I Stop Celebrities from Blowing Their Money
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For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.
Quite an interesting concept though that their rates don't seem to up no matter if you just get by or make millions...
In the case of a properly functioning public healthcare system, I totally buy and support it, though.
The difference is, I think, in the word "insurance". If a USAn doesn't pay for health insurance, they have to pay for healthcare. I don't particularly know how Germany's system works, but I'd assume that non-payment of taxes, while it probably has other repercussions, does not preclude receiving healthcare.
You could work in the industry for years and never get in. Others get lucky and get in within a few months. A lot of people are SAG Eligible but can't afford the initial fees to get in.
It's not like a standard union where you show up to work every day for months and you are in. Non-union basically do the exact same thing as union folk, but get paid less per hour. In contrast, there is a budget limit to how many SAG workers can be on set, so while your hourly is higher, the quantity of work you have is much lower.
Most SAG members are background extras, who don't earn very much money, and can't work more if they wanted to.
Definitely not the union you'd want to emulate. Film and TV actors are all temporary workers.
The Biggest tech union on the UK just merged with BECTU (the eqvielent of IATSE)
As someone linked below, you can actually see here that employer is kicking in another 15%+ for premiums, which at $50k per year is $625 per month and at $100k per year is $1250 per month:
http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers/agreements
Employer portion plus at least $133 from the employee = at least $500-$600 per month, if not $1,200+ for the higher earners which seems about what you get on healthcare.gov. I didn't look into what deductibles and copays were, but I'd be surprised if it was much lower than what most employer based health insurance plans offer.
Or the benefits of collective bargaining, even in limited context like procuring healthcare.
Collective bargaining is a feature of a free market. If you don't like the idea of unions and collective bargaining, you don't like free markets.
The need for labor unions is a product of the free market, and a way to build a unique value proposition. With employees that are totally fungible, totally replaceable parts, the marginal value of labor itself is driven to zero. Wages become a race to the bottom, and working becomes unprofitable. But by saying "Only members of the union can work here", the union sharply decreases the available labor pool, thus creating a unique value proposition.
In other words, it's a market response to a market problem.
The people who call for "free markets" and rail against unions basically don't understand what it is they're asking for. They're in love with an ideal, not thinking about how profit actually works in the real world, as a function of economics. It's straight-up ignorance reinforced by puritan idealism.
"Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business."
- Peter Theil, Zero to One
I think that's a general good feature of the free market. Collusion is hard until you get down to only a few providers of a service. (In this case, labor.)
The real problem here is that employees generally have no power, because they have no flexibility. We have a nationwide, intergenerational case of people living paycheck to paycheck when even modest savings would've lead to fantastic wealthbuilding. In short, we wouldn't need unions if employees had a BATNA.
This is a financial education problem. But it's one that could be temporarily solved by susbsidizing a BATNA for workers, rather than enforcing labor laws that lead directly to inefficiency.
This depends on what you mean by "be for collective bargaining". As in most things, the details matter, and the slogan "be for unions" is almost meaningless.
In the sense that people should be able to form and/or join unions etc, then absolutely, I think most libertarians would be totally for it.
But often when people say you're for or against unions, they're talking about specific laws with specific consequences. For example, should an employer have the right to fire an employee who is attempting to start a union? A libertarian might well say that both sides have liberties that shouldn't be taken away in this case. If the employee manages to start a union and gets collective bargaining power - good for them! But the government shouldn't intrude on the employer's right to fire employees if it so chooses, no matter what the cause.
Another example - many countries have laws that say that if some percentage of the workforce, say 30%, agrees to form a union, then all employees are now automatically part of that union. This makes it much easier to form unions, obviously, and you might make the case that it helps protect the usually-less-powerful employees from the usually-more-powerful employer. On the other hand, this often means that individual employees don't have the freedom to negotiate their own specific terms with the employers, even if they prefer not to be part of the union. Or that the employees now must pay money into the union, whether they want to or not.
Again, all of these are legitimate debates and most of the sides of this can be defended. But the slogan "you should be for collective bargaining and unions" just doesn't include enough nuance to even being to address how you should react to each of the above - which are the specific laws that people are talking about when talking about unions.
