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Wasnt that the point of this thread? That you cant learn about budgeting until you have had to do it yourself?

Another aspect of poverty is that quite often it's simply more expensive to be poor in many respects.

Have car troubles? Well, you don't have the money to afford a complete overhaul, so you patch the one critical system for half the price, but you have to do that three or four time because you never have the money for the complete overhaul before it gives out again. Same thing with many medical issues (can't afford the major surgery for $20k so I have to keep going to the ER to manage the symptoms twelve or fifteen times at $3.5k a pop).

Yes, but its not like its some skill only poor people practice. its something every adult needs to be functional, and it applies no matter your income level.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Another aspect of poverty is that quite often it's simply more expensive to be poor in many respects.

Have car troubles? Well, you don't have the money to afford a complete overhaul, so you patch the one critical system for half the price, but you have to do that three or four time because you never have the money for the complete overhaul before it gives out again. Same thing with many medical issues (can't afford the major surgery for $20k so I have to keep going to the ER to manage the symptoms twelve or fifteen times at $3.5k a pop).

Heck, there are places that thrive on that. For example, Payday loan places.
Or, arguably, Laundry mats, paying sometimes 6$ a week for cleaning clothes. After a few years, you could have bought a machine for that much.
But, you dont have the money THEN so you cant.
Being poor is, Ironically expensive

This is true.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Another aspect of poverty is that quite often it's simply more expensive to be poor in many respects.

Have car troubles? Well, you don't have the money to afford a complete overhaul, so you patch the one critical system for half the price, but you have to do that three or four time because you never have the money for the complete overhaul before it gives out again. Same thing with many medical issues (can't afford the major surgery for $20k so I have to keep going to the ER to manage the symptoms twelve or fifteen times at $3.5k a pop).

Heck, there are places that thrive on that. For example, Payday loan places.
Or, arguably, Laundry mats, paying sometimes 6$ a week for cleaning clothes. After a few years, you could have bought a machine for that much.
But, you dont have the money THEN so you cant.
Being poor is, Ironically expensive

Exactly, it's far cheaper to be rich, and being poor is most definitely expensive.

The calculus carries up too. It costs more for a middle class family to own a home than a very wealthy family, as the latter can simply buy a home outright while the former goes into debt for thirty years, often paying double or triple the value of the home over time.

Money just doesn't go as far the less you have of it

 cincydooley wrote:
Yeah, costs went up significantly for a lot of people under the ACA.

We've been over this before and yes, some states had a high initial hike (where there was a large number of people on extremely minimal plans before ACA). But the overall price impact was not that much.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Another aspect of poverty is that quite often it's simply more expensive to be poor in many respects.

Have car troubles? Well, you don't have the money to afford a complete overhaul, so you patch the one critical system for half the price, but you have to do that three or four time because you never have the money for the complete overhaul before it gives out again. Same thing with many medical issues (can't afford the major surgery for $20k so I have to keep going to the ER to manage the symptoms twelve or fifteen times at $3.5k a pop).

My first couple of years out of home I was buying the cheapest shoes I could find, because I also liked to eat sometimes... It was a bit of a revelation the first time I was able to splash out and buy a decent pair, and had them last much, much longer than the same amount of cash would have kept me in the cheapies...

 Vaktathi wrote:
Another aspect of poverty is that quite often it's simply more expensive to be poor in many respects.

Have car troubles? Well, you don't have the money to afford a complete overhaul, so you patch the one critical system for half the price, but you have to do that three or four time because you never have the money for the complete overhaul before it gives out again. Same thing with many medical issues (can't afford the major surgery for $20k so I have to keep going to the ER to manage the symptoms twelve or fifteen times at $3.5k a pop).

It goes for housing too. Here in the UK there are so many people trying to get on the property ladder, there is absolutely no value at the bottom. You're paying through the nose (~180K) for shoddy basement conversions with no space for a bath and "open plan kitchens", which is apparently estate agent speak for "there wasn't space for a kitchen so the sink is in the living room"

On the flip side, if you can stretch your budget to 2 million plus, you can get incredible value, like 10 bedrooms and swimming pool, because there just isn't competition for those houses.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Couldn't complete it- I succumbed to anxiety at around day 12.

There are indeed some disingenuous choices, I.E. either pay $30 for a baby-sitter or don't go (I don't have siblings/cousins/friends in this hypothetical who might be willing to do it for free?). However on the whole it's a pretty stark and reasonable snap-shot of how much it sucks to be poor, and how out of touch with reality people who champion "If you're poor it's you're fault!" are.

Yeah, it's far from a complete simulation. I paid to rent in the city, and then kept getting hit with car bills, I should have had an option to just sell the car.

But it is really good at getting to the emotional impact of each decision. I had the money for my kid to go on a field trip, but because I spent that money I didn't have enough two days later when the dog got sick. Damn...


