I read that half of Americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. This sounds crazy to me. I understand that poverty exists, but the idea that an adult with a job doesn’t even have that amount saved up seems really strange.
What’s your relationship or philosophy with money? What do you credit for your financial success, or alternatively, what do you blame for your failures?
For the extra brave ones: how much savings do you have, and what are you planning to do with them?
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I have $15.
Not just that I can spend. Not “until sometime in the future.” Just $15.
feel ya. i had $8 left before my last payday and I’m guessing it’ll be like that before my next payday too.
Started paying off debt, saving, and investing consistently over 25 years ago. It has really worked out, and my wife and I are more financially secure than most. Even still, we’re one health crisis away from potential bankruptcy, because we live in the United States.
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I have $15k liquid savings and another $50k I could pull from my Roth IRA in a dire emergency. It’s not as much as I’d like, but I’d be ok if I lost my job. I live in a HCOL area so it doesn’t last as long as you’d think.
I make a good wage, but I work my ass off for it. I credit my financial success largely to luck, my work ethic, and the great state of California. 10 years ago I was making $20k a year, now it’s close to $200k. The main difference was I moved to California. No college degree, blue collar job. Skilled labor. I took jobs with companies that would train me, took promotions, and job hopped a lot.
I pay a ton of taxes and I’m happy to. I’m giving back to the community that enabled my success. If anything, I should be paying more taxes. I do donate about $80 a month to various causes, mostly carbon capture to eliminate my personal carbon footprint, because the environment is very important to me and I like to feel I’m not part of the problem.
I still have $20k in debt, on credit cards but at a promo 2% interest. I hope to pay it off in 2 years.
My philosophy with money is honesty not very healthy in some respects. I’ve been chasing dollars for years, to the complete atrophy of my social life. I’ve been pouring money into my retirement and have about $300k saved up in 401ks and IRAs. I also send a ton of money to my parents who are still stuck in the poor Southern state I grew up in.
In my next phase of my career I hope to transition to a job that will keep the same wage but give me a better work/life balance. I work 60 hours a week, add commute time and it’s 75 hours a week.
I’m also fucking sick of working with all dudes. The trades are overwhelmingly male. I can go weeks without even talking to a woman.
I’m in my mid 30s. I came to California homeless in a beat up '92 coupe with $30 in my pocket. I’m the poster child for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, so listen to me when I say I would not be where I am without the support of a pro-worker government and a huge dose of luck. Taxes are good. Unions are good. Worker protections are good. Even with all that, I am an outlier. We (the fortunate) need to do more to help others.
Wow, you make $200k/yr and only have $15k in savings? Not that $15k is a bad amount to have for the average person, but it just sounds so unbelievably low for your very high income. I mean, I knew the cost of living in California was wild but I didn’t realize it was that out of control.
I only made $160k last year, this is my first $200k year. About $120k the year before. And I spent $18k on replacing my moms sewer system this year after hers failed.
It’s a balancing act. I’m sending about $60k to mine and my parents’ retirement accounts. Most people would recommend padding out my emergency fund before that, but I play things with a bit more risk.
But also yes, cost of living. Box of cereal, $8. Even if you’re frugal, it’s a lot.
They release data for stuff like this. Currently 46% can cover a cost of $2K or more with just savings. 57% for $1K or more.
But it’s even worse than that - what kind of emergency is that cheap? Sure I could replace tires in my car within that amount, but could not repair a car accident. I could visit an ER within the amount but could not pay for medical care for sickness or injury. I could call a plumber within that amount, but not not repair or replace things after a leak. I could travel to see my elderly Mom if she were sick, but could not afford a place to stay there within that amount
Am early in my career. no debts out of college due to lots of scholarships and a bit of hwlp from my grandparents helped a lot. Bought a house, have a wife in grad school so pretty much just living off of one paycheck. Had to cover a 10k roof replacement last year which sucked, but am back up to about 25k saved up should I lose my job or face another major expense.
I am pretty frugal in general but spend money on a hobby every once in a while. Not into drinking or any legal or illegal drugs so that has peobably saved me thousands of dollars too at this point.
I have 1k euro left. No job, 35 years old. I wanna kill myself sometimes.
Please don’t! Do you qualify for state-sponsored training? I know some people who have really improved their situation by taking advantage of the courses the unemployment office offers.
Dude I’m not even from there.
no matter. I know that Career foundry offers (used to offer?) a “pay after” scheme for some of their certifications. So it doesn’t cost you anything up front, but you set up a contract where you’d pay them like 5-10% of your new job’s wages for a set time.
I’m not from USA. Or European. And I don’t have any interest in computers and I’m stupid for studying.
I have a decent amount of money in a 401K that I can’t touch, and some stocks I bought during a time when I fell into a bunch of money, but an unexpected $1000 would not be possible. I’m a 42 year old married man with 5 kids and a full time job at a small college.
