78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck

[RedLion]

I have a paid off home and a couple paid off rental properties, and I am itching to pull cash out to invest opportunistically. 
 

My wife had agreed to eventually do a cash out refi on our primary, and I can tell she doesn’t want to. I suspect it’s a psychological thing. I would feel code comfortable with $750k of additional liquidity in t bills and dividend stocks and a $750k mortgage. My wife feels more comfortable with a paid for home. 

[DooDiligence]

You're both right. That's a good place to be.

[John Hjorth]

8 minutes ago, RedLion said:

I have a paid off home and a couple paid off rental properties, and I am itching to pull cash out to invest opportunistically. 
 

My wife had agreed to eventually do a cash out refi on our primary, and I can tell she doesn’t want to. I suspect it’s a psychological thing. I would feel code comfortable with $750k of additional liquidity in t bills and dividend stocks and a $750k mortgage. My wife feels more comfortable with a paid for home. 

 

Thanks for sharing, @RedLion,

 

Is not only a matter of perspective and some other more or less rational considerations. It's a matter of the answer to the question :

 

Where is the best place to install the waterproof shutters in 'the ship'?

 

'The ship' here understood as your or your familys total economic sphere. The only question that really matters, when the ship may be in frothy waters, and that in end separates the sheep from the goats when it really matters.

 

I have come the conclusion that the RE leverage - alone for this reason - always, - if possible - should be in the investment sphere, if non recourse possible [as in listed in general].

 

Personally, I've been thinking quite a bit about related to investments European listed real estate, where I have started slowly - very slowly - to dip toes.

 

The separation criteria has so far actually to a great part been related to the initial assessment of intelligent, and thereby sustainable financing for the long term, or not.

 

It is about staying power, too.

[John Hjorth]

5 hours ago, Gregmal said:

Well yes, a mortgage imo can be both an asset and a liability. 
 

I also think it can double as an efficient savings vehicle. If you are 25 and dumb and say inherited $300k I’d say go buy a collection of $2m worth of property with 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Rent it out. Your retirement at 55 is secured.

 

It's true, Greg [ @Gregmal ],

 

However, in practice, how many cases do we each, separately, actually know, where this long term scenerio ends up as being the final screnario?

 

My best guess is : Few!

 

The financial solution for first time homeowners is sold on the sucessive building of a home equity, that also serves along the way as a capital buffer.

 

Then pratice sets in at some point in time, [and always in good times!] - the bank suggests you to use it, to a bigger or newer car second car, or both, new kictchen, bathroom, or whatever, and the perfectly shaped matethematical annuity loan balance profile gets transformed into the ugly profile of an endless whipsaw by banks ...

 

You do it too, I mean the refinancings, but to buy more rentak real estate - rinse and repeat, which is a totally different matter, because of the long term built-in componding.

 

And I just happen to like owning banks, despite some parts of them are ugly. *shrugg*

[coffeecaninvestor]

Personally I’m not impressed with the average Americans ability to delay gratification, and live below their means. It’s pretty simple equation, but most don’t know how to.. so I am not surprised the % is so high. If you can do those two things it doesn’t matter if you get above average investment returns, or if you pay off your mortgage early doesn’t even matter. 
 

Personally I paid my mortgage off very early. My first starter home I paid off in 10 years. Then we paid off our next bigger home in a year after rolling the proceeds from the starter home. The home is approximately 1/3 or our NW, and at first it annoyed me not just investing that money but over time I came to appreciate being 100% debt free. Having a really strong personal balance sheet makes life stress free, and I can stay fully invested easier. 

Edited May 22 by coffeecaninvestor

[rkbabang]

Another thing to factor in is your age.  If you are 25-35 and have a mortgage with a 3% rate, you should probably keep it.  If you are in your 50s and thinking about when to retire, you should probably pay it off.   I was 48 when I paid mine off and have no regrets.  I have more to invest every month now and am comfortable knowing I'm completely debt free.   When I was in my early 30s I wanted to leverage the equity in my house to upgrade to a bigger house.  I wasn't thinking about how I could pay it off.

[Cigarbutt]

Many interesting comments here but isn't there another perspective to take also?

Why is net private/public saving going down?

