40-year-old homeowner says economy doesn’t add up: ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck’

If you want to know how bad we're being fucked, search for the PPI, the producer price index. CPI, the one we always hear about, is the measure of inflation to us, the consumer. The PPI is the measure of inflation to producers, what they pay for goods and services to produce the goods and services we buy.

The PPI has been back to "normal" for a while now. Pretty much as soon as the post COVID logistics issues were mostly ironed out. The difference between PPI and CPI changes is almost all profit.

We don't get daily articles on the PPI though, I wonder why.

Tell people about PPI whenever you can, online or off, the more people know, the better. It's easy enough to say inflation is just down to greed but being able to back it up by comparing two simple charts will help people really understand.

PPI

CPI

Yep. Same. I do pretty good for myself and I'm more fortunate than most, but I had to borrow money from my dad recently for a series of expenses I couldn't absorb in real time. I got the "you don't know how to budget" sermon. It felt as fun as you'd expect

I said fuck it and gave him a list of earnings and expenses (I'm pretty frugal) and he was like, "oh..."

Gen Millennial here. I can assist you on your suicide that day for a hot meal so I can at least eat on that day. Maybe someone from Gen Z can assist my suicide if I leave him my blanket then.

On the bright side, 9mm is cheaper than a retirement home. Somebody's getting a blowjob on my 60th birthday, and it ain't gonna be me!

Assisted suicide vs... illegal suicide? What's the difference?

What if we just financed all our kids advantages on our own credit for them and then promptly died?

What would happen to the debt?

Say I max out my credit card for their down payment on a house and then go "get firewood".

I'd rather look forward to the improvements in technology that make elder care less expensive.

Except that's not at all what OP said or was implying. Nice way of pushing the blame on the people affected rather than the broken system we live in.

Dude, i pay near $400 a month in just student loan payments. I had to buy a "new" car last year and this 8 year old Subaru cost me $360 a month. I could have bought another $4000 beater, but that's a hole you never get out of because you are constantly having to replace cars that aren't worth the scrap they are made of. Everyone has been on a knifes edge for the past 16 years and now everything costs double from them but wages have been the same. No amount of budgeting is gonna fix that.

Every time ive tried investing, i had to take it out after a few months to pay for something thats popped up in life after other things have raided my savings.

Investing is for people with a lot of excess cash.

If you don’t save and invest it, you’ll be living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of your life.

I don't think you really know what "living paycheck to paycheck" actually means if you think it, in any way, involves investing.

This is really stupid.

You're basically telling people "just be rich" like it's that simple.

People living paycheck-to-paycheck are not able to invest money because they don't have excess income, they get to decide if they want to pay for rent or want to pay for food. Combine that with astonishing inflation rates and salary raises that don't match cost of living increases or simply layoffs, and we have one fucked up situation.

This is a systemic problem. Billionaires shouldn't exist. Billionaires are a societal problem.

edit: Oh, I see your comment isn't directed at people living paycheck-to-paycheck, that's a bit more reasonable then but I still think you're missing the mark. It's not as simple as "just increase your income" like you seem to be thinking it is.

The problem is that for many folks the amount they are making isn't enough for them to live a very reasonable life AND they have nothing to invest in the first place. Suppose a household in a given area needs $100,000 to afford a VERY modest house in that area, health insurance, savings, healthy food etc. Now suppose the house has one disabled breadwinner and one fellow working for $40,000.

Because of this they live in shit town in a tiny apartment a building full of drug addicts in a not so great part of the state wherein the average life expectancy is about 10 years less than one of the good parts of the country.

The first 40k of "excess" would be spent on having a decent life, working a sane number of hours, moving into an actual home. For fully half the country the idea of having excess is laughable. It's a crass joke.

OP is like: Even if you have highly-valuable skills, you can't get ahead, because the game is stacked in favor of renting out your assets instead of delivering valuable labor.

Reply is like: Yeah, but have you considered renting out your assets though?

My bill also shows I use way more electricity than similar houses. My best guess is they have a heat pump or gas heat/water heater. Whereas I have forced air electric.

I recently installed an emporia energy monitor. It's basically a kill-a-watt meter that you connect to the circuit breakers for full house monitoring. And while I see some areas that I could improve to cut my bill, no where near enough to get to what the power company is saying similar houses are using. Saving up for a heat pump now as I think that's the best thing I can do to get my bill down. And as a plus I'd have central AC instead of having to use window units in the heat.

