I think American society runs on poor choices

In My Humble Opinion
101

I think people both overstate and understate the latte thing.

I do know people who buy a latte everyday. But these people are not hurting for money, so they can well afford the habit.

On the other hand, the $5 latte is a stand-in for whatever you want it to be. It could be a pack of cigarettes or lottery tickets or the big box meal at Hardee’s. $5 every workday adds up to $1300 every year. That is rent plus utilities. That is money that be going to groceries and medicine. That is money that could be used to weather a long string of calling in sick when you don’t have paid sick leave. It could be Uber fare when the car breaks down. It could be Christmas gift money for all the kids. So it isn’t a trivial amount.

I do sympathize with the “need” for certain luxuries because I have my own indulgences. But if someone can’t keep $500 in emergency savings and yet they do manage a $5 a day habit of some type, I dunno. I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest to them that it would be wiser for them to make their own coffee rather than rely on Starbucks. Or bring in a sandwich from home three days of the week and only splurge at Hardee’s the other two. I do think many people would be amazed by how much they could save just by tweaking their behavior a little. Putting $1000 into a brokerage account every year isn’t going to make anyone rich. But it could be the difference between being able to fix the roof without pulling out the credit card and shedding any tears versus paying with credit and praying that nothing else breaks down in the foreseeable future.

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102

I don’t think I agree with your figures. $5 a day saved for a year is $1875. Certainly if you just tuck it under the mattress it won’t help much.

The S&P 500 30-yr average ROI is around 12%. Let’s assume 10% just for fun. Put $1875 into some index fund and leave it for twenty years, and you wind up with $13,740. That’s also not retirement, but it is quite a bit different from one month of a 30K salary.

And of course, if you continue to put the same $5 a day into the same fund, you wind up with $129K and change. Also probably not retirement money, but closer.

Regards,
Shodan

103

I prefer Dunkin’ Donuts coffee @ 3.00 a pop. And I get seven dollar lunches at the restaurant with my employee discount. Total: 50.00 a week.

Okay, let’s say I bring lunch from home for a week. Maybe I make a big pot of low carb stew over the weekend, which will last five days if I keep watering it. I’m watching carbs because I’m diabetic. Sandwiches are not the best choice for me. The ingredients for the stew cost, let’s say, fifteen dollars. That’s broth, meat, fresh vegetables and spices. Easily fifteen dollars where I shop. I drink only free office coffee.

Okay, yay, $ 35.00 a week extra for me, right? Right!

Now let’s consider the labor of carrying home the extra groceries along with the cat food, cat litter and cleaning supplies all taken home on the bus. Either with the shopping wagon or not, it’s an extra burden. Then there’s the labor of cooking the stew which is considerable, peeling, chopping, searing, stirring, along with the doling out portions into the tupperware-esque bowls along with the kitchen clean up, including washing cookware. Estimated time spent, six hours, not counting time spent at the grocery store or public transportation.

Now there is the carrying of the bulky bowls on crowded buses downtown back and forth. I’m lucky to travel early in the morning, because I get a seat, but on the approach to Lakeshore Drive, pudgy people bundled up in thick coats will be sitting next to me, and I will be holding stew in well used bowls whose lids have questionable grip strength. I’m praying they don’t spill. Going home is easier, but I most likely will not get a seat. So the dirty bowls swing from my elbow as I cling to the handrails.

When I get home, there are dirty bowls to wash, unless I’m too exhausted from working a ten hour day. If I am too exhausted, the bowls sit there in the sink in a gross pile because I don’t have a dishwasher.

By the third day, I’m tired of stew. If I skipped doling it out for the week, and left in the pot, I might be able to add some things to stretch it out for dinners. But by the fifth day, it’s watered down drippings I hope I never see again. And I have to spend an hour cleaning up the pile of gross dirty bowls in the sink that I was too exhausted to clean up during the week.

But still, I’ve got that 35 dollars.

Was it worth 35 dollars going through all that aggravation?

Fuck no. And the free coffee sucks too.

104

OK, but why is a $15 dollar stew your go-to option here? I eat soup fairly frequently for lunch, and it doesn’t cost nobody’s $15. Ten dollars, tops. Because I buy canned.

Alternatively, you can ditch the labor-intensive stew and come up with something simpler. Like romaine hearts and canned tuna. Or baby carrots, grape tomatoes, with slices of cheese and lunchmeat. No prep at all to these meals.

