergrad > master's > Ph.D. If this guy is 40, he must have done something in his late 20s and early 30s. And, dude, I get that we enjoy judging people in this thread, but there's a difference between making fun of people who are genuinely and embarrassingly bad with money, and making fun of someone who loses their parents partway through a Ph.D. program and then has their only source of income cut off by their advisors. Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 15:00 on May 15, 2015 |
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May 15, 2015 14:57
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Aliquid posted:http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rubio-cashed-out-retirement-before-presidential-run/ar-BBjQjln This blows my mind: quote:And, so far in 2015, he estimates he has earned between $100,000 and $1 million from a new book. I wish we could do this when reporting our earnings to the IRS. "Dear IRS, I estimate that I earned between $1,000 and $50,000 this year. To be fair though, it's probably a lot closer to $1,000.  So yeah... ttyl"
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May 17, 2015 01:14
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drat Bananas posted:[2 pages later] I acknowledge and appreciate this joke! This one is a double whammy: bad with money, and raping the environment! The shampoo bottle trick is cool though, I'll have to remember that when I go on a cruise.
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May 19, 2015 02:35
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Bad with money: http://shakycode.com/post/119775920434/losing-it-all Dude goes from 100K/year to homeless in the blink of an eye.
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May 25, 2015 05:09
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Devian666 posted:Reading the list of things he had all I could think is that a Glock 19 isn't very filling when you're hungry. To be fair though, if you read further, the glock actually saved him from a couple of muggers. He was also lucky that it jammed when he put it to his head and pulled the trigger.
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May 25, 2015 06:40
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