For each person, the most advantageous outcome is if everybody but them participates in a union. The end result is that nobody participates in a union, making things worse for everybody.
I have a caveat in that I don't support laws that interfere with such bargaining or artificially increase one party's market power (closed shop laws). In the US this identifies me as being "right to work" which is often seen as anti-union.
For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power.
This is similar to the procedural loophole of registering manifestations where the mayor or other redeposit body can virtually countermand the right to organize. It happens all the time.
That's a fair caveat from a libertarian standpoint. It's just that most of the self-declared libertarians I meet seem to have the idea that the state should forbid unions from interfering with their idea of a free market. Which sounds very unlibertarian to me.
People disagree about the finer points of political ideas all the time. But drawing a line in the sand doesn't immediately signify gatekeeping, it signifies normal debate. This is especially evident if you compare the example I gave to what you're calling gatekeeping: it would be unreasonable to require all fans of a band to have episodic recollection and deep opinions on every song ever recorded by the band. But it would not be unreasonable to assume a libertarian with philosophical fidelity to the school of thought supports collective bargaining. Again, it might not be correct, but it's not ridiculous.
As a meta point, I'm noticing a trend online where people will give a quick driveby dismissal using terms from the popular zeitgeist. Typical, recent examples include "gatekeeping", "whataboutism" and "gaslighting." Sometimes these are appropriate criticisms to levy at someone's argument and they draw a real insight. But they're also frequently abused or pigeonholed into discussion in contrived ways. From my perspective this seems like a more subtle equivalent of collecting logical fallacies to point out in other people's arguments online. It's symptomatic of something larger: that snark is the modern saboteur of reasoned debate.
Very, very rarely is a single sentence critique of another person's point anything more than a middle brow dismissal. It sounds intellectual but there's no deconstruction or antithesis involved. If you wanted to substantially critique the commenter's point, it would probably have been more appropriate to cite "No True Scotsman" instead of "Gatekeeping". Better still would be to skip the trite idiom altogether and explain why you consider it an error with substantive depth. A pithy comment only convinces those who already agree with you. A meaningfully persuasive one convinces the audience, if not the original commenter.
I have a handful of friends that work in Hollywood as actors and producers. They get paid amazingly well and get insane amounts of time off.
...all because they have organized labor. Most people would be amazed how much an extra gets paid once they have their SAG card.
Many take advantage of unemployment as well since they typically work on contracts. Have several friends that will work for 6 months on a show and then take 3-4 months off while collecting unemployment and figuring out what contract they want to take next.
(The U.S. is nearly $10k a year)
However, on average the U.S. government (thus taxpayer) funds half of the health care costs, meaning that the private sector has to fund about $5k per person per year. That would suggest the SAG employer is paying $3500 a year and the SAG employee $1500 a year.
On top of that you have a ~€380 deductible. Everything except medicine costs goes from this deductible first. If you really trust your health (or have the money to cover it) you can raise the deductible to ~€800, which will drop your monthly premium by ~€20.
GP visits are free and act as a sort of filter for access to the ‘real’ healthcare system. Anything minor (prescriptions for various minor diseases, mole removal, etc) goes through him and if he thinks something warrants further research you get blood work done or see a specialist, waiting times usually 1 week, 2 weeks tops.
All in all its a really nice ‘hybrid’ sort of system. It isn’t 100% socialized like some countries around us, but the end result is that we have the best healthcare system in Europe (and thus probably the world) :)
The Netherlands spends $5385 per year per person on healthcare, 80% of that is spent by the government.
The UK spends $4192 per year, again 80% is by the government. The UK has trickier cost areas to handle too (healthcare in Scottish islands is far more per person than in Rotterdam)
Measuring the objective quality of a health care system is almost impossible (it varies dramatically on your subjective priorities), let alone measuring value per dollar, but I don't think I've ever seen one that claims the Netherlands is better than Scanadavian ones.
The problem with comparing worldwide is that the WHO does an annual health report, but this focusses on a different aspect each year, instead of a general outlay. It has been done in 2000, with data from 1993-1997. The Netherlands switched from a completely socialised system ('Ziekenfonds') to the hybrid system in 2006. A lot of our improvements are because of that, and thus aren't in the 2000 WHO ranking.
