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I am poor. Most of the people in this area are poor. No one I know rents furniture.
The people I have known who rented furniture? College students from upper middle class homes.
The stats get even better when using donated embryos, or donor eggs or more than one cycle. What’s expensive to someone making 12k a year may not be expensive to someone making five or six times as much. Adoption is not cheap either. Average costs can be upwards of 25k with many couples being rejected for factors like age or prior medical history. Many couples who do IVF wind up with frozen embryos. A cycle using frozen embryos is typically 3k or so. Again relatively not that expensive if you’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel in the income scale. You can also do an embryo adoption with another couple for 6k or so.
As I pointed out there are many ways around that including using donated meds, donated embryos, shared cycles and frozen embryos from prior cycles. You can also go overseas where costs tend to be much less. The Czech Republic, for example, offers a round of IVF for about 6k. Most are NOT going into heavy debt to afford IVF. Some medical plans even cover it.
If people wag their fingers at poor people who have lots of children well frankly they should. Having children you can’t even afford to feed is a very stupid life choice.
As has been pointed out on this thread multiple times, you can largely avoid poverty if you make some basic rational life choices like getting a high school diploma, avoiding early childbearing and working. Despite your assertions, most Americans are not a single job loss away from living in a tent.
I’m sympathetic to the poor. I don’t think ANYONE should be living in a tent. But I’m not about to infantalize some people who have made some very stupid life choices.
Just because YOU have not found any decent paying work at home jobs does not mean they don’t exist.
The ultimate in presumption. telling other people whether or not they should have children. I think you should not have children because I have determined you are too poor.
There are plenty of people on this board who have had their financial legs chopped out from under them by this depression. Companies have shut their doors and left long term employees standing in the streets.
Bank of America is dumping 30,000 employees to offshore their jobs. These are people with advanced degrees and experience. I guess they should have known better.
The leading cause of bankruptcy is illness. People with health insurance are losing their lives savings. People without will end up in the streets. I suppose they or their families should not have gotten sick or hurt in an accident. They should know better.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH Here is illness causing 62 percent of bankruptcies. Some people just do not know how to budget.
That’s not what I said at all.
Here’s a different translation than Nava’s. The meaning is a little bit different- personally it makes a little more sense to me.
Oh, and here is the version played with saxophonist Don Byas. It’s the saddest performance ever! I don’t want to hijack, I’m taking it to Cafe Society.
You’re missing the point, which is not how do get fertility assistance on the cheap or subsidize it, but that it is possible to go heavily into debt to conceive a child. As for the rest of your facts – it is even cheaper to just not have children. From a strictly fiscal point of view “no children” is the most beneficial choice for anyone, but it’s OK for anyone BUT poor people to make the choice to have them. Somehow, you think it’s OK to subsidize expensive and uncertain technologies for middle class (and above) families who want to conceive, but not provide help to the poor people already here and alive. That’s just… bizarre to me.
We won’t even get to the insanity that not only do medical plans - such as they exist - for poor people do not cover birth control but they don’t cover abortion either! Poor women without doctors or medical coverage do NOT have access to birth control pills and thus are left with less reliable contraception. If/when that fails, society gives them no choice but to have that baby. The cost of that pregnancy and delivery will be on society, and many will complain about the burdensome cost while totally rejecting paying for a MUCH cheaper termination or birth control pill, even if the pregnant woman would prefer it. Poor women certainly don’t have access to emergency contraception/morning after pill. If she keeps the baby she’s a bad person. If she gives up the baby well, she must not love her children so she’s a bad mother. Or maybe some busy-body will conclude that because she’s poor she’s inherently unfit and just take the baby away from her.
But hey, it’s all the woman’s fault, there are no factors involved making her more likely than her better-off counterparts to get pregnant in the first place, and no access to abortion. :rolleyes:
Great, we have medical plans to create more people for an overpopulated world, but we have 50 million Americans with no medical coverage at all other than the ER. Am I the only one who seems something wrong with that?
