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I had an ex who spent way more than he could afford. He didn't have a steady job so his main source of income was medical studies and (I later learned) prostitution. He treated credit cards like "free money" and never paid them off, just paid the minimums. One day he got a new card and immediately went out and bought a new laptop, a plasma screen, and a PS3 and Xbox 360 -- then days later his dog ran through the room, got caught in the chords connecting the laptop and the TV, and knocked the whole setup down destroying everything, and he's left with a maxed out credit card and nothing. I broke up with him the month that he missed rent becuase spent $150 on a World of Warcraft turtle mount. It's just a digital turtle, it doesn't even do anything.
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Jun 21, 2013 01:47
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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. I agree with this, assuming the individual receiving the windfall doesn't have any debts to pay down with it. 10K is almost half my annual income and I have no idea what I'd do if that amount of money fell into my lap -- sit on it for emergencies and feel some safety of mind, I suppose, but that wouldn't manifest major concrete improvement in my life. I have two friends who came into >$10k recently, a guy and a girl, both living below poverty line, and it didn't improve either of their lives. The guy was severely depressed at the time he received the money, but hadn't been able to afford any kind of mental health treatment and was in a poor mental state when he got the cash. He started doing coke daily since he lived in a really coked-out area and suddenly he could afford it, then stopped showing up to work or hanging out with friends so he could snort more blow. Two months later, he was jobless and broke again. The girl spent a few thousand dollars of the windfall on a dream trip to Europe. Not really an unreasonable expense, and she had a lot left over. While she was travelling, she contacted a nasty respiratory illness. She paid up for acupuncture and "all-natural" medicine, figuring she might as well spend the freeroll money getting herself healthy again quickly. But she ended up spending more than expected, and meanwhile her boss at her retail job illegally fired her for "poor performance" since she took all that vacation and sick leave. So she ended up broke and jobless too. I don't know what the moral is to these stories, but they're bad and involve money so I guess they go in this thread.
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Apr 15, 2014 06:49
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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) 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.
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Apr 15, 2014 15:01
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CitizenKain posted:Unless you are rolling in cash, no one is saving 360 bucks a month when you are 20. I mean, paying 25k on a Ford Focus isn't smart at all, but even if he was driving a hand me down beater I doubt he'd have the money to save that much. I work retail at minimum wage and save ~$750/month. Can't imagine living at home, working full-time or near full-time, and not saving -- after doing that, how are you supposed to adjust to life with rent?
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Apr 18, 2014 16:07
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Felter Chesthard posted:You have less than $600 of expenses per month? I am assuming you are in one of the $10 minimum wage states. Minimum wage here is $11/hour now, but when it was lower I did, yeah. Isn't the entire point of living at home to have low expenses? If a guy can afford a $25k car by living at home, he can afford to drive a beater and stick that $400/month car payment or whatever into savings every month.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:52
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I asked my bank to open a savings account to park my tuition money in for a few months, and they tried to set up an RRSP and put the money into it 
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Oct 23, 2014 22:42
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Dangit Ronpaul posted:americans like cars because they're poo poo at planning, obsessed with instant gratification, and drastically overvalue the illusion of safety? yup, sounds about right Say all you want about planning and delayed gratification, I have no fondness for my time living carless in rural America, where the bus schedule made every grocery store trip a 4-5 hour adventure. Or if you only have an hour to kill you can walk to the nearby gas station and get a sandwich. Big improvement when I moved a few miles away to near the rail trails, where you can bike in safety. Huge improvement to move into a city with functional public transit.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:49
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IAMKOREA posted:Volunteering for WWOOF would be good for you, given your ignorance of third world famers. I will give you a 'loving break' however you wish - just let me know what's up. I don't understand why one would want to emulate third world subsistence farmers. I've met a lot of ex-subsistence farmers on my ~*extensive frugal travels*~ but very few people looking to get into subsistence farming... I wonder why? Also, having done WWOOF: unless you have specific interest in the agriculture of your destination, or you don't do leisure time, doing WWOOF in a low cost-of-living country makes zero sense. You can find sub minimum wage agricultural labor anywhere, and it's similar in character no matter the location, so given that you intend to spend a certain amount of hours at work and a certain amount of hours at leisure per year, why not do your labor in a country that will pay you a high rate for it and spend your leisure time in a country with low wages and cheap cost of living? My compensation for WWOOF could be generously valued at €3 / hr. Now I realize with the opportunity cost of missing days of work in my home country factored in, WWOOFing actually increased my costs on spending a free hour in a foreign country.
