Making money

Is it just me, or is making money alot harder nowadays than it is in the past (i.e., 70's to 90's). On the one hand you can easily strike-rich with a good idea and a webstartup (the first dot com bubble and the imminent second one that I see) -- or you can work at a large corp and make an avg salary.

According to stuff I read and have not verified, the median income hasn't really shifted for decades; yet with inflation and also globalization driving down the average labor/engineer/tech cost, its harder and harder to just buy stuff you need to be "satisfied" -- without having to spend 40 years paying it down (i.e., a nice house and enough money for kids' college and etc).

What do you guys think ? These days I make a decent salary and love my job but after the government screws me on taxes, and after I max my 401k, employee stock purchase, I am down to making very little.

This has been bothering me for a while.
--- merged: Sep 8, 2011 6:50 AM ---
For example, a reimbursement I received from my company's relocation agency was for $500+. However, $250 of it was immediately withheld for tax. Like.. wtf?

 

I think anybody who can't make "enough" (hah!) money isn't willing to make the sacrifices required to attain their golden ticket.

I won't bother dropping the math on my current employment but I am being rewarded for putting up with a life of inconvenience.

That and I think there is a huge sense of entitlement in the West. People expect things to be all Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

White people are above the service industry. White people are career students pursuing hoity-toity do-nothing ethereal-deliverable jobs.

The older generation sees the current generation as do-nothing college kids and everybody forgets the exorbitant cost of education these days.

And as the Misfits suggested in the late '70s: "We're all blue from projection tubes." Materialism is robbing us of contentedness.

...

Anybody who says they're not making enough money and isn't a teacher or in law enforcement probably needs to shut the fuck up.

I'll let the resident politicos talk (and by talk I mean angry circlejerk) about the quagmire of "middle class white guy" taxes but I'd like to suggest that the problem isn't taxes themselves, merely how much bang you're getting for your buck. I'm not a genius, but something tells me our tax dollars are somehow affected by the Laws of Thermodynamics: money is somehow converted into two martini lunches and endless arguing in those big white buildings scattered across the District of Columbia. I like paying taxes. I just wish more of my money would go to actually solving problems.

 

Well, that's a bit of what's bothering me. As an engineer, I help make something, either a tiny part or a big part. But its something solid. However, bean counters, finance people who shift money around (and who got us into the 2008 crisis), and lawyers (mostly thinking of patent-war between huge corps type lawyers) -- they don't really make much of anything. They make "ethereal-deliverables" out of thin-air, just shifting shit around. And they paid alot more than everyone else. Don't mention the business and management types (the useless ones I mean, and that's probably a large %-tage) who don't do much but talk talk talk.

For me its the drive to not be the failing / decelerating generation in my family. I am trying so hard to live up to what my parents achieved but they achieved it before my current age and if I worked hard for 50 years I could still never catch up.

^ I think that's what's really bothering me..

 

Is it harder to make money now than it was in the past? Is there an echo?

This is the same thing that people say every generation. We all look back with pseudo nostalgia on some glowing idealized past where kids were polite, jobs paid well and were plentiful... etc.

If things are harder today to make money it is only because wages have perhaps not come up to match the cost of living. Blaming it on taxes (in the US anyway) is a little hard to fathom as tax rates continue to be the lowest they've been in decades. The thing is, the cost of living has gone up and continues to rise. The cost of everyday things such as fuel (heating and driving), clothes and (especially) food are higher.

I do not have the stats to back this up but suspect that if we look at median wages we will see that they have not been rising as dramatically as the cost of living.

People (especially in the US) need to realize that maybe it's time to tighten their belts and pay more in taxes to help get their country out of the financial crisis they find themselves in. Do with fewer luxuries that they have come to expect and live with less. Our grandparents did this to help finance WWII. Looked at in one way, WWII was a massive stimulus package that kick started the stagnant economy and brought about a golden age of economics in America.

 

This is something I have thought about a few times in the past. I think in some ways it's true and in other ways it's false.

For example, an argument to support this idea that it's harder to make a living now would be the story of one of my grandfathers. He came over here around 1910, worked for a while (I'm really not sure how long) and saved up enough money to buy his own farm land in a very fertile area by a river. That business did well for decades until essentially he couldn't compete with the vegetables being trucked up from the California mega farms at lower prices. Ok, well that's just capitalism at work right? Yes it is. However towards the end of the life of the farm when we were trying to any type of changes to keep it afloat, the area he had been farming for decades was now considered close to "wetlands" and we couldn't do anything. In fact, major parts of the farm itself were in danger of being declared a "wetland" which of course would have been a disaster. Now I'm not one of those people who claim government regulation is root of all evil, but I do believe that if someone were to come to that location today and try to start a working farm it just wouldn't be possible due to the environmental regulations.

On the flip side of that I think we have more "tools" now such as the internet, fast global supply chain, etc so that if you do truly have a good idea you can be very successful. A guy I know started a cell phone accessory business that's doing very well. Everytime a new smart phone/ipad comes out people want all the associated junk that they can possibly attach to it. He has some engineers design some stuff on CAD, sends the plans to china, and they ship back the craptastic acessories that he marks up 1000%. That business of course wouldn't have been possible in the 1910's.

