Can you elaborate on this? $7.25 * 8 hours = $58. It's hard to imagine expenses adding up anywhere close to $58/day, especially if you factor in that in high cost of living areas the minimum wage is also higher than $7.25.
Wow can you be any more out of touch? Your comment is offensively innaccurate.
$58/day = $1740 for 30 days
Unhealthy cheap carbs for a single person... $200/month (chicken, beans, rice, milk, cheese, bread)
Shitphone with basically no internet for a single person... $40/month (who needs internet anyway)
Fuel for a single person... $200/month (assume 2 tanks / week)
Rent for a single person... $1400/month far (+fuel)
Health insurance because you have two or three shit part-time jobs: $400/mo
Vehicle insurance on an old vehicle: $300/mo
It's hard to imagine someone who's so out of touch with reality that they think they can get away with claiming minimum wage is higher than $7.25 in high cost of living areas. In Houston, Texas the minimum wage is ... $7.25/hr. Cost of living here isn't approachable to minimum wage.
This doesn't even start to pay for taxes, retirement investments, medical emergencies, vacations, legal disputes, education costs, or heaven forbid having family.
What numbers are you using for your costs?
>Shitphone with basically no internet for a single person... $40/month (who needs internet anyway)
>Health insurance because you have two or three shit part-time jobs: $400/mo
>Rent for a single person... $1400/month far (+fuel)
These are all sunk costs. You need them regardless of whether you have a job or not. You seem to be talking about your general finances (ie. your expenses > your income), whereas I interpreted mywittyname's comment as saying that the job itself is a net loss (ie. your cost of getting the job > your income from job).
>Wow can you be any more out of touch? Your comment is offensively innaccurate.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
They're not sunk costs if you literally don't have money to pay for them.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Your argument wasn't in good faith. You're saying that minimum wage is a livable wage which is a demonstrably false statement. Then you're also claiming that the cost of living is a sunk cost.
Food isn't optional. Getting a job that pays you money which you spend on food doesn't magically make the cost of food a cost of getting the job.
>You're saying that minimum wage is a livable wage which is a demonstrably false statement
I made no such statement. Please point out where you think I made that statement.
Most people aren't able to get food without money obtained from a job. So unless your food is provided elsewhere then getting a job that pays you money which you spend on food does magically make the cost of food a cost of getting the job.
> I made no such statement. Please point out where you think I made that statement.
> $7.25 8 hours = $58. It's hard to imagine expenses adding up anywhere close to $58/day*
That makes zero sense from an accounting point of view.
>> I made no such statement. Please point out where you think I made that statement.
>> $7.25 8 hours = $58. It's hard to imagine expenses adding up anywhere close to $58/day*
1. I'm not sure how you're getting "minimum wage is a livable wage" from that comment.
2. you seem to be fixated on "expenses" meaning living expenses (eg. rent, food, clothing, etc.), whereas I was only talking about expenses related to getting the job (eg. transport). This was pointed out several comments ago.
> I'm not sure how you're getting "minimum wage is a livable wage" from that comment.
The comment you replied to stated:
> There are a lot of jobs where your net pay is below zero, long term, when you factor in the external costs associated with working, such as needing transportation.
Transportation is just a single one of those costs. Nobody in their right mind is going to get a job that they recognize won't pay for their expenses and many people consider more expenses than just transportation.
> I was only talking about expenses related to getting the job (eg. transport).
That wasn't clear and is no doubt where our discussion went astray
You (and other people) seem to think that food, housing, and healthcare is an expense in getting a job, but that makes zero sense from an accounting point of view. This is trivially proven with a thought experiment: let's say you were unemployed and had $2000/month in "required" expenses, and a job offered you $1000/month. Are you going to turn down that job because it "won't pay for my expenses"? Of course not, even though you're still losing money from an overall cashflow perspective, taking the job still provides you a +$1000 improvement to your financial situation[2].
[1] although I suppose you would need less calories if you didn't work, but I think that's safe to ignore
[2] for simplicity we can ignore government subsidies that gets cut off when you exceed a certain amount of income, or unemployment.
Well the world doesn't work like your armchair accounting.
