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A lot of people were conditioned to rely on food delivery when it was cheap. Pre-pandemic, restaurant food was much less expensive, delivery apps had low or no fees, and the options for tipping were much lower.

Now, of course, restaurant prices have skyrocketed, apps all charge significant fees and the tip expectation is around 20% (and don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is to base tipping on food cost when none of the tip goes to anyone involved preparing the food and a 10lb bag of mashed potatoes is cheaper than a 1/2 oz container of caviar).

But people now expect their meals to be brought to their door and have a lot of resistance to going out to get it or, god forbid, preparing it for themselves.

I suspect there's a cultural element that I can't speak for outside of my own bubble.

For example, I grew up in a rural area, large family, single income. I don't know exact figures, but adjusting for inflation, I suspect my dad was making what would today be $50K USD / year, feeding 4 kids (and a bunch of farm animals and pets.) Going to a restaurant was inconvenient and expensive. The food from animal husbandry and farm crops was labor intensive, but vastly cheaper. Every meal was cooked or prepared at home. (e.g. we'd have cereal or pancakes, sandwiches for lunch, a meal of meat and potatoes and vegetables.)

If there's a point in this, it's that going out or having someone else do all the work of making a meal was a special treat. It was rare, it was exciting, it meant something.

But I know as an adult with the means to live very differently, we order out at least once a week, which feels like a ridiculous luxury. It doesn't feel special. It just feels more like, well we didn't need to be prepared and have the ingredients we need here at home, so we'll settle for something convenient. (Though where we live, we do not do delivery, but have to drive 10-15 minutes for pickup. We're usually already out because we take our dog to the park regularly.)

Obviously there's a much bigger discussion on general financial literacy, defining "need", "quality of life", what we feel we deserve, whether we think about how today's decisions impact our future and if we care enough to do something about it. But at least in respect to ordering food, I think at least some of that is going to come from culture and family influence. In my specific case, seeing how hesitant the provider of my family income was to spend money also gave me reason to stop and think a bit before spending as an adult, even as my income grew well beyond what my birth family was getting.

The trick is finding enough self-respect for yourself to break that conditioning.

I was conditioned to smoke tobacco, waste money on crappy food, vote against my own self interests every two years at the ballot box, buy a new car every five years, hate people who looked or behaved differently than me, say 'yes sir' and 'yes ma'am' and do as I'm told, etc.

I still find myself trying to break away from the stuff I learned as a child and as a young man. It takes life long effort.

I often link to these articles. Especially the second one is exactly what you are talking about:

• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: <https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...>

• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: <https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...>

• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: <https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...>

(Repost: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752737>)

I looked up the average cost of living in Alabama. It says it is 54k for a family. Do you think that is realistic? The reason why I ask is that US incomes always confuse me. Incomes seem quite high and I understand that taxes are much lower than here (Finland). As an uninformed outsider with these costs of living 100k for a couple seems quite nice and a gross income 130k appears absolutely rich. Am I missing something? IlJust very curious always as some of the income programmers with my experience get in the US seem absolutely unachievable here.

The numbers made my eyes jump out a little, though I need to remember that "six figures" when I was a ten would be over $250,000 now, a few decades later.

And I'm in the U.S., Pennsylvania instead of Alabama, though they should be similar. (COL site says PA is 20% more expensive on average.)

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity...

Of note, Alabama is one of the cheapest states to live in nationally. I would think that a $100K USD income would still allow for a healthy amount of extravagance and savings, though that would require financial literacy.

Childcare and healthcare costs are really the big two.

100k is an awesome salary for a young single adult in most of the country.

100k is much less awesome when you pay $3200/m for daycare for two kids, and $890/m for family health insurance.

Yeah, childcare costs are absolutely brutal nowadays. We are lucky enough to be able to hire a nanny 3 days a week with grandparents caring for them 2 days a week with young children. Daycare costs so much that this situation ends up being cost competitive.

Cost of living in my Texas city is about 10% lower than the national average, but I have friends shelling out $1400/month for 1 child. That's more than my mortgage payment from a house we got in 2020.

I haven't done looked at the FRED graphs, but I wonder how much people leaving the labor force due to the math not working out for childcare costs is happening.

I am sure these numbers seem kind of low to folks living in high cost of living areas, but the median household income here is just over $60K.

An easy way to check is look up basket prices. Average rent in America is quite high, food costs are high, tipping culture and other fees make food delivery an expensive venture. 100k for 2 people is a lot of money on a global ecale, but it's not really "rich" in the US unless you spend extremely smart for many years.

The cost of living (and everything else) varies wildly in the United States. Finland is maybe analogous to Rhode Island—not Massachusetts (Sweden) or Connecticut (Norway), but close. Alabama is then more like Albania—quite a bit cheaper… but do you want to live there?

(Sorry to all the Albanians, it’s not really fair to compare you to Alabama.)

Maybe for rural Alabama, but not for Auburn. I think Auburn has the state's second highest cost of living, second only to Madison.

My two-bedroom apartment is now $1400 per month, and that's for a decent but not exactly nice apartment.

