A bag of sugar provides nothing but calories. No protein, no vitamins, no fiber, and very little sense of satisfaction–since sugar alone isn’t very filling or delicious.
A five dollar value combo at a fast food restaurant will give you a ton of calories. It will also give you some protein and some vitamins. AND it will give you pleasure, since a food scientist somewhere has made it so.
Does processed food always come on top? Of course not. A banana sold in a bunch is a quarter, and that’s a 100 calories. A hard boiled egg is another 100 calories, and it’s like twelve cents or something if you’re getting a dozen. That’s breakfast right there, and it’s healthier and cheaper than McCheesyGreasy Biscuit Sandwich. But I don’t think it’s stupid that people would choose the latter over the former. I know that if I had to face a day of shoveling shit, only having a banana and a egg to look forward to would add insult to injury. That’s what you eat when you’ve got a steak waiting for you at dinner later. Not a Hot Pocket and koolaide.
And five dollars spent on groceries instead of processed food gives you much more protein and vitamins and at a greatly reduced cost. Because processed food does not cost less than unprocessed food.
That must be where we differ. I would think spending more than you have on things that are not as good as what you could get for less is stupid.
I’ve been poor enough to scrimp on my food budget. I managed to eat just fine, and much of it was done by avoiding processed food and McDonald’s and suchlike. So, again, the economist in the link is wrong.
Yes indeed.
My parents bought a house in 1950 for £2,500.
They lived in it for 57 years, then sold it for £250,000 (and bought a suitable retirement bungalow for £200,000, leaving £50,000 for emergencies and enjoyment in their old age.)
I bought my present house for £60,000 27 years ago. It’s currently valued at £180,000.
Also I don’t want to live in a ‘single room’. I have three bedrooms - so I can host visitors. Also I enjoy having a TV room, a computer den and a dining room.
I agree with you. And I may get shit for this, but we were so poor at some points when I was a kid we ate chicken scratch feed. Us kids would go through it picking out the gravel and shells before cooking. Dried beans, rice, foraged/cheap greens and so on is incredibly cheap and also nutritious.
That said, many poor people today lack the skills to cook on a budget and a dollar Mcburger is certainly cheaper than buying ground beef (about five bucks a pound right now) plus condiments, cheese and a package of buns.
I see both sides and I think it largely depends on where you live. I haven’t rented in over 20 years but if one works in a region where real estate costs are high it makes sense to rent. But if you can afford to buy, do it! Especially if the homeowner can, or knows people who can, do home repairs for free or cheap.
I live in a very low cost of living area where purchasing real estate is cheaper than renting it. I have land (almost a half acre), I can house my dogs and have a vegetable garden and no matter what, I have a place to live for about $400 per year in taxes.
I moved into my own home with a two year loan to finish off the roof. The payments - although with a horrible interest rate (12%!!) were still cheaper than the rent I’d been paying.
You wouldn’t believe the number of people who said they’d never take a loan like that - they’d never let the bank have all their money, blah blah.
You probably knew for a certainty or at least had hope you would be in a better position financially in the future and could eat better. If you knew for a certainty that wouldn’t be true, or had no hope of that, I imagine eating beans and rice every day would become a little more soul crushing.
And you can’t tell me a(at the time) 70cent bean burrito from Taco Bell was more expensive when you factor in the cost of buying the supplies and possibly cookware/crockpot/fridge/oven and cost of electricity/gas and time/convenience and labor/cleanup etc.
If you own your own home and have a kitchen and all the cookware and have time , sure fast food is often a bad deal. If you’re living in a one room flophouse with not even a hotplate to your name cheap dollar menu stuff is the better deal, at least for the time being.
I don’t think anyone is getting my point- the benefits and drawbacks of owning or renting a similar abode are what they are, and for most people come out better on the “own” side assuming you want to live in a normal dwelling. That’s not the debate.
Neither buying nor renting a normal home objectively beats the financial return on living in a a dirt-cheap, minimal living space. 150 square feet seems to be the standard minimum. However you arrange it, that’s going to be cheaper than any kind of normal situation. With the leftover money, you could make all kinds of good investments- including in real estate if that’s your thing. Living smaller is cheaper.
But of course, people don’t want to do that. People want to own a real home. Which is fine. But that doesn’t give you a lot of room to say you are so much better or smarter than the guy springing $5.99 for the extra value meal. You are still spending a ton of money on stuff that isn’t strictly necessary. You just don’t think of it that way.
