Great points, but not the world we currently live in, nor on any track towards. I’ll just let my mom know she can stop working because society should be taking care of her and I’ll go ahead and liquidate my 401k and IRAs since they won’t be needed.

It’s great to work towards those goals of having better social programs, but you still have to exist in the world that you actually live in.

Agreed, the bailout should be targeted and very selective. If OpenAI can’t survive, then fine, let it ‘die’. It won’t actually die, it’ll get scooped up by someone else and their assets will be picked up by one of the surviving companies. It’s an interesting way to innovate… burn money to push the industry further along, knowing full well that you’ll never turn a profit, but that a future company will end up with your tech and they might eventually make a profit.

The problem is most Americans with retirement savings are shareholders of these tech companies whether they know it or not. My mom lost a HUGE part of her retirement savings when WorldCom went under and was never able to recover from it and is now in her mid 70s and still has to work full time. She’s almost blind and can hardly walk and she’s worked her whole life and tried to do everything right but her financial advisor was giving her what was thought to be good, safe advice in the early 2000s and completely changed how her twilight years are playing out.

This is what I did… I tried to ‘just move on’ without blocking them, but they had commented several times in a thread I was trying to read and it was such a distraction, so I blocked them and only ever think of them when I see posts like this. It’s a shame too because the person I blocked did seem to have worthwhile comments, they were just too annoying to try to read.

I keep seeing this assertion that Yahoo linkjacks stories, but that isn’t true. Yahoo is a news aggregator and pays to syndicate stories from a large number of sources.

In fact, Yahoo not only paid for the story, but at the very top of the page, and in the article itself, they attribute it to NBC News.

You can stand down from this mission of protecting online news sources from Yahoo and redirect your efforts to some other worthy cause.

My point is that just because you are living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean you can’t still save. It’s a decision that you have to make but it is doable because no matter how bad you’re situation is, there are other people getting by on 5%-10% less than you. By insisting that someone living paycheck to paycheck can’t also have savings is what’s doing a disservice to them.

Anyone have the .stl file for this so we can start spreading these in more locations?

Hey now, to be fair, all those many, many times when the Old Testament recorded the Israelites committing genocide, they were doing it because God specifically told them to do it. It’s not like they would EVER go against the will of God.

I didn’t say that the savings didn’t make a difference, I said that having an additional small amount of money available to be each part period wouldn’t have kept me from living paycheck to paycheck. Of course having the savings made a difference when something major happened, that was the whole point.

During the time I was getting paid around $25k a year I was bringing home around $700 a paycheck (every 2 weeks). Me putting aside 10% between my 401k and my savings meant that I had around $30 every 2 weeks going into savings. I often ran out of available money several days before my next check, and having an additional $30 would have been nice, but would have likely only given me another few days.

And yes, when I had unexpected bills, and later when I lost my job, I did dip into my savings because that’s why I had it, but that 10% want going to be the difference between me living paycheck to paycheck, or not. In fact, the transition to not living that way was a very gradual process.

So your view of paycheck to paycheck is likely even smaller than Bank of America’s because you wouldn’t count someone with a 401k?

But I would exhaust the money from my paycheck that was in my checking account, and I had many times where I would also empty my savings when I’d get hit with an unexpected expense.

My point was that even though I was saving money, it wasn’t ever money that I ever saw in my bank account. My 401k was taken from my paycheck and I couldn’t even think about touching that with a lot of effort and expense. I had my direct deposit setup to send most of my check to my checking account, but I always had a small amount going to my savings at a different credit union. My toughest years I was making around $25k a year and I had 5% of my income going to my 401k and 5% going to my savings. My rent, car payment and car insurance would be the first things I paid each month and usually that meant my first 2 weeks of the month were sparse and if I had stopped putting aside that 10% it would have been a little help, but not enough to get through to my next check. So yes, I had access to money, but I was still living paycheck to paycheck because I had strict rules on when I could access that money - and I tried to pay back to my savings anything I took out, when possible.

Would you consider someone adding to their 401k each check to not be living paycheck to paycheck?

I am surprised and would have expected that number to be higher.

Oh, that isn’t the definition I think most people use for the term “paycheck-to-paycheck”.

I think you answered your own question because you’re using a different definition than Bank of America. I have always been a saver, as a kid is squirrel money away in different places, and when I became an adult I kind of kept the same mentality, even when I considered myself as living paycheck to paycheck, I was still putting money aside in different places (401k, HSA, savings, Fidelity, etc). It wasn’t a lot going to any place, but it was consistent at around 10% in total. The way I saw it was that there are plenty of people surviving while earning 10% less than I do, so I just had to make sure I never missed the money. So my definition of living paycheck to paycheck is likely different from yours, if you don’t allow for saving.

Vote in the primaries. Get involved in local politics and find out who actually wants to help people, has good ideas, and has a proven track record in their community.

Elect the good leaders in your kid’s PTO to the school board. Get to know your local scout council (both boy scouts and girl scouts), elect them to your city council. Follow your school board, city and county council, see what they are doing, who is actually helping the community with good ideas, and then send them to the state house, demand they continue to fight for the people. The good ones in your state house should go to the Capitol for no more than 3 terms, then they can come back to the state house to be the local senior leaders.

The problem is, no one does that first part where they pay attention to the local stuff, demanding local change and building local leaders and helping to ensure our candidates aren’t evil.

The crazy thing is millionaires have more on common with us normal workers than they do with billionaires.

I get what you’re saying, that they are millionaires are closer to being broke than to being a billionaire, but they still have more in common with billionaires than normal workers. Once you reach the mid to high single digit millionaire you can pretty much choose your own adventure.

Oh, I know … and that’s what makes it sad is because he could help to make the world a better place.

The Boone County Prosecutor’s Office told WRTV on Thursday that they are still determining whether the shooter will face any charges, the station reported.

I live in Indiana and if no charges get filed on this, and there isn’t a conviction then I can’t wait for the next election cycle when politicians start knocking on doors.

So he’s going to have SpaceX buy a million robotaxies and robots to drive them.

So that’s the thing… in the US even our poor are rich compared to the global poor.

But you’re right, people in the US making $50k a year aren’t really the problem. The problem is the people who have the average income of the 1%. That’s people making almost $500k a year. Which is crazy to think that the income needed to join the global 1% is so much lower than the average income of the 1%.

70 million people.

That’s what it will take to rid us of the top 1%.

Of course, if we’re going after the global 1% then that will be anyone making over approximately $55k USD per year.