I read that half of Americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. This sounds crazy to me. I understand that poverty exists, but the idea that an adult with a job doesn’t even have that amount saved up seems really strange.
What’s your relationship or philosophy with money? What do you credit for your financial success, or alternatively, what do you blame for your failures?
For the extra brave ones: how much savings do you have, and what are you planning to do with them?
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every time I read one of those statistics, I feel the same way.
I’m doing very well relative to that statistic.
I live fairly simply, but I don’t consider myself particularly frugal.
I like traveling, learning, eating, watching and reading stuff, and making things, which are all pretty cheap interests.
If I were to credit anything with my financial success, it would be a practiced awareness of financial opportunity and persistently learning about and attempting every viable opportunity I’m interested in to gain a practical knowledge of cost-benefit streams.
I’ve tried many ways to make money and work less, and some of them worked out.
I’m traveling this year, so I save most of my income, and with the IRS’ FEIE I don’t pay income tax(up to 120k).
I have a few investments and some ten thousands accruing interest.
i don’t have immediate plans, but I want to buy some land at some point, basically so I have more area to build stuff and make stuff, sign up for cryonics and get a new electric bike or the Aptera if it every goes into production.
c’mon aptera.
It’s a difficult subject to discuss without sounding like you’re either bragging or talking down to those less well off.
I recently bought a new-to-me truck. I paid in cash, and if I wanted to, I could’ve bought two more. If I liquidated my investments, I could have bought three more, so six in total. I’m self-employed now, but I built all my wealth while working for a (plumbing) company where I was surrounded by people earning twice as much as I did. Yet, these are the people who need to finance their cars, have massive mortgages, and are always in a bad mood due to stress.
I understand that some people have been really unlucky and struggle to improve their financial position despite their best efforts, but these aren’t the people I’m talking about when I wonder how a working-age person can’t come up with a thousand bucks for an unexpected expense. I hardly even consider that a lot of money.
but I want to buy some land at some point, basically so I have more area to build stuff and make stuff.
I feel you there. What kind of things would you like to build? For me, it’s things like a rainwater harvesting system, solar/wind power, a pond with a pier and sauna, a chicken coop, a heated workshop with a car lift, a root cellar… I basically have an infinite list of projects I’d like to pursue.
“I basically have an infinite list of projects I’d like to pursue.”
this is about where I’m at.
All the homesteading stuff, I want to try breeding meat rabbits, I want to try geothermal air conditioning, buy used cars and flip them (I started working on cars a few years ago and ended up enjoying it much more than I thought I would).
a whole separate area for home brewing and jerkying stuff too, canning, all that.
I like the idea of building different types of housing and read books and watch videos all the time, like straw bale or clay or underground, whatever the heck experimental cabins I could build, and I’ve further toyed with the beginning of an idea of how to turn that into low income housing after I land on the simplest, sturdiest and least resource intensive houses to build.
carpentry. I’ve built small tables and desks and chairs for classrooms, but I’d like to experiment with larger furniture.
I did a lot of solar power experimentation when I was living in a motorhome that turned out Great, and I expect many of my projects outside would be solar and wind powered.
fish farming, vermicomposting, yeah, just a thousand billion things haha.
I like making things, building things, and new experiences.
I’ve done smaller projects within most of the fields I’ve mentioned as the opportunity arose, but even when I’m renting a house somewhere for a couple months I can’t easily conduct long-term larger living experiments, so I’ll have to get a house and land at some point so I can fiddle at scale.
…“always in a bad mood due to stress.”
circumstance and opportunity.
some people don’t have the opportunities, many do have the opportunities but don’t recognize them or choose not to take them because anything outside of what they already know makes them uncomfortable where is seen as difficult, and they haven’t been taught or learned themselves through experience to push past that discomfort or initial effort.
Yeah I love all that. Flipping old cars is something I’ve thought about as well but something I’d be even more interested in is doing the same with boats. Now that I’m self-employed I’ve tought about getting a project boat that I could work on when ever business is otherwise slow. I couldn’t fit a large one on my yard but some smaller fishing boat would be interesting to start with. When looking at old boats they often look like just even a simple pressure wash would double their price.
absolutely, That’s a great call with flipping boats also, I think the exact same thing about cars.
give a “clunker” a wash and change the battery and oil, clean some corrosion, and half the time you’re done with the tune-up and can make a few extra bucks.