Grapes were $6/pound. It’s getting so we can’t afford produce anymore.

Are we talking regular red/black/green non-organic grapes or some of the more exotic varieties? I track grape prices myself and $2.99/lbs mark for out-of-season-domestic grapes. This is the current price a regular grocery stores right now here with the exception of warehouse clubs which have them at $2.29/lbs. The normal in-season non-warehouse price can be as low as 89c/lbs, but is usually $1.25/lbs.

Is there something special about your geography that makes it more expensive?

I'm in the southern emisphere and just started eating grapes. Assuming you are in the US, consider looking for produce that is in season. Besides helping with your budget, it contributes to addressa number of other issues around shops and producers trying to focus on growing stuff that doesn't want to grow at a particular time of the year.

Grapes are in season the exact opposite time of year as we are now.

Imported/greenhouse produce is expensive. Always has been.

I agree. I still think they were lucky insofar as they were born in the right place at the right time to benefit massively over future generations.

As more time has passed and I continually re-assess my Boomer parents, I am struck more and more that they truly were a propagandized generation who was never given the tools to properly think through what they were seeing. It was always just "here, more, buy this, this technology is new and amazing". Everything was new year after year until the late 80s/early 90s, when technology evened out. Even then people had cell phones and such. Once met with the Internet, especially through Facebook, we could see all of their problems flourish.

Not to say that any generation is better than any other or not, but I do believe that each generation after Boomers is actually much better than the previous one at critical thinking--probably because society had no choice but to and the fact that more people have at least a bachelors degree now.

$15/hr with tips included, maybe. That's why I specified that the $16/hr equivalent from 1972 did not include tips.

My guy, air bnb didn't cause the shortage or even significantly make it worse. It's the mega corps that literally own hundreds of thousands of homes across the US and just rent them out. I'm not even upset at boomers who own 3 or 4 rental properties and I work with a lot of them. It's always mega corps fucking it up for the rest of us.

Housing was wildly expensive and rising incredibly fast before Airbnb was invented (company started in 2008, which you might recognize as an important year for the real estate market). After 2008, tons of investors came in to buy up the depressed value properties to either flip or rent out or just hold onto until the value returned. People buying houses with cash isn't something Airbnb caused. Corporations buying up houses to rent isn't something Airbnb caused. Foreign investors buying up houses to get their money out of their country isn't something Airbnb caused.

LOL you really believe that "a millenial" created AirBNB and not some conglomerate of venture capitalists funneling billions at a team made up of people of all ages?

Wtf even does "the current generations" mean? Whenever people say "the newer generation" or "the young generation" or something they just sound so fucking incompetent.

Or just common sense laws against predatory lending by capping interest rates.

Most people don't have a safety net and live paycheck to paycheck.

A huge expense comes up, and rather than get a bank loan at even 8-10%, it goes on a credit card

Companies have a tiny "minimum payment" because they don't want you to pay it off. They want that balance to grow while people ignore it. They don't want it back now, they want thousands more later.

lol i'm looking at paying ~4500/mo for a 3br 2ba ~1300sqft.

You're still off unfortunately.

Full time at $10/hr is $1600/month before income tax. For simplicity, we'll say federal+state tax is 15% so now we're at $1360. Social security is 6.2% so take away another $100.

Then, of course, this is the United States where most people have to rely on their employees for "affordable" health insurance - and often still have money taken out of their check for it.

So now we're at $1000-1260 monthly take home pay for a full time job at $10/hr

Proof you can't die of cringe

I'm just going to say it absolutely was not reasonable to believe the world was ending. It was bad, made far worse by people who thought it was reasonable to cough and sneeze and spit on others, on food, and mass purchase hundreds of dollars of toilet paper. However, "world ending" is a bit sensationalist and only the easily fooled and unreasonable people justified such viewpoints.

Putting aside the tragic losses caused by Covid, both directly and indirectly, those three years might be argued as having been a chance to shift climate talks and the more negative cultural expectations experienced in developed nations, and especially the U.S. Hell, even the air itself was clearly up.

I recognize this is a hot take and am not in any way attempting to downplay how damaging Covid was to many families. It's just such a damned shame a chance to change for the better ended up with where we are now. Further struggling, more homeless, greedflation, and an incessant need to argue amongst ourselves.

90s and the advent of digital account keeping and digital money transfers

Digital account keeping has been a thing since the 1950's. And doing it on a computer didn't change that all banks lent out more than they had. It's the premise of the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Bank runs were a thing for as long as banks have existed.