I was slumming on the NPR (National Propaganda Radio) site and saw a bunch of “99%” photo-posts. One was humorous, but the rest were pathetic, and not in a sympathetic way. This guy was typical:
Anyone with a family making 80K/year who just can’t make ends meet and has to get help paying his bills deserves to go under for being so stupid as to live beyond his means.
Dumbass. Ooo, poor baby. A “modest home,” used cars and less than “expensive” vacations (by what standard?). Where is his savings? Where in the world did that $80K/year go? Why didn’t he at least buy that frickin’ ugly tie at Goodwill or something?
If this guy were to put that lame crap out in front of me, I’d be tempted to plaster his whiny mug. His parents ought to–at most–have told him, “Leave your children with us, sell that house you can’t afford to pay for–or even just hand it back to the folks who really own it–and go live under a rock. We disown you, you stupid bag of vomit,” instead of enabling his profligate lifestyle.
No, $80K/year isn’t enough to finance a lifestyle that would get Robin Leach interested in profiling you, dumbass. Learn to live within your means.
Further commentary on the so-called “99%” from Matt Welch @Reason:
Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. You could try to make it in Minneapolis before living the dream in Williamsburg. You could stare into the face of a no-money-down, adjustable rate 30-year mortgage at the tail end of a housing-price run-up and conclude “Maybe that one’s not for me.” You could even choose to turn down a bad if high-paying job when you’re living below the poverty line. If we indeed live in a “candid world,” let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who “forced” you to “play by the rules” is more than a little pathetic.
He’s in the top .78% of households in the world http://www.globalrichlist.com/ …….
He’s double the average American household, which is $35k to $40k a year.
Not the sharpest tool in the shed.
“Not the sharpest tool in the shed.” No he’s not, but he is plenty (intellectually and morally) lazy and greedy and a real whiner.
This pairing of charts showing “All U.S. Households” vs “Poor [so-called] U.S. Households” tells a bit more of the background for the attitude displayed in this (dull) tool’s sign. The guy should be filled with gratitude for all the blessings he has, but no…
(BTW, I do know there are some genuinely poor folk who have little control over the devastation Dhimmicraps and Repugnican’t “go along to get along” pols have wreaked with their fostering of greed in both their “Crony Capitalist” buddies and common folk alike, but genuine poverty in the U.S. is truly rare and could be dealt with much better if the “feddle gummint” compassion *gag* industry were dismantled.)
Yeah, the Reason article is a damn good one.
“You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments.”
All but two of the cars I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned cars for 25 years) cost under $2000. I paid cash. And I owned them two at a time, so in case one broke down, I had something to drive while I got it fixed.
Car payments are the biggest suckers’-game on the planet.
Smart people buy used from private parties.
Also, this helps:
http://badexample.mu.nu/archives/093788.php
In the run-up to The Zero’s inauguration, I had a brief series of posts on tightwaddery and the coming economic woes. A couple featured automotive tightwaddery, IIRC. In my 40+ years of driving, I have never bought a new car. Most of the cars I have bought (with the exception of an XJ-12 which just needed too much maintenance ALL the time–and it was in very good shape for a Jag when we bought it–and a Rambler American, which was totaled out from under me by a guy who crossed left of center) have run well for us over the 200,000 mile mark. Some, we’ve sold just because I got tired of ’em when they refused to wear out. *heh* Not a very good tightwad, am I?
Like your used car checklist and procedure. Unless I’m really very familiar with the car/model and the owner, it’s very similar to my more informal approach. I did buy one used car sight unseen. Was from a great aunt who’d just moved herself into a nursing home. She had very literally only driven it on Sunday (to church with a stop at the grocery store on the way home). Was originally purchased new by her, for cash. Always garaged. Had less than 5,000 miles on the odometer. A few problems because it had been driven so little, but very minor. Showroom condition. Unfortunately, was an early 70s model piece of Detroit iron, so it only lasted us a couple hundred thousand miles before coming up against my own cost-benefit barrier for repairs. Sold it for 1/4 our purchase price (which, after years of inflation was more like 1/10, but still not bad overall) to a mechanically-inclined youngster who did a loving restoration of the thing… that ended up costing him about what a new car would have.