Using various definition endpoints, why are there between 40-80% of Americans with no intrinsic margin of safety?

Because of extrinsic safety nets? Some kind of population life-time pattern (population getting older)?

What about the data that shows that the net savings of the top 1% (absolute and relative) has been increasing in the last decades, the net savings of the next 9% has remained stable and the net savings of the bottom 90% has been decreasing?

There may be more to it than evolution allegories or moral undertones?

[Gregmal]

21 minutes ago, Cigarbutt said:

Many interesting comments here but isn't there another perspective to take also?

Why is net private/public saving going down?

Using various definition endpoints, why are there between 40-80% of Americans with no intrinsic margin of safety?

Because of extrinsic safety nets? Some kind of population life-time pattern (population getting older)?

What about the data that shows that the net savings of the top 1% (absolute and relative) has been increasing in the last decades, the net savings of the next 9% has remained stable and the net savings of the bottom 90% has been decreasing?

There may be more to it than evolution allegories or moral undertones?

Isn’t this just indicative of concentration of wealth and wages for the majority of the population not keeping up with cost of living? 

[Parsad]

1 hour ago, Cigarbutt said:

Many interesting comments here but isn't there another perspective to take also?

Why is net private/public saving going down?

Using various definition endpoints, why are there between 40-80% of Americans with no intrinsic margin of safety?

Because of extrinsic safety nets? Some kind of population life-time pattern (population getting older)?

What about the data that shows that the net savings of the top 1% (absolute and relative) has been increasing in the last decades, the net savings of the next 9% has remained stable and the net savings of the bottom 90% has been decreasing?

There may be more to it than evolution allegories or moral undertones?

 

1 hour ago, Gregmal said:

Isn’t this just indicative of concentration of wealth and wages for the majority of the population not keeping up with cost of living? 

 

I just don't think there is any reason the average person (not below the poverty line) cannot save some money...even if it is nominal...5% of after tax income.  

 

My family was the first full Fijian family to come to Canada in 1964.  Before that, the men would come to work, but wives and children didn't come till almost a decade later.

 

My father was 21, my aunt was 10 and my uncle was 3.  They were fortunate enough to come with a thousand dollars.  They put $500 down on a house on the west side of Vancouver that cost $13,500...today the land alone would be worth $3M. 

 

About three years in, my grandfather passed away.  My father was now 24, with a widowed mother of 40 who barely spoke English, a sister who was only 13 and a brother who was barely 6.  He worked 3 jobs to maintain the mortgage and look after the family, while my grandmother took in borders to make ends meet.  Even then, they managed to pay the mortgage and save a small amount each month.

 

That frugal life lasted my grandmother her whole life.  Not only did she look after her children, but eventually lived off her retirement pension and old age security for nearly another 30 years, while still managing to save small amounts of money.  She never borrowed a cent outside of that original mortgage. 

 

When she would eat at McDonalds with the family, if she didn't finish her fries, she would carefully wrap up the paper packet of fries and put them in her jacket pocket.  What looked funny to me as an 8 year old, makes much more sense as an adult who was finally able to understand the challenges she faced earlier in life.

 

A couple of Christmases ago, I decided to donate a Christmas hamper to an underprivileged family.  My family and I gathered the components, put it in a basket and went and delivered it to a struggling single Mom with two young children. 

 

When we got to the basement suite they were renting, the back patio was covered in a shitload of stuff...barbecues, camping gear, toys, all sorts of other things.  When we went into the house, the underprivileged kids were playing handheld video games in a basement suite jam packed with stuff and they had just finished a couple of restaurant pizzas for dinner. 

 

After that experience, I decided I wasn't going to do another Christmas hamper.  Maybe I was too judgmental, but was this underprivileged or mismanaged?!  Regardless, I've chosen different organizations for my annual donations to go to where underprivileged or under-represented is much clearer!

 

Cheers!

[Parsad]

Oh, the kicker to the whole Christmas Hamper story is after we delivered the hamper, spent about 10 minutes with the family, the mother apologizes but has to go out for a Christmas party...girl's gotta have a good time!  

 

We're not sure who looked after the two children...the daughter was 12 and the boy was 9.  But Mommy was going to go party!

