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Comment by aksss | Hacker News Reader

Having been gainfully employed in corporate IT since I was 19 - and doing max contribution to my 401k every year since - I'm not "in touch" with the predicament of today's kids. Are they alright? Record employment numbers today. Wage growth up. We still have a talent shortage. Being (now) a business owner, my biggest complaint on the talent front isn't a lack of education in candidates, it's a lack of customer focus and inner curiosity (to be aggressively learning in one's spare time and on the job).

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Right, you maxed your 401k, your IRA, your HSA, and all it took was a little financial prudence, diligence, and a job paying 60k or more straight out of high school. Anybody could do it.

This sounds like straight-up textbook Just-World[1] logic to me. You appear to be completely discounting structural and systemic forces against economic mobility for certain members of society.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

many want the trappings of success out of the gate and keep ignoring many of their bosses and superiors at work have a lot of time invested and earnings already. they also confuse what they seen TV for real life.

tell, who doesn't have people in the lower rungs of their IT group with more expensive cars or outfits than you would feel comfortable with at twice their salary? then top off the people who eat out every day who are usually part of the "only contribute to the 401k to the match" crowd.

yes there are people struggling but many who are gainfully employed struggle too because they have no discipline and worse some don't want help.

the education system needs to concentrate more of teaching children to take time in acquiring things and first get a safe financial base to work from. politicians needs to stop pandering to people's jealously and blaming it all on the rich, here's a clue the real one percent outside the odd billionaire are the politicians who write the rules and sell favors through their law making work (tax code, occupational regulations, and property zoning)

I tell this to my college age kids. One of them is off touring Europe right now. I asked her how she is paying for it (and pointed out that I've never been to Europe because I can't afford it). She says she is going into debt to do it, but it is okay because experiences are more important than money. She is studying anthropology and non-profit management. I've pointed out that there aren't very well paying jobs with those kind of degrees. She dismisses this and says she isn't in it for the money. How many other Gen-Z kids are also in it for the experiences and not the money? Judging by her and her friend group, she's not the only one. I tried teaching her financial prudence, but social media exerts more of an influence on her thinking than all my example and talk every could.

Your daughter is more financially prudent than you think: she realized that, no matter how much of her young life she lived on ramen, she will never have much in her name as most of her income will be wasted away on rents, transportation and food. So she decides to f..k it and at least have fun. Better die poor and having lived a fruitful life than die poor and having lived on ramen the entire time.

With many of my generation spending upwards of 50%, sometimes even 70% or more, only on housing, how on earth are we expected to build savings? With six figure student loans that aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy and medical bills at similar conditions? We will be the explosion that finally shows how fucked up pension systems and wealth allocation have become, and this bubble will explode in about 40-50 years, if not earlier.

Add climate change to the mix which our politicians won't do anything for the coming 10, 20 years and which will inevitably and unpreventably explode at the same time... yes, definitely, I rather have a life now, I won't be able to make it to retirement anyway, no matter what I do.

Meh, there is a difference between not having much to your name and having a fat debt collector sitting on your neck.

"sure, there is no way you can walk over that pile of broken glass without cutting your feet, so fuck it, lets get naked and roll around in it, at least you'll feel the breeze gently waving your nether parts for the first half of the process"

She's one medical emergency or expensive treatment (cancer) away from bankruptcy anyway, which can wipe out her savings in an instant. No matter what, there will always be debt collectors looming over her head.

Insurance is a thing... you do have to build up enough savings to survive while not working, but that’s doable if you don’t blow everything on traveling and other luxuries.

I doubt this. Even as a German I regularly get healthcare gofundme's in my twitter feed. HN frontpage regularly has horror stories about billing, including "out of network" hospitals in emergencies.

There is no way one can build up savings to shoulder such shit, much less are savings to be used for medical issues!

As an American currently working with healthcare data, I’m familiar with the abundant failings of the US healthcare system. But I think it’s a mistake to think that it’s completely unavoidable and take a fatalistic attitude and feel like you always have a sword hanging over your head. As far as I can tell, it’s avoidable, but you need to get decent insurance before you’re sick, and to save up money to help you ride out times when you’re not making money (as well as pay the deductible/out of pocket portion). This is definitely expensive, and if you make no money, it can be difficult (though you'd then likely qualify for Medicaid). But many Americans do make quite a lot, and spend everything they make (and more) during the good times, even if they pull in >$100k/yr. Consumerism has a much stronger hold here than it does in Europe.