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 Sigvatr wrote:
Health insurance is insanely expensive because it's most often laid on the backs of everyone - and it's a tricky one. What makes medical services so expensive are long-term patients. Cancer etc. The cost for these individuals keep exploding for years and everyone has to carry them. In Germany, most people pay 15.5% of their pre-taxes salary for health insurance. You must have a health insurance in Germany. "Almost" everyone pays 15.5% because some people have the option to get a private health insurance that offers much, much, much better services at lower cost. Sounds crazy, but that's because you pay for you and yourself only. The healthier you are, the less you pay and vice versa. Plus in order to qualify for a private health insurance, you have to either have a very high monthly income (~55.000€ before taxes, German average is ~40.000€ pre taxes). It's cheaper because you don't have to pay for others.

The German system is very screwy in that regard. Someone on €54,000 has to pay in to the private system and subsidise the healthcare of everyone earning low wages, but someone on €56,000 can go and pay for his own care. Very odd.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Working Class = Middle Class. its not a 4th class wedged between Middle and Lower.

Please just stop making things up. Words have actual fething meanings.

The working class are people who have full time work, but in unskilled or semi-skilled positions. Historically this meant manual labour, but more and more it's meaning stuff like retail or food service.

The middle class are people who still work full time, but are able to command a higher wage because they have specialist skills, so lower and middle management, or middle rung professionals like accountants and IT guys.


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 cincydooley wrote:
Again, no idea what you're talking about:

http://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-in-every-us-state-2015-4

"In this analysis, Pew defined middle class households as those earning 67%-200% of a state’s median income."

So basically your argument amounts to saying that if we take middle class to be 67% to 200% of a state's median income, then we can prove that middle class is 67% to 200% of a state's median income. Good job.

Anyhow, I think there's an idea that floats around, it's more common in the US but not exclusive, that 'middle class' is referring to the people literally in the middle of all society. So you line everyone up in order of income, and the ones in the middle are the middle class.

But the middle is actually defined in respect to the working class and the upper class, it is the class in the middle of those two. And when society has a pyramid structure with lots of people at the bottom and not many at the top, then that middle group is actually much smaller than the working class beneath it.


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 cincydooley wrote:
If you're an obese smoker you're damn right you should pay more than these athletes you're claiming go to the Doc more than you.

Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...


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 cincydooley wrote:
No. Said dangerous jobs often pay VERY well.

If you work in logging or on an oil rig, then sure. But really high risk jobs like that are a pretty small portion of the workplace, despite what the History Channel shows.

Most workers are in low risk jobs, or in very low risk jobs. Think of someone working in a warehouse, compared to someone working in data entry. The guy in the warehouse is more likely to get injured, but he’s not taking home any kind of sweet danger money.


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 cincydooley wrote:
Which is a large reason why a national minimum wage makes zero sense.

In the abstract, then sure. But given that the federal minimum is pathetically low by the cost of living in any state, in practice it’s okay.


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 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
1.... I should point out, the "Middle class" is very much defined in economic terms, and usually this wage is from 40-250k per year. This is also pretty synonymous with the term Working Class, because people earn their money through their wages and work, rather than dividends and stock options.

No, class is defined by more than just income, and any definition that draws in such a wide range as 40-250k is just totally fething pointless.

2. Cincey is quite right... the cost for most people who ALREADY had insurance pre-ACA has gone up.

This is a big ‘sort of’. Costs have gone up for people on very good plans, and gone up for people who had very basic plans. But for the latter it is a wash, as they now have plans that actually do something.

For those in between it’s been a much more mixed story, with some up and some down, and made even more complex because premiums have been increasing anyway. I mean, if my premium increased 15%, and yours decreased 2%, what does that mean when premiums were increasing on average 7% before hand? And when we both have different stuff in our new plans?

Those last two are quite often the result of living an unhealthy lifestyle. And it really should be more expensive for people who have made those choices. However, I think there's a limit to how expensive that "expensive" should be, and it has to do with the associate risk pool that insurance companies have.

So a system that allowed for a cap of 50% on premium for smoking, and a 30% cap for other unhealthy behaviour…


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Yes, there are cost of living indices for every little area.

So you accept you were wrong. Good, moving on.

You'd also have to legislate a living wage for each of these individual areas, it would have to fluctuate on a yearly basis because this kind of thing is very volatile, and you'd have to consider each individual employee's living situation and dependents. Every individual person would basically have his own living wage.

This would be a nightmare to legislate and keep track of.

No, you wouldn’t. You’ve invented a really weird system in your head, and used the impossibility of that system to argue against a more robust, basic system. Don’t do that.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Can I use the "You don't know what its like" argument next time someone from Europe tries to tell Americans how we should run our constitutional rights and laws?