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Feb 1, 2015 08:30
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NancyPants posted:If someone's going to make the case that it's cheaper for a single person to eat out than cook, they had better live in Vietnam or be using the McDouble as their argument, not a goddamn 8 dollar lettuce sandwich. It's cheaper for me to eat out than to cook, but I work at a cafe and get food at cost  I actually really miss taking bagged lunches, because I love cooking and eating good food, and needing to heavily plan your meals around using up fresh produce before it rots is both monotonous and stressful.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:51
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Gabriel Pope posted:Very much so, one of their major talking points is that it's so unfair that men "have" to spend $50-$100+ just to get a shot with a woman they've only just met. A $50-$100 date won't even buy you something that impressive if you're not going dutch. That's $19-$38/person before tax and tip. If things are going well and you want to linger over drinks/dessert/coffee, that's a very easy number to hit even at cheaper table service places. Moral: there's a reason the title of the discussion thread is "don't eat out today."
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Feb 26, 2015 04:21
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Taking an undergrad course in markets in night school. We had an example comparing two securities costing $10,000, one with 5% expected return and a 1% chance of default and one with 7% expected return and a 25% chance of default. 70% of the class polled said they personally would buy the high-risk, high-return one 
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Jun 25, 2015 03:28
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:If you're talking about just an absolute risk and return yeah that's dumb, but if you were talking about annual returns then after a long enough term the 7% return starts running away and becomes the higher EV investment even with a 25% lifetime chance of default. It's a fixed-term security, and that's the risk of default over one year, which is incorporated in the expected return. The other students might have just interpreted the question ("Which would you personally buy?") more abstractly than me, because the 2nd investment is better if losing $10,000 is nbd for you. Which is probably not a financial situation most undergrads are in.
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Jun 25, 2015 05:54
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Desuwa posted:The 7% is after adjusting for risk. Real returns without a default would be 42.6% or so. Yep. Insane fantasyland investment. If you have the ability to hold onto this thing and let the interest compound, you get an expected return of 287% over 20 years... except that "expected return" is a 99.68% chance of losing all your money and a 0.32% chance of $12 million dollars. Gross. Undergrads have incredibly high risk tolerance, I don't get it. Somebody I know bragged about his returns from maxing out his student loans and investing them in unhedged US Vanguard ETFs (we're Canadian and this is illegal). They were crazy good, during a period where the loonie crashed... He didn't understand why I reacted like that was a nutty thing to do. : What if the loonie rose or you got audited? : Well, it didn't!And I mean, he made a bunch of $$$ so who am I to talk. Him and my friends who invested in Magic and Bitcoins.
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Jun 25, 2015 20:51
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Gorman Thomas posted:Living in LA is bad with money. Crimson Peak was $18 a pop last Saturday and a medium popcorn was $8. Movies are PRICY nowadays. It costs more to see an opera livecast at Cineplex than it does to buy an under-30 ticket to the actual opera. For the price of a movie and snacks, you can drink scotch at the opera. Opera is pretty good value.
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Oct 21, 2015 03:30
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edit: double post
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Oct 21, 2015 03:30
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Humblebrag or not, that's a bizarre story. I thought banks gave credit out to anyone who wanted it nowadays. When I got my limit raised to10k that was more than half my annual income. Maybe they're more inclined to lend to young people since they assume we have parents to bail us out.
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Nov 20, 2015 05:26
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Shelter is an overhead of life. I agree there. Some options are better than others. The combination of costs vs benefits of your house compared to renting is something important. Properties produce income because you can rent them and get money. Living in a house is like renting it to yourself. The problem with buying property is the debt you incur to buy one. If that woman leveraged herself that much to buy stocks she could get just as hosed pretty easily.
