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Thanks for that post, Froglet.  In the instances I've been involved in, financial abuse is often framed as "for the good" of the abusee and the abuser is seen as the "helper" - for instance, a mother ruining a child's credit with false accounts because "the lights need to stay on, food needs to be bought, it's for their own good." It's milder than the more controlling forms of financial abuse, but it takes advantage of an unequal relationship and exploits a child's love and ignorance of potential harm. It took me until I was about 20 to fix my credit, until this last year to fix my relationship with my mother, and occasionally a lost collections account still shows up.On a lighter note, let's talk about my dad, King of Commerce. Bought a wreck of a house house in Shitsville, CA in 2001 for $130,000. Allow me to copy the description I wrote for the PYF Awful Roommates thread: Trilineatus posted:Just to paint a more solid picture of this fiasco, this house is in a lovely central California city, was built in 1902, renovated in 1971 to add the wet bar, and not touched since. Delicate single pane original windows that shattered one by one, you had to alternate plugging in the dryer or the stove into the same outlet because nobody wanted to change the fuse box. The shower stall broke (too many lead paint chips down the drain) so we set up a ghetto shower in the clawfoot tub - the intermediary zone between that clunker project was the tub and a pot from the kitchen you used to pour water over you. The PG&E guy refused to let us touch our own octopus furnance, and gave me his personal number to call him to come out and relight it if it ever went out. I don't think we ever lit it again over the winter, we just drank to keep warm. During the height of the housing boom, the house was worth around $390k just due to sheer size. At the moment, it's worth approximately $90-110k. He's never QUITE been upside down on it. He refuses to sell it for less than he bought it for (he has always been lucky flipping real estate before this) and keeps trying to convince my brother and I that we should move back to the Foreclosure and Unemployment Capital of California to live in it. Did I mention it's in a trust for his offspring as a shelter from his bankruptcy and my mother's drug addiction? He pours around $1200 into this house every month because he pays hazard insurance on it after the absestos covered garage fell into the Walgreens parking lot. Why does that $1200 matter so much to someone who makes around $75k? Got remarried at age 42 and had two more kids plus a step kid, but never managed to live in the same city/county as his wife Why is this bad financial planning? Well, he lives in the Central Valley, and she lives in Coastal LA - this is about a 4.5 hour drive. They estimate they spend between $600 and $800 on his commute on the weekends alone. Additionally, he pays the $1200 mortgage on the shack, his $600 rental in the city he actually works in (did I mention the shack stands empty most of the time? He lives three hours away from it), as well as the $1600 rent for the house his wife and three youngest children live in. The two youngest are 2 and 4 and daycare costs are currently $400 a month to my teenage stepsister for essentially being a stay at home mom for the 2 year old and $650 a month for the 4 year old to be at a daycare center. My stepmom pays through the nose to keep us all in health insurance, which ain't cheap for a family of seven. It essentially breaks down that his first check of the month is entirely rent, her first check of the month is entirely healthcare/retirement/childcare, her second check is household maintenance like groceries/clothes/transportation, and their "emergency fund" is my dad's second check (which always gets used somehow since they have two crappy cars, two young kids, and an idiot teenager who just broke an ankle playing roller derby).  Who knew it was possible to live paycheck to paycheck while making around $140,000 a year combined?I've had them call me and ask me to borrow money until their next paychecks. I make around $25k a year in graduate school. To their credit, now that my stepmom handles repayments, she is always good for it. Before, my dad would borrow money and go "eh, I fed 'em to adulthood, I figure they probably owe me." Yeah, jackass, thanks for making me use a bucket to shower in a drafty shack during my teenage years t  Edit: The friend I'm staying with (an old friend from high school) tells me I should add commentary about the bees too. You see, the shack has a hive of bees of it's very own, going strong since 