I got my first motorcycle for my guy who basically did that for a living with bikes, and that was one of the first times practical commodity flipping made sense to me.
I had heard of flipping houses, but I didn’t hear about it, but then I saw like five bikes in this guy’s backyard and how simple it would be to replace the vital parts, which is fun, and sell them at a fair profit.
I keep trying to figure out how practical a solar /wind powered paddle houseboat would be, that I could just sort of like sustainably ferry out to wherever and paddle around the ocean for a while hahaha.
sounds super fun!
Went from living paycheck to paycheck to having a full $1k in my account right now after dumping my ex and moving out. I always thought that having two incomes combined would be better than just my own, but never realized how massive a drain my ex was compared to just taking care of myself.
That being said, I’m able to live cheaply because I use public transit, cook all my own meals, and I don’t eat that much. I think for most adults in the U.S., especially those who need a car for transit, the honest truth is that their wages just barely cover all their necessary living expenses.
Maybe it helps to understand it when you think of it from the perspective that those $1000 expenses do happen, they’re not just hypothetical. But being able to cope with an event like that leaves you less able to handle a second one, and a third one
Couple that with the fact that I’m the US there is very little financial education so what might be an expected event for one person surprises another. Imagine living with a roommate and not realizing that to move into your own place involves coming up with first and last month rent, deposit, hook up fees, renters insurance, furniture, kitchen supplies, toiletries, etc… None of those should be unexpected, but also why would you expect them if you didn’t happen to run into them before?
Basically no amount of saving accounts for an expense that takes it all, and it’s then followed up by another one right after. And for some people those events are small and happen so quickly you never catch up and now you have late fees and interest and stress.
I’m doing well, but the job is sucking my will to live, and I think about quitting and going to work in a bakery or farm every day
Am early in my career. no debts out of college due to lots of scholarships and a bit of hwlp from my grandparents helped a lot. Bought a house, have a wife in grad school so pretty much just living off of one paycheck. Had to cover a 10k roof replacement last year which sucked, but am back up to about 25k saved up should I lose my job or face another major expense.
I am pretty frugal in general but spend money on a hobby every once in a while. Not into drinking or any legal or illegal drugs so that has peobably saved me thousands of dollars too at this point.
I have a job. It’s technical, requires a fair amount of skills and abilities, yet I cannot cover a $200 emergency after bills and rent. Rent has jumped from $600 a month to $950 in less than four years, and the internet I need for my job has doubled in two years. Of the rent increases? Most of them were in the past year.
I have enough in my emergency fund that if I lost my job I’d be ok for about a year.
I’m nearly to my goal, after that I’m going to change my focus to expanding my portfolio.
Still no way I can buy a house though. Need to make about 3x more money for that to happen.
I credit it to having a property owner that’s kept rent cheap and having low overhead, and being frugal borderline cheap.
I’m doing well at the moment. The problem is that no matter how well I do, eventually something destroys my savings and eventually there’s a layoff at my company.
Even if I’m doing well at the moment, I’m still a couple paychecks from not doing well, and am no where near on track to eventually be able to retire
I have five digits of savings for the first time since my kids were born, but I also have college expenses for them, and at least that much in deferred house maintenance
I credit Apple, of all things. I always had credit cards to minimize interest and fees, and this is the first time I’ve had one with significant cash back. Now I pay essentially everything with credit cards, pay off at the end of the month, get a surprising amount of cash back, directly into a high yield savings account. While of course my job is the reason I’m doing well, I credit this for turning things around to actually let me put money aside, to boost my savings
Im doing well. Started off in my mid twenties reading books on finance and investing. Lived in a drug house where I rented out a room and had a dead end job. Got an education, decent job, and invested aggressively for the next 20 years. Im planning on retiring in my mid 50’s if everything goes to plan. 🤞
I dislike money. I worked hard to have enough that it’s not on my mind. I don’t need to think about the cost of eating out or buying food, or pursuing hobbies. But I also don’t really spend much. I don’t make big purchases very often and when I do I still over-analyze them.
If I had a lot more money I could retire, but I still have half my life to live. I hope to retire in 16 years. I have a job that pays well, with good job security, and minimal stress. I get 38 hours of leave time per month and I live in California.