Again, you are ignoring the fact that not every family has been poor forever, that many people had children when they were middle class and then became poor. They COULD afford those children when they had them, yet you feel free to condemn for having them. How were they supposed to know they’d come upon hard times and poverty?
You seriously believe that? The unemployment rate went from 5% to 10%, the UNDERemployment rate is 1 in 6 Americans, and millions of those people have COLLEGE degrees, not just high school diplomas.
There is ONE job open for every SIX people looking for work right now. That means 5/6 of the unemployed will NOT find word no matter how hard they try right now.
Of course, I know it’s MUCH more comforting to think that if you make those “good” life choices you’ll be magically insulated from misfortune. If you just finish high school, put off kids, and work hard you’ll be OK and never poor, right? You’ll never lose your job and have trouble finding another, you’ll never become disabled or have cancer, you’ll never be in a major natural disaster and lose everything you own and your job gone because the place you work was also destroyed…
Yes in GOOD times your strategy of get educated and look for work does work - but these are not ordinary times. I understand it’s comforting to think all those millions of people just made wrong choices and it’s all their fault but that is NOT the case. Million of those people made all the right choices and still ended up destitute. You could, too, don’t kid yourself. Ask yourself - if I lost my current source of income and was not able to find a job for two years where would I be? Unless you’ve got such a nest-egg you can wholly support yourself with no money coming in the door for years you’re definitely at risk of poverty.
But you are perfectly willing to infantalize people who did everything “right” by your standards and still wound up in a tent. Because that’s what you’re doing when you say “you shouldn’t have had kids” to someone who was making $100,000 a year when they had those kids but now, 5 or 10 or 15 years later they’ve hit hard times.
YOU said you sent me the information… yet I haven’t received it. If you found one, great, but apparently you don’t want to share. That’s just bizarre to me - either you sent it to the wrong username, or… well, I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt rather than think you’d post that you did something to help someone when you didn’t.
Even if you do have a link to a decent paying on-line job, though, it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of them ARE scams. There are a tremendous number of people who prey on the poor and the jobless and desperate. Heck, I got a flyer in the mail last week recently purporting to be a Federal job-hiring fair which looked quite inviting until I did some research and discovered it was a “seminar” with no connection to the Feds at all, just some people trying to scam folks out of a registration fee. Probably a dozen e-mails a week of some thing or other - if I “just” pay a $500 application fee, or buy $1000 of product for door-to-door or internet sales, or… There was the really “attractive” job e-mail looking for a secretary who had to be female, specified bust size, and “no experience, high school diploma, or GED required”. Uh, yeah, right, THAT is legitimate… :rolleyes:
ICUMI, my answer to ‘how do people get so poor’ is the same as Amalia Rodriguez’ answer: it’s the destiny of poor people to be poor. And that isn’t a disgrace, but it isn’t a happy state either. Happiness isn’t the most important thing, but people who are miserable for too long can be driven mad by it, and that isn’t necessarily something to blame them for either.
Yah sure there are things people do to change their circumstances, but as others have pointed out, there are far more unemployed than jobs. Go over their decisions with a fine-toothed comb if you like. Maybe you’ll find something to blame, maybe you won’t, but under the current circumstances we are going to have poor people regardless, because every game of musical chairs leaves someone standing.
You and your family are a representation of what is truly right in this country. I am happy for your success; you’ve earned it.
Of course, the flip side of statement like that is that current poor have somehow earned their failure. Because, you know, Sateryn76 can work up out of poverty but those people who are poor today, they’re just losers, right?
Really, it’s effing frustrating that I work as hard as I can, and when I’m not working I’m looking for for work, but I get no pats on the back for being clever or resourceful or encouragement to keep trying - it’s just “You must have screwed up somewhere to wind up where you are.” No second chances, just assumptions I never finished high school (when actually I finished college) or I’m lazy (never mind I’ve worked two jobs when I could) or never worked (I worked for nearly 30 years without a break), or something else the better off can use to look down their noses at me.
