After years of working and saving, I can now afford to miss ONE paycheck. I’m no longer poor! /s
Capitalist scum!
Lots of people in here fighting about what “working class” means. If you have to work to survive (other than minor household chores), you’re working class. If you have enough money, or assets that you get dividends from or can borrow against, or passive income so you don’t need a regular employment then you probably aren’t working class.
Working Poor isn’t as common and definition varies a lot.
I feel like there is a world in between of these two
There really isn’t. Each group has a wider pay rate than maybe is implied, but functionally, there isn’t a role in capitalism between them. Wealthy people want us to think there is a wide range of classes so we argue with each other instead of cooperating against them.
I can stop working for about 2 or 3 years depending on sacrifices I am willing to make. Do I qualify as a working poor class?
I disagree. You are NOT poor just because you end up without money at the months end.
My brother is an perfect example. He earns A TON of cash every month. Nearly as much as I, my fiance, my Dad and Mum combined.
And still he lives from payday to payday without any reserves. Because he can not handle money.
He eats in restaurants at least ten times a week. At least twice in highest luxury restaurants. He has leased four different cars in three years, none less than €2000 per month. Lifes in an absurdetly huge penthouse. Buys his girl friend so much bullshit she gave me a €5.000 collier because she ran out of space and I drove her home after parties a couple of times. But still he asked Pa and me several times for fuel money at the end of the month.
See, if he would live like I do he could live two years from one months earnings.
So you think I am poor I guess?
Nope. I own a huge plot of land. I am going to build my own house and I am talking about a nice big house made from stone at the gates of Munich where land is expensive and houses are even more expensive. I have paid generous amounts of pension insurance. If I would stop working in five years when I am 35 I would be a made girl and could live from my savings although on a low level.
So he can absolutely afford to miss at least one paycheck, he just doesn’t want to. That’s already covered in the image. “You can’t afford to miss a paycheck”.
Being irresponsible wasn’t the topic.
Either person doesn’t need a tonne of money to survive. Not that they aren’t using it to survive.
This is really irrelevant. He obviously can miss a paycheck. He is rich, so if he says “I’ll pay you next month” to anyone, they go “sure”. Even if that doesn’t work, he can just sell a piece of jewelry. This is just an elaborate version of the “avocado toast” trope.
If that is how he spends than he can clearly afford to miss a paycheck. Its not the same as having spend it all.
When you cant ask the landlord to pay rent next month because you already had to ask last month is when you cant afford to miss it.
It would really suck for your borther and he wont keep up the lifestyle but at the end of that month when the next paycheck does arrive he is going to be just fine.
Multiple restaurants in a week sounds like he can afford to let someone else manage his money and still have enough pocketmoney for his vices. He should Look into it.
You have no idea how hard it is to get rid of an unwilling renter as a landlord in Germany. In the event of rent arrears of two months’ rent or more, the landlord can terminate the lease without notice. Only then can he or she file an action for eviction which can take another two to four months. And if the tenant only pays the arrears for one month, the cycle starts all over again. I have seen people dragging this out for five years and when leaving the premise they left behind a battlefield. And absurdetly I am not even allowed to burn or sell their shit because it is still their properties so I have to store it, show it to a bailiff for evaluation, sell the few things worth anything, then store it for another two years and only then I am legally allowed to burn it.
(And yes, my brother missed his rent a couple of times but always caught up after one or two months. Given how expensive rents in Germany are we are not talking about small sums. A 1960th 84m² apartment in a suburb is around €1500, a 1870th 70m² apartment in the centre of munich is around €3500 per month. The penthouse my brother lives in… just short of five digits. If he ever gets seriously sick he will go broke within two months and will take decades to pay of the debts. Again, he has no long term insurrances, no savings, nothing at all. And social wellfare and social health care of a couple of €100 will only bring him so far…)
I don’t want to dismiss the challenges and difficulties you speak off. All experiences are valid and personal. Yet i feel like there is a disconnect here where i don’t think you gravity of what is meant with not being able to afford.
I don’t live in Germany but just the fact that there is social wellfard and that you speak of him still having a couple of hundred says plenty of the privileges compared to the people this post is actually all above who may not even have that money after working. (Not everyone on the globe is granted fair and legal Working conditions and rights)
I assume with renter protections and your brother having a a good job missing a payment for him can be solved with an annoying call to the landlord who can reasonably expect that your brother has the means to make enough money.
For people who love in slums, who can barely Afford their home ij the slum when they do have money and sometimes need to chose between heat, food and rent the relation with the landlord who is routinely dealing with tenants who dont have the means to pay.
Also, it sounds like you care about your brother and you yourself ard doing reasonably well. Imagine that he does end up jobless with no home or food. Would you or some other family not help him out? Poverty is a systematic issue, there are exceptions but most poor families come from poor families. If they end up on the street and there is no wellfare that cares they and their kids may just die on the street.