2001 when we bought the place. It was a small hive at first, around the old iron drain pipe at the back of the house. Now it is a thriving fifteen foot long hive inside the back wall of the house between the siding and the redwood lathe. I lived in the back bedroom for a year, and you can actually hear them humming through the walls sometimes. It was almost soothing, just don't open the window. (That room also almost gave me heat stroke once while I was working nights, because the temps in there reached 130 while I was sleeping, cause you know, you can't open the windows). My dad spoke to a bee removalist recently, and was quoted $2k for the murder of the bees and the removal of their bodies and honeycomb. The conversation went something like this:  : How much to get rid of the bees? : That'll be $2k to kill the bees and remove their bodies and the honey and honey comb so it doesn't stink up or damage your walls, sir.: No, I mean, how much to just kill the bees?: Oh, $1000 is allocated for that, but you can't just kill the bees. If you leave them there they will stink and rot and damage your drywall.: Good thing we have plaster and lathe then.It seems he is learning to be frugal at last 
Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jul 16, 2013 |
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Jul 16, 2013 14:28
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Shadowhand00 posted:This is the general feeling for people in the Bay Area who do not have a valuable stock option to fall back on or are not a VP/Director-level type of person: I live in the East Bay and am finishing grad school in a low to mid range paying field. I will likely never break 100k a year in my field, and will feel lucky to break 80k. I expect to be hired on next summer at around 50k a year. I've lived in this city on and off since I was in elementary school, and my mother once owned a house down the street. I will likely never be able to own a house in this city where I grew up  For content, that house down the street my mom used to own? She lost it to loan sharks for approximately 150k in 2006. It sold for 560k in 2012. On the plus side, the legal battle it stirred up meant she got to live rent and mortgage free as a squatter for almost four years. Another story that occurred to me recently; I have a close friend from high school who is getting married in November. A wonderful man with a wonderful fiancee. They have guardianship of their two nephews and his much younger sister at the ripe age of 25. They bought a house in the Central Valley for pennies and live a pretty nice life. Neither went to college and both work full time, one for around $20 an hour, and the other for around $12. They aren't able to save because of the burden of a fourteen year old, eleven year old, and ten year old, but they aren't starving and as far as I know they have no debt besides a modest car payment. Why do they have custody of these children? Because his aunt, a wonderful woman, passed away a few years ago. This saint of a lady took in all the children his messed up redneck family failed to raise. She formally adopted his middle sister after her mother passed away, and informally adopted my friend and his other two sisters. She raised his nephews from an older sister as well. After she passed away, they were kind of hosed. The house they lived in was rented, so they had to move. His aunt had no cash in the bank to leave them, only a small pension that went to the one adopted daughter. The expense of raising what we estimated to be around twelve children over the course of three decades drained her finances so much she had no assets whatsoever. He ended up renting my father's house for $250 a month for a year so they could get by. The dumb with money part? His deadbeat relatives raised TEN THOUSAND dollars for her funeral through begging at churches, holding car washes, and begging donations from all the wonderful people this woman touched in her life. Did they give it to her orphaned children? Help them relocate, get schooling, or otherwise cope with their loss? (The church donated the funeral services and his aunts union benefits paid for her cremation) No. They blew $5k on food and balloons for her funeral, and another $3k on flowers, and $2k on "paying themselves back for the expenses of the carwash". My friend was speechless, but he's a great guy who didn't expect a handout, and many of the people who gave to his relatives also reached out to him and helped him and the girls out anyway  He's starting to take night classes at community college again, and my wedding present to them is a "line of credit" at the community college book store.