 

So in my humble and generalized opinion, the destructive pattern in savings among the population may have as much to do with gratification than economics or disparities in income! 

 

Even when I was broke, I managed to scrape up a nominal amount in savings each month, and as the small pile grew, I was able to start investing.  Any loose change, unexpected bonuses/checks...all went into emergency savings, then savings, then investments.  Cheers!

[changegonnacome]

4 minutes ago, Parsad said:

population may have as much to do with gratification than economics or disparities in income! 

for sure - I think lots of success (and failure) in life can be explained by how far out in the future folks think…. This lady lived moment to moment, immediate gratification etc…. Your father/grandmother and family thought not in moments but in generations…..the results speak for themselves…..what I would say in slight defense of the destructively immediate gratification folks is that modern technology grafted on to finely tuned consumer capitalism in the US in particular does an unbelievably efficient job of extracting every last penny of consumption (& more) from the dopamine addicted poor (or soon to be poor)…….push notifications for fast food, micro targeting on instagram, influencers driving envy, sub-prime credit card lending, payday loans, lease deals etc I could go on ..….combined together its a real lollapalooza effect for the folks born with a tendency towards to immediate gratification…..no country comes close to US in offering a ubiquitous suite of various products and services required to wreck one’s finances…I was shocked when I first came here….and so I’m unshocked by this stat in a way.

[Parsad]

16 minutes ago, changegonnacome said:

for sure - I think lots of success (and failure) in life can be explained by how far out in the future folks think…. This lady lived moment to moment, immediate gratification etc…. Your father/grandmother and family thought not in moments but in generations…..the results speak for themselves…..what I would say in slight defense of the destructively immediate gratification folks is that modern technology grafted on to finely tuned consumer capitalism in the US in particular does an unbelievably efficient job of extracting every last penny of consumption (& more) from the dopamine addicted poor (or soon to be poor)…….push notifications for fast food, micro targeting on instagram, influencers driving envy, sub-prime credit card lending, payday loans, lease deals etc I could go on ..….combined together its a real lollapalooza effect for the folks born with a tendency towards to immediate gratification…..no country comes close to US in offering a ubiquitous suite of various products and services required to wreck one’s finances…I was shocked when I first came here….and so I’m unshocked by this stat in a way.

 

Yup, totally agree!  But there also has never been more government support systems, safety nets, tax credits, grants, scholarships, bursaries, go fund me's, etc than anytime in history. 

 

If you can't save 5 cents on every dollar when unemployment is at 4%, interest rates at 5%, inflation is at 3% and you make the average income or better in North America...I think that falls to the consumer, not the times.  

 

Even though I'm inundated with online offers to spend my dollars, and I can afford to buy just about anything I want, I still live frugally as if I'm broke!  That saving or frugal mindset has to be channeled...doesn't show up by itself when you start making $150K a year.  Cheers!

[aws]

I did a double whammy of paying off the 3% mortgage on my old house (which I kept as a rental) and paying cash for my new house. Both of those happened in 2021.

 

In hindsight, I know I would be financially better off if I had more leverage from the mortgages. But I don't regret it at all. I was caught flat-footed by the drawdowns in 2020 and was more than happy to get rid of the leverage while I was in a good place the next year. And now that I have no debt, it's kind of nice knowing that another big market crash wouldn't affect me as hard as it would have in the past. Also just one less thing to worry about having to do every month.

[Gregmal]

1 hour ago, Parsad said:

 

About three years in, my grandfather passed away.  My father was now 24, with a widowed mother of 40 who barely spoke English, a sister who was only 13 and a brother who was barely 6.  He worked 3 jobs to maintain the mortgage and look after the family, while my grandmother took in borders to make ends meet.  Even then, they managed to pay the mortgage and save a small amount each month.

When everything is on the line, people hustle. Today’s generation is simply too comfortable.  
 

The only reason I became worth anything is because coming out of school I had nothing and no safety net so working the way I did, and doing the things I did to my body to make it happen were fair trade offs. Say 100 hour 5-6 day work weeks with a 90 minute daily commute to most people and it’s a hard pass. For me it changed my life. 