> a job offered you $1000/month. Are you going to turn down that job because it "won't pay for my expenses"?
$1000/month is _less_ than that minimum wage. So I'll assume it's indeed a part time job.
Taking that job means 4 hours less time each day looking for a better job because you're busy with this part time one. Not only 4 hours less for work, but another 1 or 2 hours each day because now you're driving to and from that job. So 6 hours less each day. That's an expense.
Now that you're working it also means being less eligible for any government assistance. $1000/month to work 4 hours/day while taking $800 less government assistance comes out to... a net of $200/month. For 4 hours/day of work and an additional 2 hours/day for transportation.
If you look at the raw money, you're making more money. Homelessness is on the horizon and inching ever closer even if it's approaching slower.
Are those 6 hours to you really worth your time when you could have spent those 6 hours trying to find an even better job?
And when you do reach homelessness, is that $1000/month job going to continue employing you?
I think that's the dilemma that the commenter at the start of this thread posits. Jobs are "available" but they're not sustainable. And people are turning down $18/hr stressful part-time jobs because they can't afford them.
ah yes, just slap "armchair" in front of something to invalidate someone's position.
>Taking that job means 4 hours less time each day looking for a better job because you're busy with this part time one
>Are those 6 hours to you really worth your time when you could have spent those 6 hours trying to find an even better job?
The money you "earn" searching for a job is highly variable, and I don't see any attempts at quantifying it. If you were recently employed for $4000/month, your time might very well be spent looking for a job rather than taking the next min. wage job, but if you were unemployed for 6+ months and your previous job only barely paid better than minimum wage, the ROI is probably not there.
>Not only 4 hours less for work, but another 1 or 2 hours each day because now you're driving to and from that job. So 6 hours less each day.
Aren't part time jobs closer to "8 hours a shift but you come a few times a week" rather than "4 hours a shift but you come in 5 days a week"?.
>Now that you're working it also means being less eligible for any government assistance. $1000/month to work 4 hours/day while taking $800 less government assistance comes out to... a net of $200/month. For 4 hours/day of work and an additional 2 hours/day for transportation.
Thank you, that's the type of numbers I was looking for in the original comment.
>And when you do reach homelessness, is that $1000/month job going to continue employing you?
Would you rather be on the streets in 10 months or 5 months? The choice seems clear.
Maybe. "A few times a week" can mean "I need you to come in tomorrow and I don't care if that conflicts with your second job." It becomes a risk.
> Would you rather be on the streets in 10 months or 5 months? The choice seems clear.
The problem's been going on for months. Homelessness is significantly increased over the past year. The choice made seems clear.
[0] Compared to, for example, driving for Uber, where at the end of the month the cost for car+fuel+maintenance might cost you more than you earned, increasing your net loss.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995335
This line in particular:
> There are a lot of jobs where your net pay is below zero, long term, when you factor in the external costs associated with working, such as needing transportation.
If your point of view prevents you from understanding that people need shelter, food, and clothing in order to not die, and must be alive in order to work, then your point of view might not be sufficient.
I buy gas once every 2 or 3 weeks and spend $45 on a phone plan with 4 GB of LTE (US; I guess that can fit the definition of basically no internet). My car insurance (with collision and unlimited medical) is less than $500 for 6 months.
I would probably balk at paying much more than $800 in rent. The rental market here is pretty thin (I think part of it is I don't know where to look), but I see a listing for $1100 for a 4 bedroom house. Electricity+water+gas would be in the range of $250 for 1 person (and less for several as heating is a major utility cost here).
Cost of living across the US varies wildly. The numbers are pulled from my most recent billing cycle for Houston and partly extrapolated to minimum wage (which I am most definitely not, but have friends who are).
My rent is $1500/mo for 920sqft inside the 610 loop. The leasing office wanted $2000/mo for new contracts in October last year.
It's really hard to find places for $800 within a 30 minute drive of any office in Houston. All of my friends have the same problem. I'm looking to buy a home for a similar reason.
Living far enough out to have rent reduced to $800 is offset by increased amount of time driving and therefore increased costs in fuel. So I bought gas twice a month before the pandemic with a 5 minute drive to the office. When I lived 30 minutes out, I bought gas twice a week.