Multiply by a few million and you get the current picture at the bottom of the US economy. The faults of a few are used to punish the rest of us. The assumption, over and over, is that the poor are defective and inferior. Because that so much more comforting than, as I keep saying, you can do everything right, yet still end up poor through no fault or moral failing.
I actually take joy in cutting costs and saving money because it makes me feel more self-reliant (I’ll touch on this in a bit) and better about myself. I make good money and have plenty of wiggle room but I LOVE living well within my means. Before my current job, I truly had no choice to live within my means, the budget didn’t allow for it, but a lot of what I did then I still do today.
My fiance and I cook a majority of our dinners and I bring my own lunch (usually a soup or stew w/ bread) to work each day (lots of money saved there - my lunch runs me roughly $1-2).
We don’t have a washer and dryer because I refuse to pay for it. My fiance takes the easy route out and does her laundry at her parents when she visits them each week but I manually hand-wash my clothes. Scrubbing board, dryer rack, and all. Again, I save an incredible amount of money.
We don’t have cable or a plasma/LCD/LED tv (we’re still rocking the CRT). I pay $7.99 a month for Netflix which provides all the visual entertainment we ever need. She’s busy with graduate school so she rarely has free time to spend on entertainment but I get by just fine with my library card (I love to read). We budget $150 a month for entertainment, be it movies, dinner, etc. She enjoys fishing, much to my delight, so for the cost of gas, we can spend an entire day having fun outdoors.
I maintain a small garden on our porch which provides SOME food, as well as a hobby for both of us. I grew up gardening and my fiance enjoys learning. I also handle a 50’ x 50’ garden at my parents house that’s responsible for a good portion of my parents and our own veggies (tomatoes, okra, peppers, and sweet potatoes).
I’m very mechanically gifted, so we rarely throw anything out that’s broken. It gets repaired. I constantly search Craigslist at work for folks unloading either free furniture or appliances. I’ll occassionally spend, if the price is right, for used appliances, tools, furniture, etc. I got a free coffee table that a couple was getting rid of, for example, just recently. It’s varnish was non-existent but it hard very minimal damage to the wood itself. It was sanded down and re-varnished to match our living room set. I spent $6 dollars on the varnish and maybe a gallon of gas for a virtually brand new piece of furniture. Very rewarding and an excellent conversation piece, too!
AC/Heating barely impacts our electrical/gas bill. We live in Atlanta where summers are hot, humid, and miserable. I take advantage of night time temperatures as well as shielding/opening windows depending on the season.
We live in 1 bedroom apartment that costs $750 a month. My fiance makes $29k before taxes; I make $65k. I am 24, she is 23. I have a college degree but it wasn’t necessary and isn’t needed at my current job (specialized skilled trade). My fiance, again, is a graduate student and will be so for the next 5 years. We are saving for a house but I’m actually having fun in our situation and we’re both happy. She’s planning on completing her post-doc out of state so I don’t believe we will officially “settle down” until after her schooling is done.
All and all, we spend just under $1500 on monthly expenses, pocket the rest. I think we could do a bit better, such as exploring a better ISP or perhaps being a bit more conservative on our water usage, but I think I’ve tested her patience enough on certain things.
And good for you… but what you the two of you lost your jobs? What if you only had, say $800 a month coming in? What then? You’d still be scrimping and saving but would it be enough even to pay your rent?
What would you do, how would you survive?
Seriously… where do you go from a scrubbing board?
Before you get too butthurt about that, he wasn’t advocating restricting the ability of anyone to have kids.
What he was saying is that for many (most?) poor people, having children, especially out of wedlock, is not a sound financial decision. They’re very expensive, and if you can’t pay your bills, it is irresponsible and stupendously self-centered to have a kid knowing that you’re in that situation, because you’ll likely have to get public assistance to afford to feed and clothe the child.
On the other hand, if a poor women finds herself pregnant despite taking precautions and doesn’t have the money for an abortion you can hardly call her self-centered for taking advantage of public aid to have a healthy pregnancy and helping to raise the kid she didn’t intend to have but was more or less forced to because right-wing religious nuts don’t want to allow poor women to have access to abortion, right?