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Aug 28, 2013 06:59
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tiananman posted:What does this mean? Did she borrow money from the mob and they took her house as payment??? She was a drug addict and she sold the title of her house to one of those scam companies that advertises all over the ghetto with "WE BUY HOUSES IN CASH" My dad is a lawyer, and since he had a vested interest in the house (bought before they split but they were never married) he made it his personal mission to gently caress that company over. We only recouped another $70k, but he estimates he cost them around 1.2 million in legal fees over five years. EDIT: Also, once they had her title, they sold it to Fannie Mae, and the the judgment my dad had going on with the original company stalled Fannie Mae in evicting my mother for YEARS. They finally actually paid her $5k to vacate in 2010, four years after she'd "sold" the house. Also, she blew that $150k almost immediately. She got it in 2005 or 2006, and we lived without electricity from late 2006 onward. I still occasionally get phone calls from accounts she opened in my name. She's clean now though, and lives in another state
Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 20:50
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MickeyFinn posted:40% of the people in my zipcode spend 35%+ of their income (I assume gross) on rent. That seems crazy to me. Find out about your zipcode/town here: That doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but I live in the Bay Area. 50%+ is where it really seems to get dicey. I spend about 45% of my graduate student income on rent, but I have additional resources through unemployment and savings. For 35% of my income in the city I live in I could maybe rent a shared bedroom with some undergrad students. In the city? Not even a crack motel.
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Sep 13, 2013 22:08
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And, you know, that lack of opportunity you talked about. Everyone in this country is born with a right to a free education, but isn't it a drat shame that not all education is equal (see: elementary school in Oakland vs San Francisco, or rural Kentucky vs Portland) and societal pressure and oppression outside of individual control (see: tracking, lack of special ed services) affect individual experiences of oppression and privilege as well. I personally think that every individual who succeeds from a disadvantaged background is extraordinary and does nothing to invalidate the struggle of those continuing their lives in socioeconomic and educational depression. But then again maybe the poors are lazy and the American dream lives. Edit: it's also interesting how often people seem to expect internet and technological literacy from people from severely impoverished backgrounds. Seriously, you can't learn to educate yourself online in 15 minute chunks at the library. Assuming your library has working computers that aren't so heavily walled you can actually do research. I've worked with full grown men and women without a functional idea of the internet or financial tools like online banking or online job applications. The world is leaving them behind and it's not their fault as individuals that their communities lack access. Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 05:02
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It's also interesting to see the new growing population of "educated poor" where there have been multiple generations of both college education and poverty. People really are resistant to the idea that the American dream is changing and getting further away - they went to college and got at least a two year degree and then continued to manage a blockbuster, but there is magical thinking that their child's liberal artsy bachelors will be different. I tend to believe that the "socio" part of "socioeconomic status of parents as a predictor of future wealth" is the real game changer. Someone can be rich and still live like they are poor and vice versa. Despite my crippling poverty growing up, my parents were still socioculturally middle class with a good understanding of institutional systems and mortgages and retirement, but no money to fund them (because hey, drugs man). I could play myself off as the American dream, or I could admit my privilege gave me an enormous advantage over those who are now my clients. Bonus story for content: What happens when someone who is first generation "not poor" but also ninth generation "college bound" goes to college? If you guessed enormous loans, credit card debt, and working full time hours, you are correct! I will be graduating from grad school in May with a cumulative 60k of student loans for the last seven years, 7k of credit cards I'm paying down, and a two year obligation to work for the state that I indentured myself to for a stipend so I wouldn't starve to death. I also financed a MacBook and am going to Costa Rica in March 
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Sep 28, 2013 18:09
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INTJ Mastermind posted:So let's make all college students take a mandatory major in healthcare, science, technology, math, or engineering as a pre-requisite to getting federal student loans. They can double major or minor in humanities if they choose. We need to stop selling liberal arts degrees as an "investment" seeing as how these never pay off. I don't believe in turning public universities into trade schools - I was a sociology of law undergraduate and it informed my life thereafter. Now I am finishing my masters of social work as a result. A classical education is how you make global citizens with empathy for humanity as a whole and a broader sense of duty and obligation. Grad school is trade school - go career or academia or perish. I do believe in being realistic with undergrads. "Do what you love as long as you love it enough to pursue a phd. Otherwise, here is the computer science department." That said, my brother is a chemical engineer who is now back in school for a pharmacy phd who is very socially conscious, so your mileage may vary.