Car insurance depends a lot on vehicle, driver age, etc. $300/mo was quoted to some younger family last summer -- they were outraged because it was half-again their car payment. I pay $600/6-mo.
I agree that prices vary widely, I'm not sure it makes sense to take expensive places as typical.
(the service workers would be looking for better positions too, but the pay differences between similar positions are smaller there)
The people who work those jobs should have the same access to their worksites as anyone else. Our willingness to tell people who make less money they should just "live farther away" and have longer commutes is awful. No, we should fix our cities so that we support a range of incomes and workers in one place.
In that it's in an office building, yes. But it's not office work like sitting at a desk.
Wow. In Spain you would pay between €150 to 200 per year of insurance for the typical old cheap car. 400/year for a nice, semi luxury one. I knew some things were expensive in the States, but this particular one surprised me a lot.
Tribal reservations don't require license plates or insurance usually, and you cab choose to self insure if you have sufficient cash set aside.
I think you are ignoring the third party risks - damaging an expensive car or hurting someone. In that situation, you use insurance if you want to protect your money. If you have no money, insurance make little sense, and you just suck up the risks of pranging your beater.
Absolutely beg to differ. I was on a high-deductible, low-benefit plan for a two-year old used economy car in Louisiana with no marks on my driving record for $250/month. The insurance cost was more than the monthly cost of the car. That being said, it was more than the state mandated liability insurance, but it still wasn't anywhere near the levels of insurance I now have in Washington State on a brand new Tesla Model 3. As you mentioned, it's highly dependent on where you live, but it's absolutely feasible to be paying $200-$300/month for insurance.
Edit: Apologies to parent comment. This was a reading comprehension failure.
Source: I live in New Orleans.
For each factor you change you can add another 15%-40%.
I'm paying $400/mo for 2 cars, no collision, above min medical.
edit: Upon further review, it's actually double that ($56/mo), as apparently it's billed in two-week intervals.
Yep. We all pay very high rates.
Household insurance isn't any better. We lost our last house because insurance increases over 4 years doubled our monthly mortgage payment.
I wouldn’t take the costs listed in the parent comment literally.
Our non profit Parent teacher association and the schools themselves have to carry insurance for events in case someone happens to get injured.
You say $58/day for 30 days. That's working the whole month with no days off. That's not anybody's life that I know.
It's better to estimate 168 hours per month worked. That's 4 full-time work weeks of 5 days a week plus an extra day. With 12 months in the year, you're still effectively short a few days, but it's close enough.
So $7.25 * 168 is $1218
Let's ignore every other expense. Let's say you walk everywhere, use the library for internet, whatever.
Average rent is roughly that.
You are fucked from the start to just put a roof over your head. That's also assuming that job is 40 hours a week. Giving 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, you have 72 hours left over. Some of that time will be dedicated to commuting, hygiene, eating, etc. You might be able to swing a second full time job, but that's just your life from then on.
Also 2 tanks per week, that's insane. Even when I was driving 50-ish miles each way, I was getting gas about twice every three weeks. With a daily 100 mile commute, I'd say my fuel costs were in the neighborhood of $100 per month.
Your insurance is also way out of whack. Old cars have cheaper insurance. I have a 2017 model and pay $700-ish every 6 months. And it wasn't much worse when it was new.
To be fair, I live in Europe, but this is why I asked the question "is it really that bad?", to which the answer appears to be yes.
The big issue is that transit accessibility is priced into rent, so while parts of US cities might actually be reasonable to get around with public transportation, you'd never be able to afford to live there with a low income.
Like https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016... is about a guy that caught the attention of the internet because he couldn't take public transit to his job.
I've spent time in Houston, on minimum wage, and in the past decade. It was alright. I even had the money to go out drinking every weekend, by Rice university at that. Usually when you hear arguments like this and you get down to brass tacks, you start to hear the arguments that allude to the real culprit, things like "I should be able to have extra money for fun" which usually translates to "I blow my money on things I can't afford and then blame the world for being broke."