For someone disabled, such as my spouse, the benefit of having someone else be responsible for things like repairs, clearing walks, and such things he is unable to do himself may make renting appealing. Just sayin’
While for many people owning a home makes a lot of financial sense there are circumstances where renting is a sensible alternative. A lot depends on the individual.
There is a convenience factor involved - while he is having a particularly bad day health/ability-wise is not a good time to be vetting contractors, for example. Some larger management companies will have contractors on call, greatly simplifying finding someone to deal with a plumbing emergency at 2 am.
yes, but that doesn’t always work out. after the unpleasantness of 2007-2010, the home my folks own (free and clear) is worth about $20,000 less than the selling price when they bought it in 1988. It’s probably gone up a bit due to the slow recovery, but if they were to sell today they’d be lucky to even get what they originally bought it for.
I’m not disabled, but I’m content to be a renter. I prefer knowing that if I want or need to move (which I will be doing when my lease is up) I only have to wait a number of months or if I’m far enough along to buy out the remainder. If I owned a place, I’d have to go through the hassle of trying to sell it.
It seems to me that the variety offered by cheap fast food (there isn’t a lot of variety there - the McDonalds value menu, the Taco Bell cheap tacos - which are not very filling…and then…) is far more limiting than cheap grocery store food. But then, my poverty years were filled with more than rice and beans. Potatoes, oatmeal and cornmeal are all very cheap. Bags of frozen vegetables from Aldis. Eggs. I used to make a box of Jiffy cornmeal muffins every week. Of course, pasta and tomato sauce. Pasta and olive oil. Pasta and off brand Velveeta when you are wealthy :).
Visit an ethnic grocery store and your options expand further - and for amazingly cheap costs. Rice noodles. Huge bags of spices for much cheaper than a grocery store. Beans in a variety of types. Produce for less than a grocery store - and often these markets are in urban areas.
I did have an oven. But a crockpot can be found at second hand shops around here every time I go in for less than a value meal - and almost everything listed above can be cooked in a crockpot.
Part of the problem is a lack of knowing how to cook - all too many impoverished families simply don’t know how to prepare food from scratch. If you don’t know how to do that then yes, “convenience” food you can easily nuke is indeed convenient. If no one in your immediate circle knows how to cook more than frozen meals and slice n’ bake cookies it may simply not occur to you to cook from scratch.
I think this is the big thing. If you’ve never learned to cook, and have all of these ready-made options which don’t cost that much, then why not buy those?
back before the Food Network went to all competition/reality shows, people used to love to ridicule Sandra Lee’s Semi-Homemade Cooking. Especially insufferable snobs and assholes like Anthony Bourdain, who were too stupid to realize that the people she was preaching to couldn’t even do the 70% packaged/30% fresh stuff she was making. They totally missed the point of her show because they were too busy being smug.
I live in a region where move-in ready homes in OK neighborhoods can be had for about $3,000 or less. Properties in crap 'hoods, or which need a lot of work, for under $500. Property taxes between $300-400 per year.
Are these properties investments? No, of course not. Are they a crap-ton cheaper than renting at $400-500 per month? Absolutely yes, if you have some basic survival/fix-it skills, and/or have friends who do. And obviously, if you don’t mind living in a place like Flint, MI. Which isn’t actually that bad.
The problem with food isn’t that processed food is cheaper than fresh. It’s that people think it’s cheaper. Which is an easy misconception to fall into, if you don’t know how to cook, or how to shop seasonally, or how to grow things yourself. You can get really tasty, really nutritious food for nearly free… if you know how. If you even know that the options exist. Too many people don’t.
Yup me and my wife were looking at those with dreams in our heads a few years ago, we found houses(real actual decent looking houses but small) on real estate websites for five hundred dollars or UNDER! in Detroit. But then you do a google streetview and the surrounding houses up and down the street are all obviously abandoned and covered in graffiti or even partially collapsed looking like some post apocalyptic movie. We realized the nearest stores were only bodegas or liquor stores, access to decent shopping seemed to be an issue. Not to mention stuff like fiber internet or cable an unknown.
Real estate companies their whole demeanor changed when they realized which property we were asking after, like they didn’t want to even deal with us(we did not ask for a showing anything, just info). That isn’t even mentioning lack of employment opportunities or other amenities or services in the general area.