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Sep 28, 2013 19:03
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tuyop posted:Dude, that's kind of exactly what I did, except much smaller student loans and a car loan on top of it. I joined the forums to follow Zaurg's second thread, and your thread has been a journey of discovery for me. I am in public service so my loan forgiveness should improve my outcomes, and the credit card debt is decreasing rapidly.
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Sep 28, 2013 21:24
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:He's just a bit of a silly person. I have been a class A financial gently caress up and even I think this is dumb. I like the arbitrary thousand pounds as the largest number this guy could imagine someone saving.
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Sep 29, 2013 18:37
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My grandmother is Canadian, and her sister is American and lives in rural Louisiana. In order to see her sister regularly, she bought a "winter home" down the dirt road from her sister north of Lake Pontchartrain - an acre of land and a doublewide trailer. It was quite lovely, looked like a real house, and they redid the inside and had all the amenities of home. She and her husband spent about 3 or 4 months out of the year there. They paid in cash, for the land and the trailer. Last year, lightning burned the trailer to the ground. They had never considered buying homeowners insurance, because, really, what's going to happen to a trailer in the middle of nowhere? So they are out the 30k they spent on the trailer plus the cost of renovations plus the value of the items inside, in addition to the lack of monetary consolation for all the sweat and effort that went into making that a second home (like the beautiful deck her husband built and installed tiny twinkle lights on just to surprise my grandmother one summer).
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Sep 29, 2013 20:08
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tuyop posted:Man I'm going to go live in a debris pile in the forest to get on TV! Stop looking for excuses to live your yurt dream and just do it 
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Nov 6, 2013 00:57
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I think you start getting into "bad with money" territory when you buy houses with what are basically ill used in-law units for guests that don't generate rental income. My step family does this; the matriarch of the whole clan owns an enormous house with three bedrooms in the main house and an attached two bedroom in-law apartment that she lets family members crash in. Of course, this is also the woman that got a 400k life insurance pay out from her husband's passing three years ago and has blown most of it on stupid poo poo that doesn't matter that idiot family members talked her into. No, Maria, don't pay off your enormous mortgage! Don't fix your roof that leaks into your kitchen! Don't buy a decent vehicle! Instead, invest in a friend of the family's auto painting business that's already failed once, but an enormous RV from your crazy brother and let your drugged out son live in it in your drive way, three cars that don't run (one of which because she is too cheap to buy a new battery for it and it will likely rust in the driveway graveyard until it's unsalvageable) and continuously replace your carpeting as your herd of lap dogs wash it away in a sea of urine. That 400k was her retirement and she never invested any of it. As far as I know, the devastated remnants of it are sitting in a checking account and she is going to work at the census and beg my father and stepmother to live with her forever and pay rent on the in-law suite she has no use for. My dad may die of an aneurysm just from close proximity to her deluded poor person "spend it on pleasurable luxuries and family before it's gone" mentality.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:31
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think part of it is that they just don't build many small houses in nice areas, at least in my city. That's probably true in some areas; where this woman lives was formerly an unincorporated county district so it's not the case, there are plenty of modest homes in the area. Though if she had paid off her mortgage and refinance I think I would be in favor of her choice - the giant sprawling house they bought originally for 400k is now worth 1.5 million. However, she now owes more than the original price tag after pulling out all her equity. She used her drugged out sons car accident settlement as the down payment and my stepmothers paycheck for the mortgage for years (until she married my dad and moved out) so I guess SHE at least made a profit.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:32
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At the dispensary next to my house you can buy a joint made out of leftover bits of random weed for $5 and get three people nice and buzzed, so it's possible. As for a story of people who are bad with money, my former friend with benefits makes $450 a week at his full time job and spends about $250 a month on weed, which he is actually getting a massive discount on. It isn't unusual to see him smoke three bowls in a row and then continue to function normally to the point of being able to code/program, set up complicated electronics, or do phone tech support. He often has to wait until the last second to pay his utilities, and only pays his internet bill when they remind him to by shutting it the gently caress off. On the other hand, the stereo he set up for me is stellar and he has a good side business doing tech support in exchange for weed discounts and high end electronics.