Should we live in a world where we are wage slaves where 100% of our earnings are spent on the bare necessities such as food and shelter?
One of my friends has $20 to spend on herself after her frugal bills and doing a body crushing job (no "fat" like retirement savings, or medical insurance). I look at it like she earns 50 cents an hour.
Surely we work to be able to spend some money on the pleasures of life? Or is that a dream only for the middle class? Work usually costs us immense amounts of time, let alone the other personal costs of work for many.
No.
> Surely we work to be able to spend some money on the pleasures of life?
Money doesn't buy happiness. The best things in life are free. And sure, if you have money to spend on fun things, have at it. If you don't and you want to, try finding a way to do it. It really is up to you. But the idea that if you do not have disposable income to engage in consumerism you're going to be unhappy, well I'll just say that's a terrible starting point for your argument, and a mindset that breeds unhappiness quicker than tight finances.
No. No. Happiness is extremely difficult to find if you are financially insecure.
Money has a marginal effect on happiness after a certain limit. But to say money doesn't buy happiness is an utterly stupid lie repeated for ages by those that have more than enough money.
When I lived in Spring and commuted to the office at 610 North and I-45, it was 2 tanks a week for the 35 minute drive. That was 7 years ago.
> 200 bucks a month for shit tier food? Ever heard of cooking?
One week of food for one person:
2lb white rice, $1.5 1lb beans, $1.25 2lb ground meat, $10
1gal milk, $4 1lb sharp cheddar, $5 1 loaf bread, $3.5
total... $25. Times four weeks, you get $100. I never claimed to be good at cooking.
> 1400 a month rent?
Due on the 1st, late on the 3rd.
> "I should be able to have extra money for fun"
There's nothing wrong with wanting extra money for fun.
> "I blow my money on things I can't afford and then blame the world for being broke."
Minimum wage doesn't have money to blow things on things they can't afford though.
*didn't get lucky when searching for a unit
source: got lucky so I don't pay $1400/month, still live 1hr away from work.
I think what is happening is young professionals who make decent money and come from middle class backgrounds and have never lived outside of the uptown exclusive areas see their rent and say "I can't imagine how hard it would be for minimum wage workers" thinking they live with the same expenses.
If they're really in a bad spot, they'll be buying these cars financed. You don't want to be in a position where you're paying off a car that long since was sold for scrap steel price at a junkyard.
Also a smartphone is a must: they often don't have a traditional computer at all! An internet-capable phone might be the only way they can access email, unless they're truly destitute and using libraries for internet access.
Secondly, you need uniforms. These are often paid for out of your check and come from companies that have pretty comfortable markup.
Then you have the "expensive to be poor items" Such as getting your paycheck on what amounts to a Visa gift card, because cheap employers are transitioning to payment services that offload the cost of associated with payroll onto the employees. These cards have relatively high maintenance fees, and charge for things like actually getting your money.
That's not even getting into shit like, "split shifts" where you have to work a few hours, take a multi-hour break, then work a few more hours. This means that you have to stay at work for 8 hours, but only get paid for maybe 4-6 of them. While you could leave, it would cost you money to do so.
I've gone through this with younger siblings over the years. One in particular was a delivery driver, and factoring in cost of their car, the only reason they thought they were making money was because they were hiding the depreciation on their car through very long car loans and were not paying for the insurance coverage they should have been.
Most low wage positions are only possible because they are subsidized by someone else, maybe it is a parent who lets them live rent free, or they subsist on credit card debt and payday loans to handle emergencies.
Split shifts is a horror story. I've seen my younger sister working at a restaurant, the main hours are 12am-2pm then 7pm-11pm.
What are you supposed to do during the massive break in the middle? It's royally screwing up your day.
To make things worse, a trip in the tube and back will cost you £3 to £5, a sizable chunk of your first hour (£8/hour pretax).
As if the night hours and pay were not terrible enough, the hours are set daily on a short notice. You constantly must adjust your schedule and if there's less hours to do you simply don't get paid.
Well thankfully we don't have to imagine, people have researched this: https://livingwage.mit.edu/. According to these data, the living wage across the US in 2019 was $16.54: https://livingwage.mit.edu/articles/61-new-living-wage-data-.... So it's not at all inconceivable that the federal minimum is a poverty wage, in fact it almost certainly is.
