You are right about, "on time".........we have never had a late bill/payment.......sometimes it took creativity to do it......we be celebrating our 46th anniversary in a couple of days.........the thing about living a frugal life is.....when things get rolling along....you basically still live frugal...........we only use one card that gives cash back.......the second card is so when we go overseas we don't have to carry a bunch of cash.......it has only had Dollar shave club charged against if for nine years........we quit traveling when our daughter moved back to the states....I have tried to expain the credit card trap to my grand children who have left out on their own.........it seems like it has fell on deaf ears......
$15 dollar hr minimum wage?
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Learned that the hard way as a youngster. It's almost criminal that we don't teach finance in high schools as a mandatory course. As a result, I wound up spending about $2,000 out of college on a piece-of-ish computer that should have cost $700 around that time with a one-time cash payment.
Due to my own poor decisions, the first car I bought on my own I had to get from one of those "Buy here pay here" places. had to pay 18.5% interest on it. Subsequently I worked hard to improve my credit. It still sucks. But I paid that car off on time. My current car I financed for 3% interest
They do teach such a course at Henry Clay, I got asked to speak to the class about leases, credit, promissory notes, guaranties, and the like a year and a half ago. Think it is a good idea.
We should be doing that in every school!
I could be mistaken, but I think in the old days "home economics" covered financial stuff like that.
In my public school days, home economics covered venereal diseases and how to bake biscuits.
In my public school days, home economics covered venereal diseases and how to bake biscuits.
In my daughters middle school, they were teaching basic money management like setting a monthly budget, bills, etc. They had a "job" that paid a certain amount, then had to see how much they could affor with rent, utilities, etc. She gets the more advanced track with me teaching the beauty of compound interest. When she lets anyone borrow money, it's 100% interest compounded daily. Me and my son both have gotten they screw job on more than one occassion when we needed money in a pinch.
Debt is hard to understand until you have some.....
Well defined liability and a system that assigns rights to workers accomplishes the same thing.
Exactly
I had Hone Ec as a senior. Our teacher was granddaughter to Col Sanders. She incorporated cooking in her class also.
certainly “learned” me a lesson.
everybody. And ditch differs make $15 per hour.
we are talking about burger flippers, desk clerks and maids at hotels, some grocery store workers in smaller towns etc...
Love going through this thread and reading the posts of jobs . . . burger flippers, maids, retail store workers . . . do you guys keep a written list of the jobs you look down on or just keep it organized in your head?
oh shush. My first two jobs were a grocery store carry out guy, then a burger flipper at McDonald’s. I didn’t deserve mkre
Than minimum wage.
My wife was a bit reluctant when I left my last job (decent pay) to retire early fearing the worst for our finances. I had run the numbers and knew if I budgeted frugally we would be ok. Told her I would find a part time to make up the $1400.0 dollar a month hit we would take if it comes down to it. Now, in the 5th month of retirement she has stated that she is surprised at how well I am budgeting. Spent a lot more than I really needed to when we had it and am now spending much less. So far so good.
I wonder if yeast infections was taught in reference to biscuits.
My first job outside of the military was cleaning floors, bathrooms, stocking shelves and other menial task for Montgomery Wards before everyday opening. Minimum wage was $5.50 and hour then. Did what I had to do to pay the bills. Moved to automotive doing oil changes and tire changes until I found a military contractor job paying $9.38 an hour. Moved up quickly in there to $13.00 an hour until the government side came calling. Where the pay was much better until retiring 1 Sept.
Congrats!
I tell people all the time that learning to get up at 4:45 on Saturday mornings after Friday night football games was all the motivation I needed to make good enough grades to get into college. Learned wonderful lessons.
Good thing you had the ability to do that. Not everyone does. Be thankful for your gifts. Minimum wage should be the bare minimum, but the bare minimum needs to be the minimum to get by on one salary. Essentials. Food, water, shelter.
Substitute millennials for people in your last paragraph and you nailed it.