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Dec 2, 2013 00:13
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As your friendly neighborhood purveyor of government services to parents, there are none! Well, not none, but depending on their state it can be almost laughable. Even getting kids into subsidized preschool can be a nightmare. I can usually get people WIC, food stamps, and connect them to childcare exchange parenting groups and add them to the multiyear section 8 wait list. If they do end up homeless, they might actually get more 
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Dec 6, 2013 22:21
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There's a whole Goons with Spoons thread about this, "Help! I'm poor and I want to make good food!" http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3442278 The best thing I ever did for my budget was get food stamps and limiting myself to eating what I could purchase with them. I learned how to cook well on $200 a month for myself that way, and it held over when I no longer had food stamps. For a tale of those bad with money, I have classmates in my graduate program who are making my head hurt right now. Our program is based on a contract with the state: Get a stipend equal to tuition while in school, indenture yourself for two years post-grad to the state. Right around now is when we start sending out government applications to compete for the best jobs that fulfill our contracts. Technically, you don't have to start applying til June, but it's likely the competitive well-paying jobs will have been filled before then. However, since I go to a ivy league equivalent public school, my classmates are smarmy fucks who figure "I will jump the head of the applicant queue because I am a special fancy school snowflake, gently caress those state school applicants who started six months ago." They are planning European vacations for the summer anticipating that they will have June/July free because government jobs take a while to come through with offers. So, basically, they are all going to end up making $20k less per year and will have to move farther away than they would have if they applied earlier, and losing the income from two months of the summer, and possibly in breach of their contract if they are out of the country when they are required to interview. Breaching the contract converts the stipend into a lump sum loan due immediately. Goddammit. This is why the people in our field hate us for being cocky fucks. 
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Dec 16, 2013 23:34
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HooKars posted:This site kind of annoys me/frustrates me because it'll say something like (for example the first recipe on there) -- Peppermint bark. Ingredients: Peppermint oil -- $0.14 for a few drops. What, no. I have to buy the whole bottle and fit the whole bottle into my grocery budget, not just the 14 cents I use (and then in this case, probably never use again). Yeah, most tools for budgeting also require the judicious application of common sense. It's the same way that "interest free for six months" sounds like a good idea but requires common sense to apply it, eg "Can I actually afford to pay this off in six months before I get slammed with cumulative interest?"
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Dec 16, 2013 23:52
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Yaos posted:What are these people doing that they make so much money but they have to take out loans and go so deep into credit card debt? It's seems every other post in /r/personalfinance is somebody that makes a billion dollars a year but has massive piles of debt. I would say the usual suspects: Tech (young, undersocialized, handed a pile of money), oil fields/rigs (young, undersocialized, handed a pile of money), and the military (young, undersocialized, handed a pile of money).
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Dec 18, 2013 19:52
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Or like... take 100 bucks worth of it back to the store, and tell the kids Santa made a late delivery or "whoops look what Santa accidentally left on the roof!" when they get a couple more gifts next week. Jesus.
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Dec 21, 2013 19:22
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I think he is more referring to the old school netflix where you pay a monthly subscription for mail order dvds. If he had the plan where you only got one DVD at a time, he was paying $7.99 a month to "own" this DVD which he never exchanged. Of course, savvy people (read: assholes) knew that you could call netflix, say it got lost in the mail, and get free DVDs.