Glass jars are terrific for soup and other liquidy things. I never get any spills in my bag when I carry one to work (3 miles by foot).

I also bring my lunch fixings to work with me and keep them in the office refrigerator so I don’t have to bring them from home everyday (forgive me if this is not an option for you). So if I’m going to eat salad for multiple lunches, I bring the ingredients in on Monday. That way I don’t have to keep lugging food with me, and I don’t have to worry about forgetting my lunch.

Another advantage of a jar is you can eat right out of it. And if you’re going to just add more stew it for the next day, you don’t need to wash it. (Or you can just rinse it out between servings, if leftover remnants skeeve you out).

No one told you to make stew for the whole week. So that is entirely on you.

Do you not see how you are resigning yourself to only two choices–tired-ass aggravating stew and a $7 cafeteria lunch? There are so many other options out there. Sure, they may not result in a $35 savings for that week. But they may result in a $50 savings that month. And maybe that isn’t a whole lot of money to you, but it could be a lot for someone else. Like the person who can’t secure $500 at a moment’s notice.

I mean, if you can swing $10 a day while still maintaining a decent emergency fund, then keep doing you. But if you’re someone who struggles to find $500 for an emergency, then maybe consider the possibility that there are things you could do that wouldn’t change your quality of life and wouldn’t make you exhausted at the end of the day.

105

You’re making it way too hard. I make a double or triple batch of whatever Sunday dinner is, and freeze the leftovers into 2-cup ziploc containers with the screw cap lid. This week it was chicken mole with black beans and rice, another week it was butter chicken with rice. Do this a couple weeks in a row so you have some variety. Alternate these lunches with tuna salad or egg salad and lettuce, frozen burritos (Costco has a really good organic chipotle chicken one), maybe potpies, or whatever you’d eat for lunch if you were eating at home.

106

I thought according to the food evangelists that I’m constantly pestered by that I’m supposed to avoid processed food like the plague, so all this prepared stuff is out, including canned soups and cold cuts.
Otherwise, I dunno, I’m killing the planet, or myself, or risking the vengeance of Demeter or something.

Look, I know it’s an expensive quirk of mine to prefer to eat out as much as I do. But I don’t bitch about people who drive to work instead of using public transportation, or own more than three pairs of shoes.
Kindly extend to me the same tolerance.

107

I am probably very wrong here, but I think the reason a lot of people don’t cook is because they never really learned how to fend for themselves in the kitchen.

Shopping for food, planning cheap yet tasty meals and actually knowing how to use the tools and equipment…all of these things are learned skills. They are not taught in schools anymore, Grandma’s off in a retirement home and Mom works so the kids eat convenience foods and never got to watch and help in the kitchen.

If you only have a limited amount of money for food every 2 weeks, the risk of missing meals because you made a mistake trying to cook tends to stop most folks from trying.

Even if you can afford to take the financial hit of a spoiled meal, wasting food bothers most folks and the habits are already formed.

108

Arguably, if you eat out at places that get a preponderance of sustainably produced reasonably local ingredients and use sustainable and fair-labor etc. practices themselves, it’s better for the environment and economy overall than if everybody’s making their own meals independently. Efficient high-volume centralized production and cleanup rather than all that excess energy use to transport food to and from individual homes, responsible disposal of food waste, less packaging, etc. I mean, there’s a reason that all those utopian science-fiction settings have big old friendly canteens and cafeterias where everybody eats together.

109

Too Many Cats, I really wasn’t talking about you specifically. I certainly wasn’t trying to sound judgey at anyone.

Due to my bad habit of setting my kitchen on fire, I didn’t touch the stove for years. I also had developed a serious TrapNeuterRelease addiction, so learned how to make amazing samwiches, salads and crock pot meals so I could save money to spend fixing my neighbor’s cats along with any other intact feline that fell into my hands. How’s that for an expensive quirk?

110

I don’t bitch at people who eat out more than me. I don’t want them bitching at me for my splurges.

But I also don’t walk around complaining about how financially strapped I am, which means I don’t invite others to wonder how that can be when I always seem to have money to spend on luxuries.

So as long as you fit the above description, keep doing you. Your $10/ day is helping your local economy. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

111

You aren’t getting free ingredients from your trapping addiction, are you?

112

“What’s in the stew, flatlined?”