Poor people don’t have as many choices or resources as those better off and it’s silly to think that doesn’t have an effect on their lives.
In event that we both lost our jobs simultaneously, we could still survive without income and your hypothetical $800 for quite some time. Assuming $800, we’d have to foot roughly $700 per month. If I lost my job, two things would happen going by the last round of layoffs:
A) Severance package worth 2 months pay or
B) Option to leave with accumulated PTO which maxes out at 8 weeks, or 2 months pay
So, I’d leave with 2 months more pay which only lengthens how long we could survive without income. She doesn’t have a 401k but I do. That would also buy us time (I calculate 4 months after taxes).
Given that there are 2 job openings that pay on par with my current employer (hospital) in Atlanta with roughly the same pay that have been opened for many months now, I don’t think I’d have a problem finding work, but, I’ll play Devil’s advocate and assume that’s off the table.
Barring some unforeseen expense and including severance/PTO package and 401k, we could get by for a hair over 3 years of no work and $800 per month. I have 2 credit cards with no balance, she has 1 (that I know of at least, haha), which would give us $5,000 credit. If I can use that under your conditions, that would increase our time by another what? 7 months? We’re pushing nearly 4 years now.
I owe roughly $2000 grand on a 2010 Ford truck that I could get $15,000 for, so, I’d probably pay that off with savings first and pocket the extra cash. She has 2004 Chevrolet that’s paid off so we could use that as the family car. There’s another year, if need be.
Of course, I’m not factoring in things like eliminating our monthly $150 for entertainment, internet, Netflix, etc.
If you find out, please PM me, haha.
I actually got it from my great-grand father who I was very close to. He was my age during the Depression and taught me a lot as far as self reliance goes as well as the value of a dollar. I can remember pulling weeds in his garden for $5 and thinking I made out like a king at the end of the day.
Scrubbing board ----> pounding the clothes on rocks in a river.
I apologize for the delay in my response. Yes, I did have disability insurnace through BellSouth, but got ZERO paid out from them as they denied my claim. (I was paying for both long and short term disability insurnace). Apparently this is common for large self insured corporations to do as I found out. I tried to hire and attorney, but the cost to sue was well beyond what I could afford. The problem seems to be that under the current law if the company/insurer is found at fault they only have to pay what they would have anyway, there is no provision for a penalty award. So, the problem is, the companies/insurers deny almost everything and if you fight and win they only have to pay what they would have had to anyway. It gives them a great incentive to deny. And because there is no penalty award allowed attorneys are not intersted in taking the cases unless you pony up tens of thousands of dollars for their fees. Hopefull this has changed, I don’t know. My advice is to purchase disability insurance through an indipendent agent and DO NOT rely on your employer. And for you young people, I know that you think you are invicible, but it CAN happen to you. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
As far as savings I saved about 12% of my income for retierment. I wanted it to be more, but I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been. Unfortunately after my injury my wife at the time decided that life would be better without an injured husband. After the divorce I had very little left. It was a disgusting experience and I won’t go into it here, for if I did most of you would think I was making it up it was so bad.
Well, if you see my above post I went through a very nast divorce. I was awarded $120k in a Workers Comp settlement. My darling ex-wife cleaned out our join accounts and left, my settlement included. Don’t stick your penis in crazy, trust me on this one.
However, even if I was still married and didn’t lose the funds, $120k really isn’t a lot of money. I was inured at 38 years old, can’t live on that kind of money for the next 40 or so years. I certainly found out that in the real world, you are nothing but a business decision. As soon as you are no longer an asset, you are no longer cared about. BellSouth used to be a company that took care of its own. No longer, I guess business is just buisness. As I said above, don’t ever take your health for granted. You must plan and prepare for the unthinkable, because if you don’t you are screwed. I thought I had, but it didn’t turn out like I had planned. A little research would have told me that a company sponsored disability plan was the wrong way to go, but I trusted what was told to me. That is always the first mistake.
—> losing the will to live