EDIT: A bit more, since I didn't really address your comment about out of network charges.

In the event that you get balance billed for some surprise out of network charge despite going to an in-network facility, you likely don't have to pay it, even though they're invoicing you. Contacting your insurer about it will likely take care of it. And if it turns out that you do need to pay it, hospitals are generally willing to accept $0.10-0.20 on the dollar for self-payers who can't pay, before they send it to collections. You don't have to pay the retail price, which is totally made up and has very little relation to what they'd accept. This is largely due to their adversarial relationship with the insurance companies, which force them to accept the lesser of their retail price and their contracted rate. Think of the high prices as the starting point in their negotiations.

I fully agree that the US healthcare system is very messed up, and that what I'm saying sounds insane and unnecessary. I wish we had a single-payer system in the US (with optional private insurance on the side). Fortunately, it seems like people are getting sick of this, and we're getting closer to getting that. I just wouldn't take the attitude that the world is totally fucked, so you should live for today.

> Fortunately, it seems like people are getting sick of this, and we're getting closer to getting that. I just wouldn't take the attitude that the world is totally fucked, so you should live for today.

That depends if the US gets another four years of Trump, or a repeat of the final Obama years with a sane President blocked by a Republican-dominated congress.

I would not be so certain that the outcome of the 2020 election is a Democrat president, a Democrat controlled House and a Democrat controlled Senate - and even if all three end up in Democrat hands (which I hope for!) those in power should rather not be bought off by the insurance industry.

To make it worse, even if all stars align and all of this happens, there still remains the problem of exploding rents preventing anyone who rents (=99% of the young population) to make meaningful savings or retirement contributions, and to top that one off student loans also are in dire need of reform and hell will freeze over before the US will even consider the German model of tax-funded world class universities.

I never understood this line of reasoning -- sure you are one big disaster away from bankruptcy, why not pile on and be _also_ at risk of moderate mishaps sending you into bankruptcy spiral.

A meteor can kill me in the next five minutes, why would I ever bother going to the gym? In fact, w

Oh man. If money isn't important then why borrow it? There's a disconnect there -- one that, I might add, I suffered from to some degree at that age. What everybody tried to tell me, and what I would say to your kid if there were a chance in hell she would ever read this, is, "Money isn't everything" only when you have enough. Although her net worth is now negative so in a way she's poorer than someone who has nothing. And she'll soon get to experience what paying that off feels like. Money might not feel important, but it's important to the people who are gonna be demanding payment.

But that's not really even it. Spending tons of money (especially money you don't have, which always costs more) is not what you do if you care more about experience than money. Someone who values experience over money spends time learning different ways of cooking beans & vegetables - delicious, nutritious. She gets a bike, learns to maintain it, and rides it everywhere, including to the farmer's market. After some advanced practice maybe she even learns to make her own clothes. These are all fulfilling and empowering experiences that deprioritize the spending of money. It even feels a little bit rebellious, because you don't have to earn tons of money, and can be somewhat less dependent on a consumerist lifestyle and all the hidden burdens that go with that. Like credit card debt servitude for instance.

That's what "money is less important" looks like. Whereas if the "experiences" you like are flying to Europe and shit, you like money. You're a Davos-ass mothafucka, with a Sasquatch carbon footprint, to boot. Life isn't Instagram. Glory lies in all directions and experience comes no matter what. Everything is an experience and most of the good ones are free. Don't fall for advice from your ignorant-ass peers, or from influencer/manipulators, or from lazy shallow journalists who want to characterize your whole generation in one wildly-inaccurate sentence!

You want to have the time of your life when you're young and healthy to enjoy it! All the money in the world can't turn back the clock. Of course there is an in-between way: delay that trip for a year and save money for it. But that's HARD.

How is she planning on living afterwards with debt and no earnings potential? If it’s to rely on you, you might want to disabuse her of that notion so that she starts taking life a bit more seriously.

Nah, we tell them from the time they are young that we will help them with the first year of college and after that they are on their own. They know that we are serious so none of them have ever asked for help after the first year of college.

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