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Dec 28, 2013 23:57
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VideoTapir posted:Generally speaking, if a government job has a private equivalent, the private equivalent gets paid more; especially for education-required stuff. The rest of that sentence was correct. Unless you're a social worker like me Working in CPS is the best shot a social worker has of netting 70k+, and that's only in wealthy areas.For a story of people who are bad with money, a coworker in CPS just had their 20th anniversary with the county and still scrounges for after hours shifts to make ends meet, and claims contributing to additional retirement beyond the county pension is for chumps. He's nearing 65, and works overnight in addition to his regular shifts at least once a week. Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jan 6, 2014 |
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Jan 6, 2014 21:57
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I've basically given up on owning a house in the next ten years because of this thread and/or forum. I just won't be in a place to do so smartly for at least that long, and now I'm starting to see friends who bought houses before they were established in their careers suffer from the lack of mobility. Especially working in county-based government positions where if you take a new job in a new county your compute doubles AT MINIMUM. Instead, I am renting a house for an incredibly reasonable rate with a garden and a driveway and freeway/public transit access. I would never be able to afford to own this house, but man, living in it sure is sweet. Too bad I'm just burning money on rent 
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Jan 20, 2014 23:50
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Jesus. I have two associates, a BA, and 3/4s of a master's from high ranking public universities in non-academia career driven programs and I'm only in the hole like $60k for the whole thing Thank god someone told me about the horrible consequences of for-profit "colleges" and private student loans, and that my institutions work hard to give their students enough federal aid to prevent Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo, and whoever else from cashing in on us. E: I should also add that I had no parental support and was only able to start making enough money to support myself through part time work near the end of the bachelor, so I know it can be done with McJobs and loans for living expenses. My career is also based on social welfare, so seeing clients throw their money and indenture themselves for Heald College or ITT Tech makes me sick on an almost weekly basis because they don't know Medical Transcription certificates are worthless and can be had for $100 in books from the near-free community college. Information is power, and information is reserved for the offspring of the educated
Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 21:41
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Jeffrey posted:Even non-scam colleges have programs that are for-profit. Like they have programs they care about, and others that only stay around with low admissions requirements for the easy money. A number of big schools care a lot about undergrad and PhD programs, while treating terminal masters programs as cheap sources of income to pad their budgets. Which is why it makes me laugh that the 20% of my master's program that signed contracts with the state to get a free degree are considered money grubbing pariahs who "aren't in it for the right reasons." The attitude of some professions towards financial solvency in academia is just mind boggling. I even got asked by my internship director if I was only going into my speciality because it had a stipend attached; as if that would be a bad reason if I were otherwise capable and competent and content. I sell community college and state public schools HARD to any teenage clients I encounter. One of my clients is filling out his FAFSA with me next Wednesday to go to a state school on a full ride
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Jan 24, 2014 00:07
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If you are young and single, living with your parents can be the kiss of death. I'm in the San Francisco bay area and it is depressing how many men I (briefly) date who are still living at home. Sorry, bro, no you can't spend every waking moment at my place plus every night. Most of these men could easily afford their own place, but social awkwardness, financial obsessiveness, and cultural/familial pressure end up with them leaving my independently financed apartment every night at 6pm to go home to have dinner with mom like we're goddamn teenagers. I also think living at home for too long has the unintended side effect of encouraging young people to shack up together very quickly and entangle their finances (since they aren't able/used to budgeting for life on their own), which while it isn't "bad with money" it is "bad at life."
