this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
531 points (96.5% liked)
Not The Onion
18646 readers
1289 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I make low six figures, definitely not in survival mode. I’m probably abnormal, as I grew up with money insecurity, and had to file bankruptcy in the early 2010s.
When my income started going up, after a certain point I just started living like it didn’t. I save 30-40% of my pay every month. I’m not cheap, but I’m frugal and willing to wait for sales on stuff if it’s not something I need right this moment.
I have well over a year of expenses in a HYSA.
I bought my last car in 2020 for 24k USD fora new previous year model that was still on the lot and paid 1/3rd cash up front with a zero interest deal financing to keep the monthly cost down.
Paid off all my debts, student loans, everything but the mortgage. And since I work remotely and am an introvert, my wife and I moved to the rurals and got a mortgage for half of what it would be in our previous city. I will likely have it paid off in 2-3 years, maybe 6-7 years into a 30 year mortgage.
Living on six figures had not been all that difficult. I don’t even really think about money anymore and it’s a weight off me. It’s living on six figures while keeping up with the Joneses, celebrity influencers, and advertisers, going into massive debt for sake of appearances and potentially invoking the envy of others to prove you’re somehow better or you’ve “made it” and “deserve it” … that’s hard.
life is easy if you live on a budget.
vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.
most of their consumption is impulsive and based on peer pressure. most common example is how many people buy cars that are like 50%+ of their salary. I knew so many people buy 40-50K cars on 60-70K salaries then constantly whining about how expensive their car was....
when i was making 60-70K... I bought a 20K car. but of course everyone made fun of me for being 'cheap' and driving a 'shitbox'. etc. apparently I was supposed to buy a overpriced luxury car like a BMW/Mini or SUV?
I've had so many girlfriends... who just lost their shit at me for not spending my money on stupid expensive shit. Once I had one go through my bank statements, find out I had 50K in cash (was saving for a house), and demand I spend it on taking her on a trip to Africa. I said no and she flipped out and screamed at me, called me names, and we broke up. In her mind I was huge selfish asshole for 'hoarding' my money to buy a house and not spending it on taking her traveling.
I broke up with 3 different women too because when it came to living together talk, they basically refused to budget. and when I found out how much they were spending... well it was over. They were spending like 120% more than they made and just piling up debt year after year with credit cards and personal loans. And when you tried to explain to them that was not how you become financially secure, they just told you what a rich asshole you were and that you should be 'generous' and give them your money to 'help' them.
While I share some frustration on the matter, I'd also point out:
It's not as if we're taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that's it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.
We live in an environment where the risks aren't, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.
Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don't disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But...think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.
It's crazy, isn't it? I went to a "good" school (non-public school, better education from elementary through high school) growing up and even then our home economics courses only taught us how to sew and make pillows and shit (I'm not entirely knocking it, I can stitch up and patch clothes). The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
It's been like... 25 years now or something. Mr. Roland, bro, sir, if you're still out there, thanks for the head start. I completely bombed financially in my 20s, but recovered in my 30s after bankruptcy, in part remembering and working on a lot of the stuff you taught, and I'm thriving now.
I mean, yeah. But... consumerism. It's literally the problem. People need to work on their susceptibility to this. Just because something is sold to you does not mean you have to buy it. I don't buy anything major without at least a few weeks to a month of research, and longer the more expensive it is. And I'll commonly wishlist something if I feel an overwhelming sense of desire to buy it and can't figure out why. Sometimes I legitimately want something, but other times it's just social or advertising pressure, memetic desire. I figure if I come back later and still want it, it's worth considering, but often it just gets removed from the list. The desire, the want is temporary. Marketing is very good at manipulating your base desires and making something seem like a need when it's far from it.
People and businesses will always be selling, always manipulating.You have to learn to curb your impulses and tame the monkey brain. There is a level of personal responsibility required.
I mean, we definitely didn't even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver's ed
an elective course
where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
I'm not saying you're wrong, and that's gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don't get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn't a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren't doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I'm not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you'd kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I'd say that that's relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it's on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
EDIT2:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
collapsed inline media
This one doesn't go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
collapsed inline media
collapsed inline media
EDIT4: One more fun chart:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/
collapsed inline media
EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses
"We'll do anything but think"