My generation "Y" and "X" started a lot of the "personal debt" problem in our country. We thought we should have everything our parents had when we were in high school as soon as we graduated from college. Borrowed money for fancy cars and houses that were too nice.
That's their choice! This is America, they can do anything they want! I started at minimum wage, I would say that 95% of the people I know did. Both my kids did and now both are in grad school.
Like someone even mentioned above, most companies start above minimum wage. I used to deal with electrical companies. Every week, I went in, they would ask me if I knew someone who wanted a job. Of course COVID has changed things but 11 months ago, if you wanted to start above minimum wage, show up to work and not do drugs, you could start out about $15 per hour.
I called on a customer at a quarry. They hired a young kid as a driver on the grounds. He was making $35/year. He worked one week and told them, "yeah, this isn't for me."
Dude, I started at the bottom of a large company in Louisville, worked my way up while going to school. I volunteered for every job and every opportunity for OT. Then after working my way up to middle management, my job was eliminated (2009). Gave them everything I had, promoted 9 times in 10 years. Gone, over. Married with 2 kids in a recession. Got a job that sucked!!!!!!! Working 15 hours per day, underpaid but it paid bills and I had insurance. Then started a whole different career in sales with ZERO experience. A few years later, knock on wood, I'm doing the best I ever have. Maybe some luck was involved, but most was hard work, working nights, weekends, doing what ever I needed to do. At one point I was working 40 hours per week and waiting tables at nights and weekends.
Go work hard, America is still the land of opportunity!
We have a great safety net for folks in these spots.
Medicaid, section 8, food stamps...
For all the posters arguing against the $15 min wage . . . are you really against ANY min wage at all? If not, then what is so magical about $7.50 or whatever it is now? Why not just completely do away with it, if you really believe it serves no purpose at all.
FWIW, my first job was at 15 I worked on a guy's farm, in his commercial greenhouse and through an entire season of tobacco, i.e., planting, hoeing, cutting and housing, for $2 an hour. It sucked ***, but as others stated above, made me appreciate better jobs I got from then on (which was pretty much all of them, actually)
FWIW, my first job was at 15 I worked on a guy's farm, in his commercial greenhouse and through an entire season of tobacco, i.e., planting, hoeing, cutting and housing, for $2 an hour. It sucked ***, but as others stated above, made me appreciate better jobs I got from then on (which was pretty much all of them, actually)
Can't think of anything dumber than a 15.00 an hour min. wage.. Raising minimum wage will cause an increase in all goods and services and heighten unemployment.. It actually punishes the hard worker.. Everything will go up and we'll be right back where we started except for the fact that those who have worked their butts off to get a decent paying job will be in poverty.. That $20 an hour job you worked your but off for is now like a $12 an hour job because of the raised cost of living..
If you want to raise income you do it through lower taxes and less regulation. Give the power to the entrepreneur and small business.. Create competition so fast food will be forced to pay more.. offering a 15 dollar and hour minimum wage and calling it a living wage should be insulting to all Americans.. The Government is the problem.. they are ruining our Country..
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^We’ve tried that many, many times. The problem is that the money that businesses save never seems to get reinvested; it simply ends up in shareholders’ bank accounts and never gets reintroduced into the economy. They don’t spend it; they keep it in offshore bank accounts.
Aren't there examples for both? I sorta fall a bit left of center on this one. IDK if $15/hr is the answer, and it certainly seems like a way for the Gov't to just rake in more tax payer money while also buying the middle/lower class vote. But I've never trusted that every business owner just puts that money back into their business for R&D and such. Plus automation is coming for us, regardless. May come faster for some of the larger chains if it goes to $15.. but it's going to happen either way.
I have no clue what the answer is, but I think it's fair to say what we're doing now, with minimum wage staying put but the cost of living rising, is not the answer.
Smart business owners invest in themselves as well as provide a return to investors. It's a balance. Growth is how you develop wealth.