I should be doing better than this.
With 5 kids, I’d say you’re doing alright. Kids are so damn expensive.
Yeah being able to afford 5 kids is insane to me.
I can’t cover an unexpected 1k. Thats my entire bank account. Every month my paycheck is eaten by bills and obligations and every other month my rent raises while my salary stays the same. I have 1 dollar in my savings, but a 401k with 5k in it. I also have kids and a wife that stays at home to watch them. May not be the best financially but I can’t actually afford daycare to begin with.
Average at best.
After school I had one week of cash left when I got my first job. I moved to a tiny town to work in the mining industry. Pay to cost of living is very good. I’ve always been careful with money and dislike shopping.
I save about 50% annual income. This is piled up in various investments. I can retire before 40.
I have about 1 year worth of expenses in cash I can access tomorrow. I try to keep at least 3 months but I’m squirreling away extra for known upcoming expenses.
I’ve got $0.85 in savings, because I put my rent and car payment money in my savings account each month until I need to pay those bills. I did at one point have $1000 saved up as a rainy day fun, but then it rained for a whole year (financially speaking). Now I don’t even have credit cards to fall back on, as those have been maxed out and gone to collections. I’m looking for a job in an industry I left because it was driving me to alcoholism (software), but that job market sucks a little more than the service industry, so I’m not optimistic.
Oh yeah and I’d be homeless if I didn’t have family who were willing and able to loan me rent money.
I currently work on software in automotive. Everything seems completely insane. We have tons of process and technical debt, executives that are super out of touch and all have their own pet projects, we have hundreds of executives so we have 100 number one priority pet projects, we have a very distributed hardware/software footprint due to the affirmationed process/technical debt, each vehicle has a different hardware footprint which means we constantly have to make our distributed software work when a piece of the software needs to be rebuilt in a new controller, etc etc.
There’s also the whole mess of trying to run agile at scale, managinga very distributed backlog, trying to balance priorities across teams that have to coordinate work, everyone leading with “how they want it” instead of “what they want”, total disregard for WIP limits, etc.
I know where I work is a shit show. I really wonder if it’s much better elsewhere. I also wonder if this place has always been a shit show and I just have more exposure to it now.
And yeah, alcohol. I’m trying to cut back but the mood here seems to violently oscillate between “this is OK” to “what the hell” and back again. We’re probably due for another swing soon.
Some days I do think about going back to waiting tables. It took me years of working elsewhere to stop having the waiting weeds dreams though…
I know where I work is a shit show. I really wonder if it’s much better elsewhere.
Have you seen the state of almost every piece of software nowadays?
Hence my wonderment, lol. I meant more organizationally, but if you’re putting out a crappy product things probably aren’t great working there.
I was born at an unfortunate time. By the time I could afford a house the housing market was already very bad. I’m just glad I’m able to buy a house but it is very expensive (we bought at the end of 2021)
I live in Canada so we can’t lock in our mortgage for more than 5 years. I just went with the variable rate because in the long term it’s generally better. However the interest rates skyrocketed. I was able to pay my mortgage still but I was pretty much house poor.
Now the rates are finally dropping so I feel a lot less pressure. With our current budget we should be able to afford one kid comfortably. I’m not sure about a second.
I’m very fortunate and grateful though. Most people my generation cannot even afford a house. It’s just insane that despite my great job it’s still so hard for us I can’t imagine what others are going through.
We aren’t broke. I have some retirement saved but I had to stop putting money in due to our mortgage. I also have an emergency funds account with enough money to sustain us ~6 months if I were to lose my job.
Having a high paying job is unsurprisingly the main reason for my financial success. Otherwise I’d say joining some personal finance clubs helped a bunch. I have my savings diversified and invested so I’m at least not losing money to inflation. But my investments will never make me rich either.
One critique I have for myself is maybe we overspent on the house but at the same time I love our neighborhood and I love our house and we have no plans on ever moving so I’m not too upset by it.
It is crazy given my healthcare costs are 2k. I pretty much have a monthly nut of 6k and my wife and I do not live a lavish lifestyle oh and I won’t be able to work much more before I will have to figure out retirement. I will be in ruin if I can’t produce thousands a month.
I get job contracts for a few months at a time. Sometimes there are months when I’m unemployed, and those are hard on my savings. I used to do just fine, but this year has been very difficult and my normal savings are pretty much gone. (I still got some in funds/investments though.) So basically, I had a buffer but I had to use it, and now I have nothing. I guess it’s because of the rise in prices? I don’t “waste” money on frivolous things like I might have in the past, but it’s only getting more and more difficult. Add to this student loans. I wouldn’t have €1000 to spare for an unexpected expense. I am really angry at society, to be honest. If the job market wasn’t so ass, I wouldn’t have to deal with these short contracts.