The only other source I could find is the Legatum Institute prosperity index[2], which puts us 6th behind: Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, Japan, Austria, Sweden, Norway. As their healthcare research is only part of a bigger picture (and thus less focused), I tend to give it less weight.
As a sidenote, aside from a small bit of extra pride its not very important where a country sits in the top 15, all these countries their healthcare systems can be regarded as top notch. The only places to attain a higher level of care would be in (usually foreign) private institutions, which come with such high costs that they are only accessible to an elite few.
[1]https://healthpowerhouse.com/media/EHCI-2017/EHCI-2017-repor...
Sweden didn't shoot up until 2010.
The Netherlands has spent a lot on healthcare, especially after 2006 - not as much as Norway (which I suspect has higher costs due to sparsely populated areas), Switzerland, and Luxemburg, but more than the rest of Europe. If you pay more, you get more.
Are you sure the benefits of your hybrid system aren't because you increased health spending by over 50% (about 7% pa) from 2004 to 2010, where Sweden only increased by about 30% (about 4% pa)?
About that last point: for those of us who come from middle class backgrounds, it's easy to think "just be reasonable about what you give people". It's a much harder proposition if your entire family has been struggling your entire life--especially if they made sacrifices for your dream (I think John Wall's mom once let the lights get cut off to pay for something basketball related for him).
Poor rural people need credit because they can't save. They can't save because they owe their neighbours a moral debt.
Jennifer really needs $50 to pay her kid's dentist bill. She looked after your grandmother, when she was sick and you were away. You owe her (and love her, you're friends).
If you have $50 saved, you will get requests that cannot be refused. Everyone is broke and everyone owes eachother favours. Debt is the only way of getting a lump sum. The critic concluded that saving with a (big) negative interest rate is a bitter pill, but better than nothing.
Fast food franchises sound like a great idea, if they aren't too failure prone. You lock up illiquid assets. You can give family members jobs, if necessary/appropriate. The bad idea side effects of this is that businesses can potentially lose money as well as value.
The spanner in any such system will always be debt. You can lock up all your assets but if you have assets to your name, you can get credit and spend those assets regardless.
The ultimate returns come from low liquidity and high risk. That's the world of venture capital. Without the possibility of 100x returns, it's absolutely stupid to invest in new businesses with little likelihood of survival. Money tied up in preferred stock is effectively illiquid and can be completely lost (hence the term "liquidity event"). And that can and should take years.
https://www.themaven.net/blackwealthchannel/investing/how-a-...
Bridgeman's story is really impressive, but is the opposite of the one Yglesias was proposing about Butler.
ESPN's 30 for 30 docs are really great, even if you're not particularly huge into sports. Broke is one of my favorites (after a "The Two Escobars"). It goes into a lot of detail about how ill-prepared many professional athletes are for the lifestyle, how they overestimate their net worth and their projected career duration, and digs into all of the different pitfalls new signees might face as they enter sport. It's easy to blow it off and say "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway", but there's a lot of heartbreaking instances where people did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt.
Anyway, worth a viewing.
Most of the people had already died. Some were still alive. The ones that were still alive, you could tell that they tried to "fluff it up a bit" -- not get too critical.
But in almost every instance? If you hit it rich (famous makes it even worse), you might as well become a drug addict or shoot yourself. It tends to destroy lives. There's nothing happy about it.
On reddit awhile back there was an "AskReddit" about what to do if you won a bunch of money in the lottery. The best advice was sobering: it is a minefield of self-deception and manipulation.
What's so weird to me is the huge chasm between the reality of getting rich quick and the way the general public views it. We've glamorized it way too much.
His advisor seemed like a good guy and talked about the dangers of family asking for money and hangers on. His advisor acted like the bad cop and actually did the rejections for requests and even introduced the player to other players who made good choices and could be a mentor/friend.
Outside the allowance if he wants a new car or vacation he calls the advisor and they tell him yes or no or later and help him get a good deal if yes.
He talked about having no financial clue early on and straight up didn't know the value of say $20k because he had never been exposed to dealing with money in that way.
He also talked about teammates blowing through their money like crazy and meanwhile he saves.