Sure, and I know several business owners who do this. I imagine we all do. A close friend said that if his minimum wage goes up, he has no choice but to let workers go across 15 of his locations. So I get that.
But you still have the ones that just pocket it. I googled the top billionaires, and i picked one I didn't know. Bernard Arnault. $100 billionaire. I won't pretend to be an expert on him or have close to all the info. But it seems his main note-worthy charitable contributions was $200 Mil to the Notre Dame Cathedral (Could there be any worse way to spend 200 million?), $11 million to fight amazon fires, and funding the Louis Vitton foundation to help arts (another wasted opportunity if you ask me).
I'm sure this guy donates more. I'm also sure he has a $10 billion dollar Yacht or something. To me, that's something I see as part of the problem. We don't need people who hold $50 billion. That always struck me weird. You could still have a $1 billion Yacht and literally take that other $9 billion to save entire cities.
I'm sure there's a ton of holes in my argument. My fellow conservatives here will roast me. But it's just my thoughts. IDK how else you fix the rising cost of living but the slow wage growth. And it's not just lower-class, there's slow wage growth going all up and down.
Take away the incentive and you take away the chance for the true philanthropists to emerge. There is not a perfect system. But I promise ours is the best on earth. We need to tweek. For example, now that wealth can be created so easily without actually adding value to anything, we need to think about how we structure deductions in relation to these types of businesses.
Think about facebook's value and the # of people who work there? The lack of spin-off jobs. Contrast that with where wealth was controlled previously, by industrialists... How many people did they employ and how much spinoff did they create?
One of my daughters is very liberal and I have had the same argument with her, who says "no one needs a billion dollars". Well, that is probably true, but if you somehow took it away from them, what does it get spent on, and why? Guys like Bill Gates literally made thousands of millionaires by co-founding Microsoft, and now spends his time figuring out how to give away his fortune. What exactly did he do wrong?
But I am 100% behind adjusting deductions, etc., so that more wealth is taxed across the board and in favor of less income taxes (which is a disincentive to working harder and earning more)
Of course, you still have to decide what the money is going to be used for.
I do disagree with LineSki above, restoring one of the world's most iconic buildings + restoring the Amazon seems like a fitting way for a billionaire to spend his/her fortune.
P.S. I do appreciate this thread which has been mostly respectful back and forth discussion on issues, as opposed to the Political Board which is a cesspool - I won't be spending any more time on that thread.
My counter to that is, and you alluded to it, why would I want to pay more in taxes to the government, which at least half (and I'm being generous) would be caught up in bureaucratic waste. Especially the younger generation, that has no reality of money and budgeting, don't get this. They just think, "lets give the government more money" because they think they will do something good with it. I'm happy to make donations to a private organization, local charity and usually a sucker for donating where I know it will go directly into a group or individual to use it in the right way. The thought of giving it to the government to waste makes me nautious.
I did an internship in D.C. working for one of the Senators in college in the early 90s, and worked on one of his committees. The department was SO bloated it was ridiculous. One guy told me he put a proposal to cut staff from 40 to 5 and was told "oh no, we can't do that". They are more worried about building thier little kingdoms. There was a lady who was the "Department I.T.", so whenever there was an issue, she just called down to I.T. and have them come up. Otherwise, she watched talk shows all day long. So that's the kinda stuff those tax dollars pay for.
Last time I heard, I think I read there were 13 or 14 different agencies in Washington who are tasked with combating terrorism. Not only is that wasteful (I am thinking CIA, State Department, FBI and 2 or 3 more ought to surely cover the topic) but arguably dangerous, because there is no one person or agency that is really in charge.
Another example, I have also never understood why the Army, Navy, AF and Marines, each have to have a separate model Fighter Jet (or maybe they just used to), just seems to be a colossal duplication and waste of money.
I worked for 12 years at a government plant. It was run by a private company on a cost plus basis. The more money that was spent, the more money they made. Large amounts of money was routinely spent just to spend it.