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Comment by OfficialJoeGG | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes that rent trap is to high. You pay three quarters of your paycheck to just living (even house hunting you still need a place to live). You then have one quarter to spend on food (for 2 people) & electricity, water, and heat (if your rent doesn't cover utilities)& maybe some extra things like hygiene products, bills such as car payments, etc... You have almost no left over to put in for moving.

So I don't disagree with your standpoint in theory, the logistics always muddy the water.

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I don't believe it. Say you find a place in Lincoln for $500-$600 (which is possible in Lincoln), just by using the difference between old rent and new to cover debt from moving expenses, a mover could pay off $15,000 of debt within one year.

the jobs that lead to potential upward mobility aren't in Lincoln. Plus, this kind of forward-thinking (incur $15k worth of debt now, pay it off with money saved on rent later) is really difficult for someone like myself who already has a lot of debt.

Again this comes down to circumstances. I don't personally know Karla Peralta's money situation, however, there is the possibility of having poor credit due to the food stamps and things like that.

I, again, don't disagree with you but to be so matter of fact is in my opinion incorrect.

Not everyone can borrow $15000. Wealthy people seem often not to realize that poor people don't have access to credit on the same terms that they do.

Nonsense. A person with a non-terrible credit rating can max-out around $16,000 using multiple credit cards. It's not a great idea, but I've seen it done, and confirmed that it's not a good idea. But if your alternative is a life of misery - escape!

Also, it's highly unlikely that moving will be as expensive as $16,000 anyways. Perhaps $6,000-$7,000 for a small family of two?

Nope. Many people cannot get credit cards with credit limits that high. You are talking about the kind of credit available to someone who is earning a reasonable salary and has a long credit history. A person who meets that description is not likely to need to move for financial reasons in the first place.

https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/6341/whats-the-ave...

Also, it is just not a good idea to borrow $15,000 on multiple credit cards at high interest rates when there is no guarantee that you will earn sufficient income to pay that money back in your new location.

It's easy to give out this kind of trash advice to other rich(ish) people on the internet. I wonder if you'd dare tell someone who was actually in the kind of situation you're describing that they ought to incur $15,000 in credit card debt and move to the middle of nowhere.

^This, ^this, ^this. Thank you!

Yup. Please give this advice to the first service worker you meet today, and let us know how it goes

> A person with a non-terrible credit rating can max-out around $16,000 using multiple credit cards

Even with non-terrible credit, you aren't going to get multiple credit cards with a total of $15,000 in credit line if you are food insecure; you might have gotten them first, maintained zero balance so that that money is all available for relocation, and then become food insecure, but that's a rather exceptional set of circumstances, not the norm.

If you're struggling to make ends meet, it's probably not going to be that easy to get someone to lend you fifteen grand.

Yeah, but people who are food insecure can't usually borrow $15,000 in unsecured debt.

Plus, this presumes the ability to also maintain income (in absolute terms, not just relative to.local costs) in a relocation. I guess if the food insecure people are also working jobs they can do remotely, that's reasonable, but if they are doing low-wage in-persom work, even if they can find comparable work in Lincoln, the wages are likely to be lower (clearly so at the lowest end of legal work, since the minimum wage is lower.)

So do it yourself

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