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Jan 26, 2014 02:06
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I meant more that I know people who are in their early to mid twenties and instead of taking control of their financial lives and striking out on their own, they grab the nearest sexually attractive partner and do a double cannon ball. Sometimes this works out, but I have a lot of friends who divorced in their late twenties broke as hell as well. I have similar "not interested" opinions of both those who refuse to strike out even with all the resources to do so and those who want to shack up with me immediately, as I hope was illustrated in my post. Edit: I should also add that the "with all the resources to do so" is the key point here. I'm talking about 100k year software engineers or comparable living with their moms and bitching that I can't afford the bars they want to go to, all while trying to crash at my place every single night because SWEET SWEET FREEDOM combined with SAFE SAFE TOOK NO RISKS. Then again, maybe they have good retirement accounts and I should just let one move in? Tell me BFC! Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Jan 26, 2014 |
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Jan 26, 2014 03:35
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This thread tends to go haywire every time someone posts something to the effect of "sometimes saving money to the exclusion of all else is harmful in the long run due to holistic social and environmental factors such as forming relationships, developmental milestones of their cultural region, and demonstrating good decision making" Clearly those things only apply in a narrow scope (nobody is telling the kid who bought the F250 to move out now that he is saddled with that debt) but people tend to get defensive about their lifestyles. Don't worry BFC, your retirement funds aren't affected by my boyfriend criteria
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Jan 26, 2014 09:35
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MrKatharsis posted:Totally late to the game here, but are these asian guys? You very closely described a few people I know (live at home, can't get a second date, desperately conflicted by "sweet freedom/no risks"). Some of them. The ones who had to be home for dinner tended to be Indian, but the vast majority of the failure-to-launch crowd were white of the Anglo and Jewish varieties. As for saving money in the bay, it is totally possible. They clearly liked my standard of living enough to want to move right in to it, and my monthly income is less than a quarter of theirs on average. God bless grad school and non profit jobs. It means living outside the money sectors and commuting, though (I live in the east bay and plenty of them preferred to live and mom and dad's in the South Bay, despite the commute to SF being comparable)
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Jan 28, 2014 20:03
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I moved in to replace a girl in this house last May. We have all three of her W-2 forms.
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Feb 8, 2014 01:24
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Good god, Tuyop, your locomotive bad luck is contagious Get your wife a helmet.
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Feb 16, 2014 21:08
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Jeffrey posted:That is, unless they have a career that they can't stop and start at their leisure. I would think that taking ~5-6 years off or however long would torpedo most careers, so you still gotta evaluate that part of the opportunity cost. This is a huge deal. I'm in a field that is relatively "parent friendly" (government social work) but taking 4 years off to save child care (assuming you start preschool at age 4) means that you will have to work four extra years before retirement and lose your seniority standing for that time, thus meaning that if government layoffs happen (again, as always, no ifs) then you are now at the bottom of the list and first out the door. It's a tough situation, and often childcare is the only answer. For those that rely on relatives, it is also a strain, as you are either costing them career opportunity (young relatives) or straining an older relative with young children. My stepmother is also a social worker and my father is a lawyer and they borrowed $400 from me this month because his bar dues were up at the same time the childcare bill was due for my 3 and 5 year old sisters. And this is with my 19 year old sister going to school at night and working part time to provide childcare two days a week to lower their overall bill. Her senior year of high school she did independent study and did full time childcare for the youngest baby. Even with a big supportive family, it can be tough, and in fact can be more difficult to rely on family if they are all gainfully employed and upward bound. If that 19 year old had nothing better to do but provide childcare, great! But she wants to go to college, goddammit. I work with poor families who raise children just fine, but it is often at the cost of upward mobility. They can't afford to take inflexible full time work, or earn too much so their benefits get cut off, or live in a home by themselves and not with extended family. This becomes a problem when, say, their husband becomes abusive but his family provides all your childcare. I speak as the safety net for people who don't have money to be bad with: children are expensive, children are limiting, children are still worth it. The mom in the situation I described above has six kids, no support since her separation, and still leveraged the older two into college tracks. She will likely never retire or afford nice things, but she is very clear that children were her priority anyway. Bad with money moment: Being imminently threatened with the loss of custody of children you've had in your care for six years because probate legal guardianship costs ~$900 to complete, showing up to cry at my desk driving a brand new car on your lunch break from your good job at a bank. Half my job is financial counseling/life coaching. Edit: baquerd posted:If they're making under $40k, they're already at the bottom of any serious career path. Drop down to part time, have the other partner work from home on those days, and you're set. I can't tell if you live in the real world or not. You do realize people who aren't in tech can't work from home, right? Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Feb 19, 2014 |
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Feb 19, 2014 20:48
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Tigntink posted:Living in a major city on the west coast can really really taint your ability to think about the living situations of people in the rest of the country. That attitude is super common in Seattle where almost all the couples I know are in the situation i'm in - one person works a low paying/good benefit gov job - one person works tech. I'm a social worker in the San Francisco Bay Area which is probably why that rubbed me the wrong way. The attitude of "why doesn't your retail manager job have the flexibility that my twitter job has?" just kills me.