That depends on whether they're point requires personal experience or not. Plenty of things can be understood without direct experience. For instance, today we all learned that water flows on Mars, though none of us have been there.

On the other hand, plenty of stuff, especially on day to day living, is actually quite hard to understand unless you've lived it.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Can I use the "You don't know what its like" argument next time someone from Europe tries to tell Americans how we should run our constitutional rights and laws?

Certainly you can, but it will be a bad argument because anyone can read the Constitution and understand the laws that derive from it.

 Vaktathi wrote:
The calculus carries up too. It costs more for a middle class family to own a home than a very wealthy family, as the latter can simply buy a home outright while the former goes into debt for thirty years, often paying double or triple the value of the home over time.

Well, sort of but not really. While the mortgage payer ends up paying a lot more over the course of the loan, it’s a bit misleading to add up the total mortgage payments and compare to purchase price. A payment of $1,000 made in 30 years time simply is nowhere near as valuable as a $1,000 payment made today. Not just because of inflation, but also because $1,000 today could be invested and grow significantly in value.

And the trick is in realising that almost all homeloans are way lower than any but the most conservative investment rates. As a result, even people with the money to buy a house flat out generally don’t, instead taking a mortgage and investing their money. If the bank charges 4% and the market pays 8%...


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 Smacks wrote:
It goes for housing too. Here in the UK there are so many people trying to get on the property ladder, there is absolutely no value at the bottom. You're paying through the nose (~180K) for shoddy basement conversions with no space for a bath and "open plan kitchens", which is apparently estate agent speak for "there wasn't space for a kitchen so the sink is in the living room"

On the flip side, if you can stretch your budget to 2 million plus, you can get incredible value, like 10 bedrooms and swimming pool, because there just isn't competition for those houses.

I think that kind thing changes with time and market conditions. Here in Perth right now we have something similar at the bottom end of the market, with $300k buying you nothing more than a very shoddy apartment. But once you get past that basic buy in then an every extra $100k buys a significant increase in quality, until you get to about a million, after which it takes about 500k to get any significant increase in house or location.

Speaking very loosely of course, there’s always better buys and poorer buys in any price bracket.

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

I actually kind of agree with cincydooley for the first time. If you smoke, you know the risks, and when your lungs die it's on you.

 cincydooley wrote:
No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

What about someone who is over 90? That could also be seen as self inflicted... If they hadn't abstained from smoking and hamburgers their whole life, they wouldn't have lived to be so old and such a burden on the system.

 cincydooley wrote:

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

Wow.

Might as well not cover pregnant women as well, they did it to themselves after all...

 agnosto wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

Wow.

Might as well not cover pregnant women as well, they did it to themselves after all...

Yeah, that's absolutely what I said.

But it's foolish to say they shouldn't pay more.

Every study out there tells us females use medical care more often than males.

As such, they should absolutely pay more than a 23-year old male that probably wont go to the doctor unless he's got a broken or severed limb.

 cincydooley wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

Wow.

Might as well not cover pregnant women as well, they did it to themselves after all...

Yeah, that's absolutely what I said.

But it's foolish to say they shouldn't pay more.

Every study out there tells us females use medical care more often than males.

As such, they should absolutely pay more than a 23-year old male that probably wont go to the doctor unless he's got a broken or severed limb.

They do. Statistically speaking, women buy the more expensive health plans as they realize that they'll need the services more as do older people. The reason being that the out of pocket maximums and co-pays are lower in the more expensive plans; meanwhile that 23 year old is buying the cheapest plan available.

I don't get your point. In a modern, first world country, every citizen is deserving of medical treatment; hell there's 2nd and 3rd world countries that do a better job of it than we do. I've lived in two other countries, both of which have/had universal coverage (S. Korea and Japan) and it was fantastic. I've also visited several other countries with universal coverage; Thailand has some truly beautiful hospitals and I paid about $100 for a full body scan and blood work-up just because it was cheaper than Japan (where I lived at the time).

You may be young and spry but that doesn't last forever unless you want to picture the US as Logan's Run.

Uhhhh... even healthy 23 year old males have been intimately involved in at least one birth...

They're also likely to be healthy because someone else paid for proper nutrition, vaccinations, medicines, checkups. Not to mention sewerage... No rickets, cholera or polio for you!

 cincydooley wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

Wow.

Might as well not cover pregnant women as well, they did it to themselves after all...

Yeah, that's absolutely what I said.

But it's foolish to say they shouldn't pay more.

Every study out there tells us females use medical care more often than males.

As such, they should absolutely pay more than a 23-year old male that probably wont go to the doctor unless he's got a broken or severed limb.

This I disagree with. Smoking is your choice. Being a woman is not.

 cincydooley wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 sebster wrote:


Umm, then I guess you like ACA, because that allows a premium of up to 50% for smokers, and up to 30% for obesity or other conditions.