He did a stint in the NBA d league for rehab at one point and bought a not so great car (relative) because he thought having his usual car there would be embarrassing as it was quite a contrast relative to his d league teammates. Finally one of his teammates asked why he was driving that boring old car, so he had his car brought to the local city so his teammates could drive it ;)
Granted this guy has several houses, bought stuff for family and can spend like crazy on his allowance, but within some level of reason.
Dude was lucky he got a good advisor and was smart enough to listen.
[1]: https://deadspin.com/how-jack-johnsons-parents-screwed-him-a...
What exactly do you mean by "doing the right thing" here?
Despite my disdain for spectator sports "soft" is never a word I would use for their athletes. If anything, I would expect those who have had to work so hard and stay disciplined would be able to roll that discipline over into fiscal responsibility.
I kind of feel bad for the low end of her clients whose net worth is only $1 million. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money. But it also doesn't go that far nowadays, especially if you live in SF Bay area (though most of her clients are probably in the LA area; slightly better but not by much). You can't even afford a decent house with cash for that amount of money. I feel bad for the client who has $1m but thinks he/she has a lot of money, and needs to pay a financial adviser (5% even!) to manage it for him/her. In this day and age and in California, if you have $1m, you'd better be working hard still and save up for retirement.
We're not talking about remote software developers or launching a new startup here.
>I would guess that those clients are young and with high income, so their net worth may not be that meaningful yet. Otherwise, they would be well-advised to fire their financial manager, take their million dollars and live somewhere less expensive.
When I say "otherwise," that means that you are either old or on a low salary. Let's spell that out:
i) If you are young, on a low salary, but own a million dollars, you would be well-advised to change careers and move somewhere else, otherwise that million dollars won't last long, especially with an expensive financial manager.
ii) If you are old and own a million dollars, you may as well consider retirement.
Thanks for your comment anyway, but since I don't feel super invested in this argument, I'm going to end my participation here.
If a 20-something actor/artist/athlete lands a lot of money, the first thing they go to is immediate lifestyle "improvement". Fancy cars, nice clothes, luxury amenities. "I'm rich now, so I gotta look the part, right?". Scroll through a few Instagrams of rookies who got their first payday, and you'll see them driving in an S-class Benz with an LV handbag. The novelty of saying "I'm a millionaire now" imprints the image that they will be a millionaire forever - and that short-term thinking is what runs the well dry.
Even a TV series regular doesn't get a huge amount (when compared to a google engineer) at first - and they normally sign for 5 years
I was under the impression that you subtracted your mortgage from its value when calculating net worth, not just ignore it. It makes a difference in your life decisions -- In my case, I have a home with no mortgage. I could sell it to move to a cheaper area and end up with enough cash out of the move to fund a new business. It would be a high risk move, but the option is not nullified just because I currently live in that home.
Obviously, this doesn't comply with the GDPR, and makes the site unreadable for some.
Most sites don't need to set any cookies though, so why bother asking permission.
"This site costs money, accept our cookies while we sell your personal information for a fraction of what it's worth or you can't see it. We value your personal data at 6 cents, as that's what the 300 companies we sell it to will pay us."
It’s insanly stupid and backwards...just like the new copyright laws the EU is working on.
Europeans are shooting themselves right back into the dark ages...and I probably wouldn’t care if they weren’t ruining it for everyone else too.
And before somebody asks: I am European
I think Europeans are just being bitches about the fact that they haven’t been able to replicate Silcon Valleys success (with noteable exceptions such as Spotify, Zendesk and others which ultimately also moved their HQs to the US though).
Yes, the US spies on Europeans and everybody else, just as Europeans and the rest of the world spy on the US. It’s what nation states do...they spy on each other. You and I might not like it but it’s whats it is...no need to single out the US.
It seems the US is very sensitive when nobody buys their cars, but sees absolutely no problem dominating modern comunications. The EU has a problem with that.
And my definition of stealing is a pretty standard one: both Apple and Google have been repeatedly fined using EU law for tax issues, for example.
The "web" is so much broken with cookies disabled... (techcrunch, any 'large' news site - except the Guardian!)
