62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, as holiday spending, credit card debt rise
62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, as holiday spending, credit card debt rise
As the holiday season kicks into high gear, 62% of adults say they are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent report.
damn i wonder why, ads are being driven into your brain at every second, buying things is designed to feel good, now it costs more and jobs are even more precarious
i wish we could stop shaming people for having debt. if you see people like, with receipts and a teller's hat in a film the tone is practically like they're alcoholics. ridiculous. everyone lives above their means sometimes -- a loud minority love to smugly brag about how careful and controlled and perfect they are. simply follow this budget. simply install this app. simply deny yourself any pleasures for 50 years and get hit by a bus the day before retirement. that easy. christ.
As the father of two kids, I can’t imagine how much money I saved by not exposing my kids to ads at a young age.
However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Normalizing (the opposite of shaming) people living in debt all the time is not necessarily a good thing either. Whether you actually end up able to retire or not, it is a good practice to live within your means. It's like all Zen and shit - seriously, it lowers stress, saves marriages, and eats babies, or like two of those three I can't quite recall which...
It doesn't have to be all prim & proper - things like just eating at home more than eating out, or the REALLY big one living in a cheaper place, can make such a difference.
Hating the system is okay tho. Like with a lactose intolerance, some people just struggle to make sound financial decisions and are vulnerable to get indebted for life, and it gets abused. Some people are born into poverty, and they can't meet these standards of life we have without another loan, and it gets abused. Finance is all about abuse. We can put another joke at expense of the person who are, like a gambling addict, put it onto themselves for having an expensive thing they don't even need, but in the end we know that there are long-living businesses that survive by inventing new kinds of how to abuse and gaslight a person into thinking it's nothing. It's like shaming someone for drug abuse being in a crack neighborhood. Personal agency is under the question, when it's constantly challenged by showering ads and unrealistic lifestyle models.
It's better to propose celebrating one's financial freedom and independence, starting to value it on it's own, knowing you'd lose it in an exchange. Not punching down, nor normalizing being in debt. More like treating it like a drinking binge - we can all understand if a person shows up hungover after a tragedy, we can show empathy to cheer them up, but nevertheless it progressively ruins their lives and should be taken care of for their own happiness and health. Just like alcohol denies you whole hours of your day, debt denies you wage you works hard for every day, it's just like you slave yourself off here for nothing, like there's a hole in your pocket that Mr Piggy knows how to reach, like you work not for yourself but for them and their wealth.
It should be normal to be vocal about how it's fucking great you can move places, change things without that anchor staying in your back and dragging you down. Be proud to be free. And having a party over finally paying them down.
It's like no one felt fancy having their first-ever paycheck. All these opportunities you can have for some dead presidents, mmm. Having them all for yourself once more, even minus bills, should feel like a second birthday.
Predatory lending is one of those things at least one party should be against...
But lots of those corporations donate to both parties these days, so it won't happen until people start treating primaries as the important part of our electoral system.
It's not enough to just show up in the general and settle for anyone that doesn't have your favorite letter next to their name. That's better than nothing, but it's just not enough these days. Democracy isn't easy, if it is, it likely means it's not working
Predatory lending is part and parcel to price gouging.
How the hell else are Americans covering the gaps in their income to cover for massively increased costs from "inflation" (cough price gouging cough)? They're turning to easily accessible credit, even if the terms are bad. Why? Because the average American has a sixth grade reading level and isn't competent enough in math to understand high interest rates and how debt can compound over time.
I'm in literal poverty with terrible credit score and I get credit offers all the fucking time. They always have terrible rates.
I don't think consumers actually can bear the increase in costs, and that the business groups and credit companies know that and are all banking on that being the case, so their profits can keep increasing and they can keep steadily squeezing the working class.
I mean, what are people gonna do?
Starve or put $1k on a credit that will take 5k to eventually pay off?
A cynic would say the main reason Biden only did $600 in COVID relief is lots of the parties donors invest heavily in debt. It's hard to beat 20% interest when you're the one collecting it. There's no greater investment opportunities, but the game is over if everyone has enough to live off of.
Even just them paying some of it down early drastically reduces their profits long term. If every American just geot another 1k and paid down credit cards, it could be billions of lost interest.
The article says there's almost a trillion of it by now. It's an absolutely mind boggling amount of money we're talking about. Throwing a couple million to both parties is comparitively nothing to what they're making.
The older I get, the more I realize holidays are scams.
Don't fall prey.
It should be illegal to charge compound interest, and the highest a person should ever have to pay is 10% of the total borrowed. So $100 is $110 back, max.
How do they define paycheck to paycheck? I believe people are struggling, but I want to make sure I have the numbers right when the wonks get all mathlete with statistics.
Exactly. You could be maxing Roth and ira, drive new cars, pay on a million dollar house, and live paycheck to paycheck.
Paycheck to paycheck usually denotes all of your paycheck goes strictly towards critical expenses (food, housing, bills).
This is how they're defining it in their study: https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-finance/2022/what-is-paycheck-to-paycheck/
It also has a logical flaw built right in: debt. If peoples' debt is increasing ... are they even succeeding in living paycheck to paycheck?? That sounds more like a plane in the process of crashing, and no one will call it a crash for the simple fact they haven't hit ground, yet...
I watch some YouTube videos about the terrible state of the car market (just for curiosity I guess). One of the channels is a guy who buys auction vehicles. He was saying today that one of the smaller title loan places in Vegas is opening fifteen new branches and I want to say double that amount in Phoenix.
We're in for an ugly time ahead.
$V calls LETS GOOOOOOO