I think the bottom line is that it's always "hard." In capitalism we are always trying to screw each other over as much as possible and gain the advantage. Hell, back in the day I'm sure my grandpa was pissed off at some guy across the county for selling lettuce for 2 cents less a head just like my friend probably gets pissed off that someone is undercutting him on a USB charger for a few bucks.

 

Making money these days is exactly the same as in the past... finding a job that will cover your basic needs, then allocating the surplus to the desirables, in order of their importance to YOU, including something towards retirement and investment. Unfortunately, with the pace of technological change today, and the Boomer generation's tendency to snap up every new toy and indulge their children, today's adults think their needs are far greater than they really are. As a result, a lot of the desirables are seen as necessities, and the "cost-of-living" is artificially high, making it seem that people are barely getting by, when in fact, they are enjoying far more luxuries than they think.

 

Part of what is happening, and part of why the rich are getting richer, is that the explosion of media covering the lifestyles of the rich and famous has made everyone want that lifestyle. So things that truly are luxuries are seen as necessities, such as everyone having a cellphone, 150+ channels on tv, internet connections, designer jeans/sneakers/, multiple car families... all this is now the new standard of living. But it's higher than it need be, or perhaps should be, for many wage earners. In my youth, in a working class neighbourhood, the "basics" of life were food, clothing, shelter. Now, the "basics" have gone far beyond that, and people don't realise how much of what they see as the necessities are things they could really live without. As a result, the "cost of living" has risen beyond what is really the cost of living and become the cost of keeping up.

Since the rich can easily afford this, they aren't being hurt... they still have money to invest and get richer. My father wanted me to have a better life, so he made sure that he didn't spend all his disposable income on things he wanted... instead he spent it on things he wanted for me (education, books, opportunities). Because today's generation is spending so much money on what we want to have, and what we want our kids to have, there is little left over to help us make more money down the road. Too many are now working strictly for the money they make, rather than making their money work for them.

 

Yeah you guys make good points.

I'm gonna roll up my sleeves, get down to working hard, and forget about chasing the money dreams for a while.

Although, to be fair, I think the bottom half of the brackets pay like 0 income tax. How is that fair? A chunk of my income goes into income tax. Just sayin'. Not fair.
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But I don't think I'm living beyond my means. It is still hard to save money. I eat peanut butter sandwiches everyday for lunch at work, I tethered for a few months to save on real internet, I don't order cable tv at all, etc etc. It's not like I'm sitting here with 50 Mbs internet with 150 cable channels and a luxury sports car. I do none of that.

 

Ejkwt, maybe give us an image of how much your income, tax and total expenses are?

Regardless of that, many countries have the same issue. Recently made notable: Israel.

US law enforcement?

I know a bunch of your guys here and they make an easy US$ 250k+ per year for being consultants.

EDIT: Not to mention what your military officers make by being here...

 

P/A2P9: making money is an appropriate term since it's an unjust fantasy. ejkwt, rolling up your sleeves & working hard will give you your own answers.

 

Dude, what the hell does that even mean? Money is, in many ways, the only thing that connects a lot of people. At least in this world.

Your inability to render complete sentences at a 7th grade level leaves me with no other choice but to go off half-cocked on retarded tirades:

From the sweaty Thai kid that made your watch for $2/day to the snooty career student chasing unicorn fart credentials for a few hundred thou.

And unjust fantasy? "Success is a obedience to a structured way of life, we can't ignore that structure because we're all within its sight."

 

I want to drink with you. You're a zen master. You've achieved emptiness.

 

Political orgs I worked with in the past have research to back claims that middle class incomes have not risen at the same rate as the cost of living. But I also agree there's a distorted perspective of need costs vs. want costs, and the line between the two seems to be blurring more and more, with much more willingness to finance the modern American "bigger is better" mentality by incurring massive debt.

Evaluating priorities, and determining what constitutes true wealth in a personal sense, goes a long way.

I left my previous job and took a $20k pay cut to slash my commute from 30 miles to less than one, turning my workday + commute duration from thirteen hours to eight and a half. The decrease in my salary has compelled us to adjust our expenditures accordingly, but the change, in freeing up five hours of time each day and eliminating stress from my commute, has been overwhelmingly positive.

 

You might want to look into this before you start talking about it.

The bottom half do not pay 0% income tax. To pay zero, they would have to be making less than the personal exemption amount of $3,700. This is an exemption available to everyone. Further, they may qualify for other exemptions related to being head of the house, kids, etc. All of these exemptions are the same for everyone.

There is nothing special about it. People who make more money, get the same deductions but then have more left over that is taxable. If you were to tax the people making this little they would have nothing left to live on.

Again, taxes in the US are lower than they have been in decades. If anything, the US needs to be paying more taxes to cover the costs of the wars that they have been waging for the past 10 years. You can't spend that kind of money without bringing in revenue.

 

I agree with this statement very much. I was having a conversation with a relative and saying how if the US citizens were forced to pay for these voluntary wars right now through a "war on terror tax" of X thousand dollars per household, rather than paying for them through the creation of additional government debt, I believe the wars would have been over a long time ago.