Enable cookies and use a private browsing session. The cookies disappear when you're done reading. What's lost?
The cookie law bugs me because it's feels like it's being applied in completely the wrong place. Isn't the browser perfectly capable of restricting third party cookies and presenting the necessary legal warnings?
The browser cannot differentiate first party cookies that are technical or for tracking.
The only way that paying someone 5% of assets / income just to avoid ruination can be a sound investment is if the person is utterly clueless about how money in general, and compound interest in particular, works.
On to of that they are sorting all their mail, doing bill payments etc. 'I was at his house every single day, helping to oversee contractors, pick out windows, pick out drapes.'
Charging for Italian Marble but actually using crap materials or billing for more days worked than they did would be a couple of good examples.
You don't want to tell the contractors who aren't trying to rip you off "I need to stand here and stare at you so that you don't cheat me/steal anything", but if you're always around to help "pick out windows" or "choose drapes", you can keep an eye on things without being too obvious about it.
A large number of these people will have been outside of the "real world" for a good proportion of their adult (and often, child) lives. Without comprehensive financial education early in schools, and with careers in industries detached from a lot of financial pressure, surrounded by hanger-ons and perceptions of lifestyle.
I actually have a lot of empathy for these groups who see success but don't have the skillset to know what's best.
This. I met a woman who was a nurse practitioner or something like that. She had a young boy and girl. Her plan was for them to be a pro football player and actress. So she would take them out of school to go to football or acting camp. She actively discouraged them from focusing on school. If these kids are successful, they will be lacking basic skills we take for granted. Think about the average person's understanding of math, and imagine someone actively discouraged from learning it.
It could be tragic if they were successful, which is such an unreal thing to say. Even worse, the odds aren't good, and they don't have skills to fall back on.
The NBA has been trying to do a better job about educating people on the reality of professional sports.
A lot (the vast majority) of people overestimate children / youth skill, especially parents.
The NBA has been big on trying to encourage players even beginning to start college ball as taking college seriously, and by more than just empty words. Saying things like "There are 350+ NCAA basketball teams, each with a roster of up to 13 players. There are two draft rounds, 60 players. Even adjusting for four years of college players, there is less than a 3% chance you will be drafted to the NBA, even if you play college ball".
There is even at high levels, a huge disparity of quality and talent.
When I grew up in Australia, before refereeing basketball at a very high level, I was involved in cricket. I remember a promo event, where two international cricketers from India visited a local club.
They faced off against the kids, and just hit balls around the field gently for them to run and get.
Then they faced off against the state team.
Every single ball was hit out of the park, without a hint of exaggeration. Some with a bounce or two, but every single one hit the fence. Fast, slow, good, bad, it didn't matter. It was just effortless. I think that did a lot to dawn on people who thought "My kid/adult son is playing at the state level, he could be like these guys one day". Maybe. But most likely not.
So I do like that there is some (though not enough) effort at saying "Hey, you need a fallback, because you almost certainly will need it". Even earlier than college, if needed.
She gets paid better than the world’s most successful hedge funds to be a glorified baby sitter to grownups?
I picked the wrong career.
Managing assets and making sure certain bills get paid on time seems reasonable. But having to talk them out of impulse buys they may not be able to afford sounds terrible.
It’s like these stars are not fully functioning human beings.
Or that the personalities that (a) go into low-probability high-payoff careers like entertainment and (b) do well in entertainment (through further selection or the perso al transformations necessary to succeed in Hollywood or the NFL) are also bad at saying no to competitive luxuries and short-term impulses.
But even if it's of assets, she's not just managing money. A hedge fund manager isn't going to help choose your drapes, at least not within the management fee.
Some of them are crazy - one of the artists (now dead) demanded "more goat heads" on his project. This was an actual client request.
I still do take pride in getting one of the most difficult clients in the roster to admit we did a "good job".
Famous people can be weird, and some do really exist in their own special bubble.
For fame and fortune as an artist, though, the chances of "making it" are so remote that the proportion of sober and rational people who choose to take the first steps down that path has to be rather low, and that of the ones that just keep going down the path even lower.
It makes sense that they behave this way, but it is certainly annoying for those who have to deal directly with this.