"net pay is below zero" means (In his interpretation) that the cost of having the job is greater than the amount the job pays. This is unrelated to the cost of surviving.
Second, it's not really "per day", that's an average. Most bills recur monthly. Assuming a month of four weeks, and working 5 days per week, that's 20 * $50 = $1000 per month. Doesn't that seem like an extremely low number to pay for rent, transportation, food, health care, kids, utilities, etc? I pay more for that in rent every month.
everything in that list except for transportation are sunk costs. In other words, you're paying for those regardless of whether you have the job or not.
...unless you're not paying for those because you literally don't have any money.
So yeah, food is a sunk cost, sure. But that sinking will kill you without a job.
That's not how accounting works. If you got a FAANG job that paid $300k/year, then proceeded to blow $60k on a tesla, your net pay for the job isn't $240k.
Also, that $60k on a Tesla for the FAANG worker amounts to a small percent of the worker's disposable income. But that $2k amounts to over 100% of the minimum wage worker's disposable income.
Way to miss the point. Whether the item is a tesla or a can of beans is irrelevant. The point is that if previously you couldn't afford X, after getting a new job you could afford X, then you can't say that X is a cost/expense of getting the job.
Sure I can if X is a basic necessity of life.
You can't just say "they need those to live" as if that absolves you of explaining how to pay for the things they need to live.
Employees are expected to have reliable transportation to get to the employers place of business but they do not cover transportation expenses. The cost of $400 a month for reliable transportation works out to $2.50 per hour.
Employees are typically required to have work appropriate clothing. In the US this cost has often been pushed to employees. In some cases even tool costs have been pushed to employees.
Employees have wear and tear on joints due to repetitive movements which will eventually have to be treated. Machines need maintenance and businesses are expected to pay the costs but with labor that is pushed back to the employee.
The economics of minimum wage only work short term for people who are young, healthy and with no children where experience gained will lead to a higher paying job in the near future.
However, that's something other than the 'sustainable' wage in the GP comment, since that doesn't count costs of the labor input! Each of us has only so much labor to sell in a given month, and need to get enough in return to support, you know, continuing to live and sell our labor. Sure, being employed at wage that does not provide a basic level of dignity is less worse than being completely destitute, but it's a bit disingenuous to argue that being less-worse-off is 'sustainable'.
For starters, you don't want to have to work every single day. If you work 5 days out of every 7, you only have $41.43 to spend per day.
The average cost of a studio apartment is over $900 a month. That's $30 per day. Even if you get roommates, that's going to cost you at least $15 per day.
That leaves you $26 a day to spend on food, clothing, hygiene, Internet access, electricity, transportation, health care (since most minimum wage jobs don't include it), and all of the other expenses of life. And then pray you don't get sick -- even with health insurance you're now losing income.
It adds up fast. There is basically nowhere in the US that this is a living wage. At best you can barely scrape by with no margin for error -- and certainly no money to spend on training for a better job.
Seems like we're talking about different things. I was talking about the net gain/loss from getting a job, whereas you're talking about your overall living situation.
See my reply to jolux's comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996114
The original post said the average cost for a studio was $900. You claim that the 20th percentile cost is $1000.
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever, so you go figure out what the real numbers are and then we can talk.
What methodology would you use to find this data if Appartments.com isn't reliable?
But most apartments don't get rented through apartments.com, and the ones that don't are skewed towards the lower end of the market.
The 4-flat where the owner is renting out the other 3 places and living in one of them doesn't show up on apartments.com. I don't know where you find good comprehensive data, you tell me. But if you are looking at bad data because you can't find good data, you are the drunk looking for his keys underneath the street light not because he lost his keys there but because the light is good.
The driver might think "I made $100 today, great!", but they generally don't have a good sense for their total expenses. Sure, they know how much gas cost them this week, but they don't know how much the next auto repair will be, or how much depreciation they're incurring on their vehicle. And when their auto insurance goes up because they've been driving so many miles, that's out-of-pocket too - no employer is picking that up.