[Parsad]

26 minutes ago, Gregmal said:

When everything is on the line, people hustle. Today’s generation is simply too comfortable.  
 

The only reason I became worth anything is because coming out of school I had nothing and no safety net so working the way I did, and doing the things I did to my body to make it happen were fair trade offs. Say 100 hour 5-6 day work weeks with a 90 minute daily commute to most people and it’s a hard pass. For me it changed my life. 

 

Yup, I agree!  I also think the opportunities people have today...be it in the job sector or entrepreneurship...there is no excuse for not building a comfortable life if you hustle and work hard. 

 

Of course there are exceptions where tragedy/crisis can delay, affect or hinder a person/family's economic growth...but opportunities in my opinion have never been better!  Cheers!

[Paarslaars]

This does highlight the stark difference between the U.S. and Europe. With high minimum wages, high taxes and good social security, the incentive to work hard to get ahead is a lot less here and it shows in the culture... It is also much harder here of course to actually get ahead with hard work because the government takes half of it...

 

People get ahead here in three ways:

• Real estate (rent is not taxed and profit on real estate also isn't if the holding period is at least 5 years)
• Starting a business, lots of tax advantageous things to do, also when you sell your business you don't pay taxes on the gains.
• Investing, also no taxes except on dividends.

 

Perhaps a bit shameful to say but I never really worked hard... I studied, became an engineer and ended up quite quickly in a comfortable 40-45h workweek with a substantially above average salary. I'm very efficient in what I do and good at determining which actions have value and which don't, this helped me to avoid actually working hard.

 

Now at the point where capital returns outweigh savings... I started working even less. But this makes loans so valuable, because it frees up capital to invest. My first mortgage was at 1%, current one is at 2,5%. This is almost free money...

Now my employer allows for me to take out a loan against my pension funds, interest free, don't even have to repay the principal... the only thing I have to pay is the 2% interest that they are obligated to add to the pension funds themselves. Thinking about taking it but my wife feels like I'm leveraging too much into investments and it scares her.

 

 

 

Edited May 23 by Paarslaars

[Castanza]

5 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

Yup, I agree!  I also think the opportunities people have today...be it in the job sector or entrepreneurship...there is no excuse for not building a comfortable life if you hustle and work hard. 

 

Of course there are exceptions where tragedy/crisis can delay, affect or hinder a person/family's economic growth...but opportunities in my opinion have never been better!  Cheers!

 

No time to work when you're focused on "building your brand"  

[Ghost]

8 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

 

I just don't think there is any reason the average person (not below the poverty line) cannot save some money...even if it is nominal...5% of after tax income.  

 

My family was the first full Fijian family to come to Canada in 1964.  Before that, the men would come to work, but wives and children didn't come till almost a decade later.

 

My father was 21, my aunt was 10 and my uncle was 3.  They were fortunate enough to come with a thousand dollars.  They put $500 down on a house on the west side of Vancouver that cost $13,500...today the land alone would be worth $3M. 

 

About three years in, my grandfather passed away.  My father was now 24, with a widowed mother of 40 who barely spoke English, a sister who was only 13 and a brother who was barely 6.  He worked 3 jobs to maintain the mortgage and look after the family, while my grandmother took in borders to make ends meet.  Even then, they managed to pay the mortgage and save a small amount each month.

 

That frugal life lasted my grandmother her whole life.  Not only did she look after her children, but eventually lived off her retirement pension and old age security for nearly another 30 years, while still managing to save small amounts of money.  She never borrowed a cent outside of that original mortgage. 

 

When she would eat at McDonalds with the family, if she didn't finish her fries, she would carefully wrap up the paper packet of fries and put them in her jacket pocket.  What looked funny to me as an 8 year old, makes much more sense as an adult who was finally able to understand the challenges she faced earlier in life.

 

A couple of Christmases ago, I decided to donate a Christmas hamper to an underprivileged family.  My family and I gathered the components, put it in a basket and went and delivered it to a struggling single Mom with two young children. 

 

When we got to the basement suite they were renting, the back patio was covered in a shitload of stuff...barbecues, camping gear, toys, all sorts of other things.  When we went into the house, the underprivileged kids were playing handheld video games in a basement suite jam packed with stuff and they had just finished a couple of restaurant pizzas for dinner. 

