• tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        You have to have money to save money. How does a person save money if every dollar earned is spent on necessities?

        • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You do not need money to save money. You need money to invest.

          Find inefficiencies in how you spend money and fix them to reduce expenses. Then save this difference.

          The most common areas people spend too much are housing and cars.

          • Venia Silente
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            1 year ago

            And now you just reminded me of the retarded secretary of commerce in Chile who said, when complained to that people had to wake up at 5 AM, spend two hours in a commute to start a shitty 7-to-5 jobs to earn less than a living wage, he answered them with “lol just wake up at 3 AM, you just gained two hours”.

          • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            You aren’t wrong, but lets take someone like me for example. I don’t have a car, I rent a studio apartment below the average price in my area, I eat less food than I should and try to reduce my power and water costs when possible. I have a job that pays well for my area and I can barely afford rent, until recently I often required help from family to afford it. I agree there are probably ways I could save some money. But look at the wealth in the US, there are incredible profits for property companies and hedge funds, this money doesn’t just come out of the air. There is a siphoning of wealth from the working class. To say that these struggling workers need to save or invest might be true for some but there are much bigger factors in the increasing inequality of wealth.

            • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I agree that the rich in America are siphoning from the poor. But I think that the biggest way they steal from the poor is through debt, not living expenses.

              Think about it. Americans are taught that they must go to university right after high school. Kids are forced to make a huge financial decision without any understanding of the consequences, and there’s a lot of social pressure on them to conform by taking out a student loan.

              Next Americans are taught that they should always use credit cards, and that they need to build a good credit score (so they can get approved for more debt later.) They are again pressured by advertising and social norms to take on debt, in addition to the gimmicky rewards like airline miles and cash back, which intices you to spend more than you normally would.

              Finally people have even started using debt products like margin trading, which allows you to lose more money on the stock market than you even have, and apps like Afterpay allow you to buy expensive items you can’t afford. It’s just a never ending cycle of debt.

              If people were taught about the debt trap from an early age they could protect themselves and actually save their money, not become a wage slave like so many Americans have.

              • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Please just read any communist literature about class oppression instead of making up wild theories about why the working class is so poor. You’re trying to reinvent the wheel without any idea about how a normal wheel functions in the first place.

                • nodsocket@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Sorry professor, I didn’t realize I interrupted your communism 101 lecture. Unfortunately I live in the real world where not everyone is out to get you and not everything is hopeless.

                  • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    I’m not trying to be passive aggressive, I am trying to be earnest:

                    Youre wasting your abilities by not educating yourself on marxist analysis. You come close to a bunch of points that are made by marxists but don’t have the base of knowledge to develop them properly and do further analysis on them. Modern Marxists actually do write on the debt economy and you have the very start of their analysis but you veer off.

                    This is not an attempt to call you stupid, this is pointing out that you’re trying to do something and having the right tool for the job would make your life easier.

      • chakan2@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You don’t really even have to save money if you’re smart with the first time homebuyers credits and grants.