Honestly, you guys sometimes...

No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

Wow.

Might as well not cover pregnant women as well, they did it to themselves after all...

Yeah, that's absolutely what I said.

But it's foolish to say they shouldn't pay more.

Every study out there tells us females use medical care more often than males.

As such, they should absolutely pay more than a 23-year old male that probably wont go to the doctor unless he's got a broken or severed limb.

Not the ones on prostate cancer.

Just get rid of insurance and make everyone pay whatever bill is presented when treatment is required.

The thing is, we are not talking about just Obese and smokers.
We are talking about people like my old teacher, bad back so every insurance forced him to pay more, even for non-back related stuff.
I got a better Idea, State sponsored healthcare.

 cincydooley wrote:
No. There should be no cap. And no insurance company should be forced to provide for a 400 pound slob smoking 2 and a half packs a day.

And that's an idea with some nice theory behind it, but its dysfunctional in the real world.

Because allowing an open ended increase will see insurers just push prices past the point that anyone will be willing to pay, because no insurer wants smokers on the books. But when they get sick we aren't going to just let them die, we will still give them treatment, because we aren't a completely awful bunch of monsters. So society as a whole still bears the cost, and maybe we recover some of that cost by bankrupting the dude who didn't have insurance, but that's hardly a good solution.


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 cincydooley wrote:
But it's foolish to say they shouldn't pay more.

Every study out there tells us females use medical care more often than males.

What in the feth would that achieve?

Give people a price reason to not be born as a girl?

 sebster wrote:



Give people a price reason to not be born as a girl?

Don't worry; they're made up for with their health and auto insurance costs.

Damn being born a man.

 cincydooley wrote:
Don't worry; they're made up for with their health and auto insurance costs.

Damn being born a man.

No, seriously, what's the point of making women pay more?

I mean, the point of different prices is to give people an incentive to act differently. You make a smoker pay more to encourage him to quit, and discourage other people to start smoking. But what's the point in charging a woman more for health insurance? Trying to encourage her to be born a man next time around?

 sebster wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
Don't worry; they're made up for with their health and auto insurance costs.

Damn being born a man.

No, seriously, what's the point of making women pay more?

Maybe because they cost more?

Its really simple. If you are higher risk for the insurance paying out then you pay more. Higher premiums aren't only a disincentive, they're also indicative of the risk the insurance company is willing to take.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Maybe because they cost more?

Its really simple. If you are higher risk for the insurance paying out then you pay more. Higher premiums aren't only a disincentive, they're also indicative of the risk the insurance company is willing to take.

But insurance is a pool. Individual costs are spread across the whole. So you establish a price that's an average of men and women, and then you take on men and you take on women, and hey presto the costs are covered.

The only reason to change from the base price is to encourage or discourage certain kinds of behaviour. Increase prices for smokers etc. That doesn't exist with women, you can't encourage them to stop being the gender that gets pregnant.

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Maybe because they cost more?

Its really simple. If you are higher risk for the insurance paying out then you pay more. Higher premiums aren't only a disincentive, they're also indicative of the risk the insurance company is willing to take.

But insurance is a pool. Individual costs are spread across the whole. So you establish a price that's an average of men and women, and then you take on men and you take on women, and hey presto the costs are covered.

The only reason to change from the base price is to encourage or discourage certain kinds of behaviour. Increase prices for smokers etc. That doesn't exist with women, you can't encourage them to stop being the gender that gets pregnant.

Thats not profitable. What you do is put people with the same characteristics in their own category to determine their rates, using their risk factors to determine the end rate. This way, everyone gets what they pay for and the company can maximize profits.

You don't make everyone pay the same rates. You make everyone pay a rate that reflects their risk. Thats how loans work, thats how insurance works/should work.

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Maybe because they cost more?

Its really simple. If you are higher risk for the insurance paying out then you pay more. Higher premiums aren't only a disincentive, they're also indicative of the risk the insurance company is willing to take.

But insurance is a pool. Individual costs are spread across the whole. So you establish a price that's an average of men and women, and then you take on men and you take on women, and hey presto the costs are covered.

The only reason to change from the base price is to encourage or discourage certain kinds of behaviour. Increase prices for smokers etc. That doesn't exist with women, you can't encourage them to stop being the gender that gets pregnant.

In insurance, it's a simple reality that people get charged more or less for many things they can't control. Age & Gender are both taken into consideration for just about any type of insurance, and in *most* (though not all) cases, women get cheaper rates than men.

 cincydooley wrote:
they're made up for with their health and auto insurance costs.

A lot of people feel that charging men a higher premium just for being men is also discriminatory. It's really quite a lazy and offensive way of distinguishing who is or isn't a safe driver.