I worked at a company that gave employees 20 hours of emergency personal time at the start of each quarter and regular as clockwork, Jan 1, April 1, July 1, and Oct 1, we’d see more than 50% of the employees use it immediately. All while knowing (because management would warn everyone every day the week before the EPT drop) that 90% of terminations were because people found themselves having to call in and had already used up all their time. Ninety percent.
Poverty costing more is definitely a real effect.
About 8 years ago, I had a back problem bad enough that I couldn’t work for months, and wound up living entirely on short-term disability benefits for a while, which was barely enough to pay the bills. Proper ‘fuel the car or myself, but not both’ type scraping every penny together. Even when, post surgery, I did manage to get a job I could physically do (security), it was a 0 hours contract and paid about the same as benefits did. I couldn’t keep any savings; as soon as I’d accumulated anything, it had to be spent on something non-optional. Keeping the car on the road was a constant worry- I couldn’t have afforded to fix it if anything broke, and I couldn’t have worked without it, as work was all over the place, sometimes 10 miles out of town, very late hours, generally no buses available, though I must say, that car was bleedin’ amazing and kept on going with basically no maintenance without any problems for longer than I would have considered possible.
About a year in, my estranged grandmother died, and I would up with a small inheritance- not a lot, but about as much as I’d made in the past 2 years. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to worry about every penny. If something broke, I could fix it, no problem.
After about 6 months, I was adding money to my savings- not a lot, but a little almost every month. Same job, same living situation, same car, no real changes. Simply having the option of spending money somehow allowed me to save. I can’t put my finger on where the money was going before or what changed, I barely even spent any of the inheritance money, and by the end of a year, by the time I got a better job, I’d paid it all back.
For about five years I lived in a low-income highrise in Newark, NJ. The rent was super low, but parking was not. A parking pass cost $50 a month and there were a small number of spots relative to the number of residents needing them. Somehow I lucked out by getting one.
Every month I’d have to stand in line to renew my pass. The parking lot office was only open for a few hours on the first three days of the month. The only way to renew or acquire a pass was to go to this office. So if you couldn’t get off of work in time to stand in line, you’d forfeit your pass. There was some turn-over in parking passes because of this. However, there wasn’t a whole lot of turn-over. If you couldn’t stand in line to renew your pass, you’d pay someone to do it for you. That’s how valuable those passes were.
I remember seeing grown men breaking down in tears when the person manning the parking lot booth would tell the long line of people that all the vacant parking spots had been filled. You could see in their faces that not having a pass wasn’t just a mild inconvenience for them. It meant having to spend hours each week driving in a three mile radius of the apartment complex, looking for street parking. It meant risking parking tickets for unknowingly parking in spots where overnight parking wasn’t allowed for some weird reason. It meant having to wake up early on your day off to move your car on street cleaning days, or else you were going to get towed. Maybe it even meant taking the bus or train to work despite having a car because you didn’t want to have to look for a parking spot at the end of the day.
This would have stressed out a middle-class person too. But menial workers live by the clock in a way that middle-class professionals do not. Also, menial workers perform more physically demanding work, so having to search for parking at the end of the day is more costly to them.
Cheap modes of transportation cost time. Some years back when I made much less, I could have driven to work if I’d paid for parking. But that was expensive, so I took the free bus. That meant less time for my side hustle. Thinking back, I might have come out a bit ahead with the parking, but I don’t recall the prices.
Even more than that, if a high-wage person’s work is held up by a low-wage person’s tardiness or absence, now you’re wasting two wages instead of just one. Possibly even more than that, if multiple people are affected.
As a “country” boy this post is really eye-opening about the costs associated with big city living. I lived in fairly rural areas all my life and never had to worry about not having a place to park my car. I am sure there aspects of country living that city people would find just as frustrating. (Lack of public transportation is a big one as others have metioned.)
There is a very insightful longform essay that goes into great detail about this that was published online I think within the last year. I don’t know where to find it, but if you can find it I would recommend it.
There are so many trade-offs and variables that it makes it extremely difficult to assemble a quality cost benefit analysis. Even just trying to optimize where to live in and around DC was beyond me. Never mind if we were evaluating moving somewhere else entirely.
Lack of public transportation is much worse than lack of affordable parking, IMHO.
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There are people to whom $30 isn’t trivial.
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Often, it’s not the $30 for the inspection that’s the problem. It’s the several hundred dollars – or possibly more – to diagnose and repair what may be a minor vacuum leak. The codes the computer gives are often not very specific at all, and the repair becomes a matter of trial and error involving both parts and the mechanic’s time.