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Feb 20, 2014 01:12
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Wow. For the record, I work for CPS. I am not just "for poor people." I just happen to see a lot of stress and poverty. And the occasional mansion. I love where I live and the work I do and the pay I make for it. It was a choice for me, not the winds of fate like it is for most of my clients. I leveraged a adolescence of poverty into a career that helps others. This is what bootstraps look like you self righteous punk. I love that you don't get to dictate where your taxes go. Why does this feel like déjà vu? Were you the one I had the public liberal arts education argument with earlier in this thread? Content: my not-boyfriend desperately needs a car and has a pile of high end audio equipment in a stack in a closet and won't sell it because "what if the bathroom needs audio too"
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Feb 20, 2014 04:38
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Harry posted:Did I miss something, or is baquerd just conjuring up that all social workers are poor thing out of nowhere? Yeah, social workers in the Bay Area make more money than anywhere in California. It's pretty sweet.
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Feb 20, 2014 05:31
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Man, it's my job to judge people for making bad decisions and I'm already tired of this conversation. Some people do well because they had life handed to them. Some people did a trick with their bootstraps. Some people are so marginalized that bootstraps may as well not exist. The kid I just helped fill out a fafsa for a state school might have been able to go to Stanford, but maybe the diversity of background at a state school will allow him to do more while the culture at Stanford would have driven him to drop out. Individuals are both themselves and a part of a complex society with a history of structural inequality. I salute the prosperous child of public school teachers, I hope they are more proud of you than you are of them. Also, I hate how often I have to talk kids out of going to heald or ITT tech. It's like a disease in impoverished communities, vampires feeding on hope and misinformation.
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Feb 20, 2014 06:50
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Man, I'm a social worker with a public Ivy League education and I don't even believe that part, though I am flattered. I will say that my choice to go into public social work instead of say, law, probably does cost me money though. However, as a high school drop out with a drug addict parent, I think I had a better chance of going to that fancy school for social work than for law or business, don't you? I don't think you're an rear end in a top hat. But as always, I'm glad I get to take your tax dollars without asking permission.
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Feb 21, 2014 01:07
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 There's also the fact that people who make lots of money used to have their wives do my job as a hobby or it was done by religious volunteers, thus hamstringing the "this is worth money" argument until recent years. SCHADENFREUDE DEPOSIT: a customer of my not-boyfriend spent 30k on audio equipment for his home theater. Then he got a husky puppy. Paradigm products make for some expensive chew toys. But since he is a software engineer living on Russian hill in SF, I'm sure he's good enough with life decisions to afford some new ones. Good puppy. Edit: spelling, also even Adam Smith said we should make provisions for orphans as those unable to care for themselves are not obliged to compete with capitalism. Mocking Bird fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 01:40
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Sorry guys  My coworker paid $60 to take a taxi home from the office today rather than wait 20 minutes to catch a ride with me in my lovely beater. Her reasoning? "If I don't leave now I won't have time to get starbucks before the kids get off the bus." Presumably she had the cab go through the starbucks drive thru.
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Feb 21, 2014 01:48
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Holiday: a day everyone gets off, like Christmas. Usually federal holidays, can include some lesser holidays if you work for a bank or the court. Vacation: days you get to take off whenever. For instance, I get 4 vacation days a year. I can put those with Christmas Eve and Christmas and get a whole week off. Any other days I take off are unpaid.
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Feb 28, 2014 21:03
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure if he keeps making these decisions, it would only be correct if it impacted his close relationships I know I have stayed out of or ended relationships because the individual couldn't handle life's responsibilities. And I say this as someone who spend $1500 borrowed dollars to fix a busted head gasket on a 99 Civic. (Paid off car, it was either fix it or go into debt for a new one, I gambled on the fix and it's worked out so far).
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Mar 26, 2014 04:47
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