That is the distinction that i believe should Be made here when we talk about not being able to afford. Its nog about hardship or financial ruin. Its about the difference between barely surviving and not surviving.
I must confess, currently I am not even living on my own. A storm in 2019 destroyed the apartment my fiance and I lived in and as housing is insanely hard to find in Germany we fled literally into my old childhood room at my parents house and annexed the room of my brother too - he hasn’t needed it for like five years so who cares. Which is fine because I am working at my family business anyway and it is just a two minutes walk from home. Then the Pandemic hit and in 2023 my fiance and afterwards we realized how much money we had saved - because my parents only charge a miniscoul amount of money from us - we can literally buy a complete house, something we didn’t even think about five years ago.
Another renter in the wrecked apartment building moved into a trailer park, or to be more precise, a container park - yes, they exist around here too but are not as Ultra-Low-Class as i have seen them in the US. It is okeyish and pretty cheap and you can literally get a container on short notice but usually they are so deep in the bonneys that you need to ride to work on a horse. I mean when the shit really hits the fan this seems a good emergency solution even in the US. I have been visiting some when I did work-study (*1) over there and while they were less nice than those around here I was surprised how nice the people around there were.
(*1) I am mortician and embalmer and we picked up some deceased over there for funeral preparations. Which means we had very close interaction and looking into private stuff, literally helping the local police to recover papers and documents from their stuff.
Bold of you to assume I’m American.
That was silly of her. I mean, look at you? Clearly nowhere near America. She should apologize to you.
Still I incline on agree that Internet got super America-centric
There’s over 96% of people living outside land of the free, can we talk about it for a second?
Real talk, I suspect there are a number of contributing factors to that phenomenon that have very little to do with John American sharing a twitter screenshot with Lemmy. I mean, Americans are just online, talking to each other. If we’re that overwhelming, I wouldn’t point any fingers at normal american people.
Everyone is online, what makes me wonder is how Americans and not say Indians dominate the interwebs?
Americans dominate the English speaking Internet, because there are more English speakers. There are sites in German or Hindi that have almost never used by Americans.
Having to work to survive is the default state of nature, unless you are a baby or an elder. It doesn’t mean you’re oppressed.
What about our modern world makes you think humanity exsists in a default state of nature?
We don’t live in a post-scarcity society, so the rules of nature still apply. People need food, water, shelter, energy and someone has to work to provide those things.
My fellow Lemmy user, we dont live in a post-scarity world because profits matter more than people in our Capitalist Society. We could live in a post-scarity world, but that would come at the cost of profits for the 1% who do effectively zero work.
We literally destroy food in this country instead of giving it to people who have nothing. The “scarcity” is entirely manufactured.
I like how things are defaulting to the US as if that’s the whole world.
I work paycheck to paycheck but if I told people how much I made and called myself poor I’d probably anger people. I just make sure that I do what’s in my power to keep myself comfortable now, even if that means overspending on luxuries
If you have no financial reserves, you are IMO poor or stupid. One of both.
Which are you?
Edit: I’m going to go with both.
80% are not living paycheck to paycheck
Some more accurate data from Forbes:
- 40,74% living with nothing left over after monthly expenses
- 29,13% more unable to cover their surprise expenses
- 30,13% able to actually accumulate and save
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/survey-living-paycheck-to-paycheck/
Cite?
Yes, the person making the claim that 80% live paycheck to paycheck should cite
You’ve claimed that they aren’t. Please prove.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/survey-living-paycheck-to-paycheck/
40% live paycheck to paycheck
We asked respondents to describe their current income situation.
You mean 40% of forbes readers live paycheck to paycheck?!
This may surprise you but not everyone reads forbes.
(selection bias)
Lots of articles are saying 60 to 69%. CNBC, Barrons, LendingClub. I can’t find a better source but… 40% from a rich person’s mag like forbes is just too much man. I would estimate 55% to 70%, so 80% doesn’t seem that far off.
His citation is a forbes survey saying 40% (riddled with selection bias)
you’re also not the working poor if you live paycheck to paycheck and make 150k/year. you just fucking aren’t, it’s your own fault you’re not saving money at that point
HCOL
My dad made around this amount in SF Bay Area and we made do, including a big mortgage payment, car payments, etc.
150K is a lot of money
In 2024?
He made 130K a some years ago, which is only a bit over 150K in 2024 money
Uh huh…
Just because you had to live in a neighborhood with $5000/month rent doesn’t mean you’re poor just because you piss your money away. A doctor with no money leftover every month isn’t poor, he’s just retarded.
That’s the thing about HCOL areas, they generally don’t pay well, either.
Based on vibes or what?
The person who makes the claim should prove it first
Good point. So, prove your claim, please.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/survey-living-paycheck-to-paycheck/
40% live paycheck to paycheck
We asked respondents to describe their current income situation.