Among the things that a SV engineer who manages that has to think about is if they have children, what happens when they die. It's nice to pass some things on to your children, but at the same time, plopping a million dollars in assets down on your kid all at once may not be doing them favors. Best to look at your options. (I'm not going into it here just because it's really more than fits into an HN message, nor should you take the advice from me; I'm aware that there are options.)
I know a couple who blew through $15 million. The wife ended up working as a cook in a restaurant.
5 percent of what?
I'd rather see 5% go towards financial education in schools, but hey, then this person would be out of a job.
It's the same reason startups are happy to pay fairly high cloud prices so as not to have to deal with staffing network engineers and stuff like the old days.
I interviewed a potential business manager that was recommended by a few celebrity-actor types a few years back.
The idea of someone taking financial responsibility off your plate full-stop was definitely intriguing, but I did the math about what that would cost vs. just a full time personal assistant and I couldn't justify it.
He did immediately recommend a new bank for me which I had never heard about. Was fantastic advice, been happy with them since.
Hedge fund managers and financial advisors meet with their LPs/clients from time to time. They don’t “get all of [their] clients’ mail — bills, fan mail, business-related mail, everything” nor “oversee payments for their mortgages, phone, rent, utilities, and all the little things that keep their lives going and the lights on.”
But skimming this article, it's not just investment returns really. I guess these people really are liable to blow all their money on stuff off left to their own devices.
If it's 5% commission then it's 5% of each transaction.
Source: Close friend does the same exact thing as person in article...works with NFL, NBA, etc players
I'll remember him that way in a movie where he played a great character dedicated to entertaining and protecting the rest. :)
There are lots of artists out there who are in this category, and who could use such a service. Also, the typical "mad scientist" probably doesn't care much for personal finance, so they could benefit as well. And lots of other people.
I pay my accountant roughly $1,000 a year to, once a quarter, look over my credit card and bank statements with me and talk about how much I should be contributing to which accounts and where I may be spending too much. (This is preferable, for me, to a financial advisor because I like to pick my own investments.)
Pure speculation, but Anton Yelchin?
The Varian Rule, which is about how the future resembles how the rich live today, the middle and poorer classes will have tomorrow, may apply here. Multi-family offices for middle net worth individuals seem like a plausible future.
I can't seem to convince my lawyer and accountant friends that this is a viable service because (I think) they are basically not entrepreneurial, and big firms don't offer it because they are already fighting and maintaining position in the HNWI market.
A one-stop shop that handles everything from taxes, to parking tickets, legal advice, to investments, insurance, and even medical, could be worth it for a lot of people.
What makes it viable now is that families with the kind of money worth professional management are still actually working for it each day, that is, still making this kind of money on their labor instead of returns on capital, so they have the income (albeit less in assets), but not the time to manage it properly.
I would look forward to using such a service...one day. :)
Most average people think that they do know what they're doing. They have a few hundred in the bank, they're paycheck is the same and comes every 2 weeks, and they know the price and value of the things they need. They don't suffer from the illusion that they can buy jetskis on a whim without bankrupting themselves.
Lovely example: I have autopay for all my recurring expenses except my water bill. Through some mixture of losing some information and the shittiness of their website, I can't get a login to set up autopay. So each month, I spend a few minutes on the phone to pay--it doesn't require authentication to pay over the phone, but it requires authentication to pay over the web.
> It's estimated that Depp has made $650 million on films that netted $3.6 billion. Almost all of it is gone.
Rock and roll has always been a business - 'the music business' - and usually those that succeed have an excellent business partner that looks after the books. You would be surprised at the property and stock portfolios of the truly successful 'musicians'. Even John Lennon was a 'businessman'. Although he did put peace and love first and foremost he made sure those Russians paid him in furs when he sang a few ditties there.
The same goes in the 'art business'. Is Damien Hirst an artist or a businessman, first and foremost? Again, an excellent business partner takes care of business for him whilst the army of interns/students/wannabees do the hard work of assembling the dead animals into 'art' (for the status-anxiety celebrities to buy).
So-called 'celebrities' have to be smart otherwise they end up with accountants skimming off '5%' of their earnings.
hollywood idiots
these must be models and actors