 

After that experience, I decided I wasn't going to do another Christmas hamper.  Maybe I was too judgmental, but was this underprivileged or mismanaged?!  Regardless, I've chosen different organizations for my annual donations to go to where underprivileged or under-represented is much clearer!

 

Cheers!

 

Fantastic post. 

Charlie referred to individuals like your family as people with "gumption".  The poor in Canada, have 100+ monthly cell phones, eat out once a week, have every media subscription service, and have most of the latest gadgets.  

 

I too have lived a life of frugality and don't feel any poorer for it. 

[rkbabang]

9 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

 

I just don't think there is any reason the average person (not below the poverty line) cannot save some money...even if it is nominal...5% of after tax income.  

 

My family was the first full Fijian family to come to Canada in 1964.  Before that, the men would come to work, but wives and children didn't come till almost a decade later.

 

My father was 21, my aunt was 10 and my uncle was 3.  They were fortunate enough to come with a thousand dollars.  They put $500 down on a house on the west side of Vancouver that cost $13,500...today the land alone would be worth $3M. 

 

About three years in, my grandfather passed away.  My father was now 24, with a widowed mother of 40 who barely spoke English, a sister who was only 13 and a brother who was barely 6.  He worked 3 jobs to maintain the mortgage and look after the family, while my grandmother took in borders to make ends meet.  Even then, they managed to pay the mortgage and save a small amount each month.

 

That frugal life lasted my grandmother her whole life.  Not only did she look after her children, but eventually lived off her retirement pension and old age security for nearly another 30 years, while still managing to save small amounts of money.  She never borrowed a cent outside of that original mortgage. 

 

When she would eat at McDonalds with the family, if she didn't finish her fries, she would carefully wrap up the paper packet of fries and put them in her jacket pocket.  What looked funny to me as an 8 year old, makes much more sense as an adult who was finally able to understand the challenges she faced earlier in life.

 

A couple of Christmases ago, I decided to donate a Christmas hamper to an underprivileged family.  My family and I gathered the components, put it in a basket and went and delivered it to a struggling single Mom with two young children. 

 

When we got to the basement suite they were renting, the back patio was covered in a shitload of stuff...barbecues, camping gear, toys, all sorts of other things.  When we went into the house, the underprivileged kids were playing handheld video games in a basement suite jam packed with stuff and they had just finished a couple of restaurant pizzas for dinner. 

 

After that experience, I decided I wasn't going to do another Christmas hamper.  Maybe I was too judgmental, but was this underprivileged or mismanaged?!  Regardless, I've chosen different organizations for my annual donations to go to where underprivileged or under-represented is much clearer!

 

Cheers!

 

 

I had a realization like this about 20 years ago.  My wife and I were looking to buy a rental property, we were looking at 3 family buildings in a poorer part of a nearby city.   We didn't end up buying anything, but the way these poorer people lived was eye opening.  This was back in 2004-2006 and these people had gigantic TVs (I still had small tube TVs in my house), video game systems that my kids would have killed for, a lot of late model cars parked on the street (many a lot newer than mine), yet their apartments were all completely trashed and filthy, most of them stunk something awful.  We ended up deciding that we didn't want to be slum lords so we didn't buy anything in that part of the city.  And we couldn't afford multi-family investment buildings in the nicer areas as the time.

 

Another time we volunteered at a soup kitchen for the poor/homeless.  We expected to be preparing/serving food to needy poor families down on their luck, but we were just serving drug addicts and mentally ill people.  There were no families there, it was all adults and there wasn't a single person that I would characterize as a normal person down on his luck.  Needless to say we never did that again.

 

And another time we volunteered for an organization that provided winter clothes to needy families.  We had a stack of about 300 gift cards for JC Penny and we where supposed to provide each child with a $100 gift card and go shopping with the child who would have a list from their mother of what they needed, this was to make sure the money was actually spent on clothes for the child.  This took place in the largest city in the state, we had a large group of volunteers, 300 gift cards, and were prepared for hundreds of children to show up. We had 10.  Those 10 kids did get much needed winter coats, hats, and boots though.

 

It is a lot harder to actually help the needy than most people think.