You mean 40% of forbes readers live paycheck to paycheck?!
This may surprise you but not everyone reads forbes.
(selection bias)
Where does it say they only surveyed readers?
I mean, forbes did the survey. Do you think they didn’t use their reader base?
As for only surveying readers, lemme look at the survey and see if it said that. My concern is that a magazine performing a survey is going to have some issues with selection bias.
edit:
So, in this case, it suffers from a very small sample size. There may be funding concerns too.
Lots of articles are saying 60 to 69%. CNBC, Barrons, LendingClub. I can’t find a better source but… 40% from a rich person’s mag like forbes is just too much man. I would estimate 55% to 70%, so 80% doesn’t seem that far off.
Source?
60% to 80% is literally a jump of 2x, meaning twice as many people who have savings
80% is incredibly far off
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/27/60percent-of-americans-are-still-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.html
Gives lending club as source so basically it’s the same source
Where did you get 69%
Why do we keep trying to pervert defined terms?
The working poor are those who work at least 27 weeks a year and still have income below the poverty line.
Because that definition is woefully inadequate to describe the conditions of people experiencing poverty.
I’m not sure how broadening it to include like half the country helps them?
Lots of people live paycheck to paycheck because they have to - other people live paycheck to paycheck because they want to drive a BMW and have a house 50% larger they can afford. They’re not the same.
That’s a definition of “working class” but not generally what people outside certain academic contexts mean when they say that phrase; using the more common definition does not indicate “confusion about your class status.”
Buying into strategic labour divisions perpetuated by the ownership class for their benefit does not convey a comprehension of the language.
Yeah, insisting on using a nonstandard definition exclusive to a tiny minority of speakers, so that you can then talk past your interlocutor, wasting both of your time until they finally realize you’re intentionally being an uncooperative speaker, makes way more sense. 🙄
I guess at least this way you get to feel a smug, undeserved sense of superiority in the process though, so who’s to say which way is really better.
Ok ok guys let’s drop the 5 dollar words eh? Im rate limited i can’t be looking up all this shit.
But for real b, “working class” means you exchange your time for money, no cap. White collar vs blue collar shit is designed to separate the working class yo. Looky here, we like wikipedia right? Lemme link that shit
Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce
Now if you wanna argue the point, sure it can and does mean what youre talking about, but if you take a minute to think about it, which distinction makes sense?
Both definitions are alright, i personally think the inclusive definition is best, but everyone should be aware of both so we can all know what the heck the other’s talking bout
My point is that Joe Blow off the streets who might be seeing the OP’s tweet doesn’t know (or care) that there’s another, more niche definition - Joe Blow only knows “working class” as mainly people doing manual or unskilled labor (another term I see this problem with all too often), and “working poor” as the part of that class subsisting around or below poverty level.
So, if you’re trying to get Joe Blow off the street (or pretty much any other regular person, for that matter) to understand, agree with, and support you, saying things that don’t make sense, like “80% of Americans are working poor” or “unskilled labor doesn’t exist”, and then insisting that you’re right when he objects, is only going to cause misunderstanding, and Joe probably does not care enough to learn the nonstandard definitions you think are better for whatever reason.
This isn’t directed at you, but sometimes it’s really not surprising that conservatives do so much better than socialists/communists at attracting working-class people to their cause, if only because they don’t require a four-year bachelor’s in the terminology of niche political theory to have a basic conversation with them.
Have your taken classes in debate? Im impressed how many times you worked your point in with adjectives here, and without even mentioning my wikipedia definition directly, completely dismissed it as both highbrow and niche. It would take a lot to unravel if i tried to engage with you directly, but if i did, it wouldn’t really be fair since you didn’t actually engage with any of mine. Not really.
Masterful, i respect your posting skill, i bet you wear a lot of people down.
Bye!
And Elon musk does not represent you. Stop talking like his fight is your fight. We’re not all in this together.
Middle class was originally defined as a class that gets at least some significant percent of their income from stocks bonds and other investments. I’m willing to bet that ain’t you.
Is this a definition common in a specific country outside the U.S.? I see this claim in multiple places in the thread, but that’s not how it has been historically defined in the U.S. or in France where the term originated. Middle class in the original context evolved out of the mercantile class that traded goods in cities - neither aristocrat nor serf - during the middle ages. That original definition had nothing to do with investments.
Does it not? Maybe the definition of investments has expanded to include more abstract things like stock in a company, but still a merchant needs to invest in goods that they then sell. Which now that i think about it is also called stock…
What I find interesting is how often statements like this that are trying to unify the working class (or whatever you end up calling it) just derails into semantics instead of actually people bringing out the pitchforks and shouting “eat the rich”
We are all fucked.
Which sounds like the statement wasn’t well crafted
Good meme