I have cash savings earning enough per month in interest to pay my cell phone and home internet bills entirely. But I don’t really have any other discretionary monthly subscriptions. My savings will probably be used on a new kitchen and bathroom eventually.
I credit my success to some hard work but mostly luck. At the end of the day my first job was from a recommendation. I believe interviewed well, sure, but I don’t think they would’ve taken my resume otherwise. I’m extremely fortunate to be where I am financially.
Shit still happens though. I lost my job about a year ago and was unemployed for like 6ish months. I had enough money in savings that it didn’t really matter but it still sucked. One thing that has been difficult for me is watching what I say. As an example, some stupid shit happened and I feel like a company owes us ~$800 and another one ~$200. (Not going into details because they’re irrelevant and I want to move on from the stress.) These things royally pissed me off. I still get upset when little things happen and I lose money. I hate it. It sucks. As much as I want to get comfort from my friends by venting about it, sometimes it’s better to shut up. Because some of them mostly just hear how I’m able to withstand losses like that and that in turn makes them feel upset that they aren’t. It’s a tricky thing.
As for my philosophy, for the most part my wife and I have been able to spend within our means without much aggressive or intentional budgeting. It’s only been since the job loss and her being unemployed to pursue writing a novel that things have gotten tight. (And by right I just mean our savings aren’t noticably increasing.)
Failures? Well, let’s ignore stuff like crypto and stock picks because that’s just gambling. I wish I had started maxing out my 401k in my 20s. I started on my early 30s. Also, we used to have a truly stupid amount of money in a checking account. We should’ve put it into stocks (as in total market ETFs) earlier.
OH. THIS IS IMPORTANT. I WISH SOMEONE WOULD’VE TOLD ME HIGH YIELD CHECKING ACCOUNTS EXIST. Like, holy hell. I should’ve done that ages ago. I don’t even wanna think about how much money I’ve lost on, especially because we kept a stupidly high amount of cash in our checking account… I still haven’t moved it because it’s hard and I’m lazy but wow wow wow. This is stupidly important. The reason savings accounts are annoying so because it’s a little harder to get to your cash. But a checking account with interest? Hot damn.
Lastly, I’ve never had a credit card. It’s been fine but it would’ve been nice to get the tiny marginal benefits of cash back and stuff.
Why does everyone think it’s this huge hassle to open a new checking or savings account? Takes like 30min.
It is a huge hassle to move every single auto pay, deposit, etc. to a new account.
I was born at an unfortunate time. By the time I could afford a house the housing market was already very bad. I’m just glad I’m able to buy a house but it is very expensive (we bought at the end of 2021)
I live in Canada so we can’t lock in our mortgage for more than 5 years. I just went with the variable rate because in the long term it’s generally better. However the interest rates skyrocketed. I was able to pay my mortgage still but I was pretty much house poor.
Now the rates are finally dropping so I feel a lot less pressure. With our current budget we should be able to afford one kid comfortably. I’m not sure about a second.
I’m very fortunate and grateful though. Most people my generation cannot even afford a house. It’s just insane that despite my great job it’s still so hard for us I can’t imagine what others are going through.
We aren’t broke. I have some retirement saved but I had to stop putting money in due to our mortgage. I also have an emergency funds account with enough money to sustain us ~6 months if I were to lose my job.
Having a high paying job is unsurprisingly the main reason for my financial success. Otherwise I’d say joining some personal finance clubs helped a bunch. I have my savings diversified and invested so I’m at least not losing money to inflation. But my investments will never make me rich either.
One critique I have for myself is maybe we overspent on the house but at the same time I love our neighborhood and I love our house and we have no plans on ever moving so I’m not too upset by it.
I am one broken leg away from being homeless and losing everything, and it’s been like that my entire working life. I’ve never been able to make enough to actually save. Currently I have -100 in the bank and some debt I’m trying to pay off on top of that. My rent is literally half my income.
Financially, we are well enough to have my family’s needs met comfortably but frugally. Can’t really ask for more, though additional breathing room would be nice. We can afford emergencies and recover after some time.
My parents and grandparents taught frugality; luck made ends meet like a good job and buying a house at the right time.
We have a bit of savings I have in mutual funds because I’m currently too mentally tired and risk-averse to pick something with higher return potential.
I’m doing well but i wish i could afford my hobbies.