“Err - think of it as prairie oysters, but locally sourced.”

Regards,
Shodan

113

Band name!

114

IMHO, another reason for this constant American cycle of debt, bankruptcy or lack of savings is this attitude "It will all work out somehow."

I’ll borrow $60,000 for college, but no worries, it will work out somehow.

I’ll get a $400,000 mortgage on my house, but no worries, it will work out somehow.

I’ll use my credit card for this or that, splurge on expensive vacations, buy this expensive thing or that, but no worries, it will work out somehow.
(I say this as someone who was stuck in an awful credit-card debt trap/cycle myself that I could not get out of for 7 years, so I am not judging people who think this way, just saying that it is a very prevalent attitude.)

115

Sounds more like a Doctor Who episode to me.

116

And often it DOES work out. Being too risk-adverse is as bad for your financial future as the other extreme: some of the least successful people I know are the most risk-adverse–they won’t pursue an education to get new skills if they aren’t sure they will like/be successful in the field; they won’t apply for any job they aren’t over-qualified for, because they have no faith that they will be able to shore up any skill gaps and learn as they go; they don’t pursue or accept promotions or even lateral transfers because they don’t want to make things worse.

Past that, i wasn’t sure how we’d pay for a baby, but it worked out. We were in a good financial place, but not an amazing fantastic one–but if we’d waited till we were . . .we’d still be waiting. And I think that’s true more often than not. And there have been other things I wasn’t sure about, but I am awfully glad we made the leap–we could have waited a few more years to buy a house, but honestly, prices kept rising and buying in earlier worked out really well for us.

As far as judging other people’s financial choices, I think it’s like judging other people’s dietary choices: anything seen in isolation is meaningless. We can almost all have anything we want–but no one can have everything they want. What exacerbates this is a strong social taboo against talking about these things–because people are judgmental. So you don’t see anyone’s full picture. It makes it hard to learn how to do these things–every example you see is distorted by the things you don’t know about.

117

You think this is new - or American? European governments worked this way for over a thousand years. Want a war? It will work out somehow. Want to build 10 new palaces? It will work out somehow.

Working out somehow of course often involved borrowing money from Jews and then expelling them.

118

I don’t understand your use of the word “often” or maybe we have different ideas about what “works out” means. The average American is $38k in debt not counting their mortgage, and about 80% of the country can’t cover a $500 emergency.

119

I have to admit that I am surprised by some of the devil-may-care attitudes expressed here. I don’t think people should be raked over the coals for spending money they don’t absolutely need to spend, but it is undeniable to me that “everything will work out” DOESN’T happen for lots of people. It may look like it is working out right now, but I gotta wonder how many people will think things worked out for them once they realize how paltry their retirement savings are by the time their bodies are shitting the bed.

I think we hear more stories about things “working out” because people who don’t have this fortunate experience tend not to talk about it. To wit, the only person who has admitted to having CC debt in this thread is Velocity. Plenty of posters have openly bragged about how fiscally responsible they are compared to their peers, but no one has copped to being broke because they bought too many cars or too much house or too many lattes. These people only seem to exist in other people’s smug anecdotes.

Perhaps the “everything will work out” notion is so widespread BECAUSE the folks with first-hand cautionary tales hardly ever share them. If your neighbor tells you he’s selling the house so he can be closer to his elderly parents, you will probably accept that answer–never knowing that he just filed for bankruptcy and he’s moving in with his parents so they can take care of * him*. Everything didn’t work out for him, but you’d never know it because that ain’t none of your business.

People really do need to be careful not to fall into the survivorship bias trap.

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120

I’m pretty dubious about that “almost all”. Maybe “almost all” in this conversation (and maybe not; I’ve no idea.) But there are quite a lot of people, in the world as a whole, who can’t afford something they want badly – even if they gave up just about everything else in their lives in order to get it.

True; which is probably one reason why so many people think that almost all people can get anything they want badly enough.

True, but: often it doesn’t work out. And the society praises the people for whom it did work out: they did the right thing, they were great risk-takers! And it denigrates the people for whom it didn’t work out: they made poor choices!

But very often, whether a particular choice worked out or not was a matter of luck, of circumstances outside of the person’s control entirely. And a risk isn’t a risk unless it could go wrong – if we’re going to praise the people for whom it went right, we ought to equally praise the people for whom it didn’t.

Quoted for truth.