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And if that were guaranteed to be the only thing that went wrong that year, or that month, or that week, it would be a lot easier to handle. What tips many people over the edge isn’t any such thing on its own – it’s that there isn’t enough leeway to deal with multiple problems coming at once or in quick succession; which is a very common situation in most people’s lives.
I had to spend $700 to bring my Ford Mustang into compliance. I had just moved to VA from Florida, where there are no state inspections. So my 25-year-old car had accumulated a shitload of issues that have never been addressed before.
I had to put that shit on a credit card because I had drained my savings with the move.
The problem is that due to the welfare cliff there is a disincentive to make too much money. Lots of working people who were on medicaid I’ve met said medicaid was better than their employer based insurance for example.
I knew someone who got injured, so she just worked from home for a month. Thats not an option for the vast majority of poor people, in part because poor people don’t work jobs where you can work remotely.
Do insurance companies in non-inspection states give discounts (or other incentives) for people to get their cars voluntarily inspected?
If not, that’s pretty good evidence that inspections, at least as practiced, are a scam.
Yeah, there have been a few times where $30 was what I had for food and gas for the month.
No it’s not. Insurance companies are under no obligation to do so.
They are also under no obligation to offer me many of the discounts they do offer me. They offer them because I’m a safer customer and they’re competing for my business. Not offering one for a voluntary inspection is consistent with those inspections not actually doing much to increase safety.
I would bet the number of people to whom $30 isn’t trivial is a relatively very small number in proportion to the population.
And as far as having to fix stuff… well, that’s part of owning a car. Don’t blame the inspection for letting the car be poorly maintained. That’s a classic case of shooting the messenger if there ever was one.
I know that multiple things hitting at once is difficult- but it’s not unique to owning a car- it could be your water heater and your washing machine at the same time, for example. Fundamentally the problem is one of cash reserves and cash flow, not onerous automotive inspection requirements.
Clearly it sucks to not have enough money to be able to make ends meet and put a little away. But I don’t know the answer- just raising minimum wage isn’t going to be a magic cure-all, as prices will likely rise right along with it in areas where that’s a primary income determiner.
And that still doesn’t handle the situation of people not having enough reserves because they make poor choices that deplete their reserves, or just choose not to save enough. How do we mitigate that? Should we mitigate that? Not everyone who is poor/strapped for cash is that way because of environmental conditions outside of their own control.
To get back to the OP’s question, one way that being broke raises the cost of living is because you often have to buy used and/or lower quality stuff that requires more repairs and maintenance than higher grade things. I mean, I had a series of relatively high mileage used cars from the start of college through the time I was about 30. I think in total, I spent something like $8000 in total on 3 vehicles, none of which had less than 60k on them when I bought them, and I drove two past 200k miles and one to 150k. But I spent a LOT of time maintaining them and repairing them/having them repaired. At some point, I had enough money to buy a late-model used car (a 2005 model car bought in 2006 with 4k miles on it). I’ve since put 96k miles on it. The difference in maintenance/repair cost and effort has been dramatic- outside of routine maintenance(brakes, shocks, oil changes, etc…) I’ve only had one real repair done- a water pump replacement.
On the subject of auto testing, there is good evidence that it’s not really worth doing (at least the way that we do it), and that it’s a huge waste of time and money.
Safety inspections don’t appear to help automotive safety. If you look at vehicle safety numbers for states that require them and states that don’t, there’s no statistical difference. Making everyone waste their time and money every year or two is just a pure deadweight loss. No one is safer, and occasionally someone’s life gets royally fucked up because they miss it and it starts a cascading series of failures.
The reason for this isn’t hard to figure out: very few people will drive demonstrably unsafe cars for very long. Yes, a few will, but making everyone with a car do a wasteful inspection to catch the 0.1% of the people who will willingly drive around on bald tires forever is just a bad way to solve that problem. And measurably irrelevant.
Emissions inspections do make emissions better, but they’re an extremely costly and inefficient way to do so. Because emissions control systems generally work very well, and the vast majority of emissions are made by a tiny percentage of gross polluters. And most of those will already be caught by conscientious drivers. Again, not all, but the vast majority of people who see their car start belching foul smelling black smoke will not wait for their annual emissions inspection. They will take it to a mechanic!
But the system we have, rather than just testing the output, tests that all components are fully in spec.
An emissions control framework that wouldn’t waste tons of everyone’s time would focus on the gross polluters. Put some emissions sniffers and cameras on well-traveled roads and identify the cars that actually need to be fixed rather than making everyone waste time and money inspecting systems that almost always work.
Any bureaucracy that the public is required to interact with regularly is going to have a bigger impact on the poor. Because bureaucracies are inflexible. To the non-poor, that inflexibility is a nuisance, but a minor one. But because the poor have so little slack in their lives, the inflexibility can be a major barrier.