 

[blakehampton]

10 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

 

I just don't think there is any reason the average person (not below the poverty line) cannot save some money...even if it is nominal...5% of after tax income.  

 

My family was the first full Fijian family to come to Canada in 1964.  Before that, the men would come to work, but wives and children didn't come till almost a decade later.

 

My father was 21, my aunt was 10 and my uncle was 3.  They were fortunate enough to come with a thousand dollars.  They put $500 down on a house on the west side of Vancouver that cost $13,500...today the land alone would be worth $3M. 

 

About three years in, my grandfather passed away.  My father was now 24, with a widowed mother of 40 who barely spoke English, a sister who was only 13 and a brother who was barely 6.  He worked 3 jobs to maintain the mortgage and look after the family, while my grandmother took in borders to make ends meet.  Even then, they managed to pay the mortgage and save a small amount each month.

 

That frugal life lasted my grandmother her whole life.  Not only did she look after her children, but eventually lived off her retirement pension and old age security for nearly another 30 years, while still managing to save small amounts of money.  She never borrowed a cent outside of that original mortgage. 

 

When she would eat at McDonalds with the family, if she didn't finish her fries, she would carefully wrap up the paper packet of fries and put them in her jacket pocket.  What looked funny to me as an 8 year old, makes much more sense as an adult who was finally able to understand the challenges she faced earlier in life.

 

A couple of Christmases ago, I decided to donate a Christmas hamper to an underprivileged family.  My family and I gathered the components, put it in a basket and went and delivered it to a struggling single Mom with two young children. 

 

When we got to the basement suite they were renting, the back patio was covered in a shitload of stuff...barbecues, camping gear, toys, all sorts of other things.  When we went into the house, the underprivileged kids were playing handheld video games in a basement suite jam packed with stuff and they had just finished a couple of restaurant pizzas for dinner. 

 

After that experience, I decided I wasn't going to do another Christmas hamper.  Maybe I was too judgmental, but was this underprivileged or mismanaged?!  Regardless, I've chosen different organizations for my annual donations to go to where underprivileged or under-represented is much clearer!

 

Cheers!

For context, I come from a generally poorer area. A lot of the things I see, alongside the ones you already listed, are actions such as multiple divorces, having children with multiple people, gambling, drugs, and mostly just other stupid decisions involving common sense. These are things that people can avoid, even if they’re not from money. I do understand that sometimes relationships could not work out because of abuse etc, but I also believe there’s a certain point where it does become about you.

[DooDiligence]

Internal vs external locus of control? Some people just can't be helped.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176523002744#:~:text=The results show that individuals,to enter a homeless episode.

Edited May 23 by DooDiligence

[TwoCitiesCapital]

3 hours ago, rkbabang said:

 

It is a lot harder to actually help the needy than most people think.

 

 

And a lot fewer 'needy' than most suppose. 

 

A I've grown older, I've grown more suspicious of charity for these reasons.

 

Being 'poor' today still looks great compared to being poor in the early 1900s in the US. 

 

 

[Luca]

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilization. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak). What David Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it. A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do.

We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

[Eldad]

5 hours ago, blakehampton said:

For context, I come from a generally poorer area. A lot of the things I see, alongside the ones you already listed, are actions such as multiple divorces, having children with multiple people, gambling, drugs, and mostly just other stupid decisions involving common sense. These are things that people can avoid, even if they’re not from money. I do understand that sometimes relationships could not work out because of abuse etc, but I also believe there’s a certain point where it does become about you.

The most powerful wealth indicator is marriage. You hear people talk about the racial wealth gap in America, if you account for the differences in marriage, there basically is no racial wealth gap. Black married folks are better off than white unmarried. Only a few % difference between white married and black married. Dems never seem to talk about that? I wonder why? 

[Parsad]

6 hours ago, rkbabang said:

 

It is a lot harder to actually help the needy than most people think.

 

 

There are definitely many legitimate people who do need help out there...both in North America and around the world...including the disaffected and disenfranchised. 

 

I'm just saying that there is some truth to many people not taking responsibility for themselves or at least managing their resources better...especially if they are earning at least the average family income or better.

 

Cheers!