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Feb 10, 2016 16:22
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pathetic little tramp posted:It has long been surmised Yelp sells reputation protection for people whose pages have been dinged by bad reviews. I don't know if anyone has ever caught them, but it's not really more dishonest than credit bureaus asking you to pay them to protect the credit report they hosed up. They absolutely do sell this, and they are incredibly pushy and obnoxious about it. So of course they use telemarketers to speak directly to businesses so it won't be all over the net. They also sell ads.
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Mar 3, 2016 02:52
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slap me silly posted:Holy poo poo. That's about my salary and I would never never horse. It's probably swayed by rural people. If you're not paying for boarding, and you have pasture to let a horse graze and a kid to take care of it, a horse sounds a lot more reasonable.
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Mar 5, 2016 06:39
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:That looks perfectly reasonable for a $50/night accommodation. With the room advertised as a private room when it appears to lead directly into the common area with no door? And keep in mind this is the most flattering photo they could take. For $50/night you can get a proper hostel bed, not a sketchy unlicensed and deceptively-advertised one.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:51
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Dwight Eisenhower posted:Though when you can't make payments for 2 years and eventually get evicted when the bank repossesses it you lose no equity too... Or maybe house prices fall and interest rates rise so the interest on your mortgage is pricier than the rent payments it supplants. (This happened in 2008. It was real bad.)
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Jun 28, 2016 15:34
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This week: a stress management counsellor at university told me to stop telling myself I can't afford a tropical vacation -- after all, "don't you have a credit card?" Also, re computer testing guy: any time you post a listing you get applications from people who aren't paying attention. In the last week I have a listing up that's attracted resumes with objectives of an entry-level HR role, computer programming, and music teaching, all of which have equally little to do with the role. Plus a cover letter customized to Addition Elle. (Not close, not remotely.)
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Oct 14, 2016 20:04
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A bad plan from /r/pfquote:Hello, quote:I'd rather bank on USD holding its value than equities. I don't see how there being a pot of money that anyone can stick their hand in and come out with 7% per year is believable or going to last at all. I just don't trust the idea. I'd rather just hold it in cash and make more money through my career. The cost of keeping your money in something like that doesn't seem worthwhile to me anyway.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:29
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"Minimum payments?" The way to live on <$20/hr is with no debt.
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Jan 8, 2017 23:38
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Empress Brosephine posted:I don't even know how that is possible if you want to own some kind of reliable car. Right. I've never lived somewhere a car was totally necessary. Of course, the downside to living in a place with good public transit is that my 300 square foot basement apartment costs $1,500/month.
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Jan 9, 2017 11:41
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FDIC recommendation: https://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/1995/fil9552.html I don't know which banks use this but from Google it looks like at least a few do. Here in Canada I've also seen it mentioned in accounting & finance textbooks repeatedly, since any company's managers might embezzle, not just banks.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:04
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I can't fault the poster of that Victoria's Secret story -- it's reasonable that a person (especially one from a non-US country where points cards are common & CCs are rarer) wouldn't expect a major store's loyalty card to be a credit card in disguise. VS has been sued & settled for misrepresenting their credit cards as points cards. Sucks that we have to go into any deal, even with major banks & retailers, with the assumption the other party is trying to rip us off :-/
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Feb 9, 2017 20:01
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No Butt Stuff posted:Costco sells generators that will power your deep freeze, fridge and probably a heater or A/C that run of your natural gas line for like 2.5k installed. Check your house insurance. Many include specific coverage for spoiled meat due to power outages.
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Mar 31, 2017 16:29
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I'm a retail manager in Toronto. I pay 37% of net income to split a 400 square foot basement conversion below a rooming house. 8 people in one converted 2BR house. It was under market. And median rent has gone up 25%+ since I signed the lease! Near all-time low prime interest rates do bad things.
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Apr 7, 2017 01:30
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:52 |
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That fentanyl story is disturbing. A drug addict failed to kick the habit, two people murdered him over a quarrel, and the friend who posted the story knows one of the perpetrators yet doesn't even think to mention whether he reported it to the cops. I dunno, that's just not as funny as horse rollerskates.
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Apr 21, 2017 05:29
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