I could never support myself and my son on $54k here in Auburn.

Middle class poverty traps look like what you describe. I don't understand the compulsion to spend all of what you make every month, and sometimes more, either.

> I don't understand the compulsion to spend all of what you make every month, and sometimes more, either.

It's a faux 'status symbol' thing. The idiom is "Keeping up with the Joneses" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses) and it is a self inflicted syndrome.

A large portion of the population has poor impulse control. Many of them see nothing wrong with spending large portions of their income on discretionary expenses even when cheaper alternatives are available.

I understand where you're coming from. Some examples from people I know:

* Person making around $40K buying a $50K new vehicle

* Software engineer making $100K+ in a low cost of living area asking if $5K is a good enough down payment for a home (at least they questioned it!)

* Consultant complaining about money while taking Uber back and forth to work every day and getting all groceries delivered on Instacart

However, these examples are from people who have the means to make these poor decisions and access to credit to do so. I think you understand this from having grown up poor, but it's worth illustrating for readers who may seen your comment and blame most poorer people for their situation.

There's "poverty," and then there's poverty. The bottom 20% of households in the US make about $22K per year. People I've known working in construction get paid entirely in cash and have no credit, often having to choose between paying the water bill or the electric bill after an unforeseen emergency. At the level where you are paycheck to paycheck, assuming the paychecks are regular, you can't save for emergencies because every day is spent triaging the basics.

I don't know of the veracity of his claim, nor the definition he was using, but Bernie Sanders claimed in Omaha, NE last night that "60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck". If true (and it likely is for some definition of this), seems worth knowing.

That statistic is widely repeated but it is contradicted by other studies which paint a rosier picture of Americans' finances. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42357663

My wife’s parents come from poverty (they attained middle class around when she was 8-10) and she always says there’s “people who are good at being poor and people who aren’t.” We are fortunate to make a lot of money, but even then I order delivery maybe a few times a year. I had back to back meetings the other day and was feeling sorry for myself and ordered some kabobs on Grubhub and she flipped out, lol.

it's a pretty brutal version of "financial literacy" but it sounds like you had it. Not sure how you broke the cycle though; what made you aware of an alternative?

We have an entire generation of NOT poor western young adults who grew up during essentially zero % interest rates. Their parents financed lifestyles well beyond their means; that was their financial literacy education. None of your neighbours actually "bought" a $50K+ automobile. They are all paying bi-weekly (or weekly!) finance payments. Combine with our focus on immediate gratification and society is pretty messed.

And it wasn't just consumers! Nobody runnning a small business has had to figure out to make the math with double-digit business loans work for some time. Massive fiscal spending growth has also made many businesses viable on government borrowing.

My number one tools are arrogance and self-respect.

I spent a few months visiting a therapist once per week. He said my arrogance is probably the most significant driver behind my success.

Statically speaking, I should be dead, in prison, or broke with multiple illegitimate children or addicted to drugs and alcohol.

I kept telling myself that I was better than my family members and peers who made those choices. I had to distinguish myself from my entire family to succeed.

I am a hyper-critical individual and most of that criticism is towards myself. Every time I do something or make a purchase, I ask myself if I'm treating myself with respect.

Growing up poor or with money problems, seeing that struggle. One does come out different. One can potentially be more understanding when people are just continuing the lifestyle they grew up with. In this case, 2 working adults, one white collar, used to be enough to rent an apartment and eat out/ have deliveries regularly, no? That’s just a story of middle class erosion and financialization of the economy.

What makes very little sense to me is seeing people go from having very little to making a lot, and the increases in lifestyle to match income. Aka lifestyle creep. Things that 2 years ago were not even a wish are now taken for granted. And it’s all the same as everyone else.

> In this case, 2 working adults, one white collar, used to be enough to rent an apartment and eat out/ have deliveries regularly, no?

That’s not true. I grew up in the 1990s, and my dad had a white collar job working for a government contractor. I remember that he made right around the median family household income in the early 1990s, which was at the time double the income for all households. (My mom didn’t work then.) Our neighbors were professionals, white collar federal government workers, etc. Our house was 1,100 square feet. We rarely got even pizza delivery. Maybe we went to Sizzler or Pizza Hut a few times a month. We had one car until 1998 (a Toyota Camry). My dad worked right outside of DC and took a bus to the train station, and then took the Metro to the office.

I got that $50k automobile. And it’s absolutely worth it. It has warranty and I don’t need to spent few hours every month fixing things, that shouldn’t break. Land Cruiser is bad example because of very good build quality and excellent durability. I don’t know how it’s in US, but pretty much everywhere else Land Cruiser is luxury. I personally pay gladly additional 200€ in a month to not to do 4-6 hours chores.

But yeah, the food delivery is expensive. Never do this. Try to teach the young guys in the office, that cooking is not rocket science. 3 smallish pieces of okayish meat cost 5€, add some rice. Grab paprika, tomato or cucumber and you have super healthy 3€ meal. Instead of 7-10€ microwave crap from supermarket.

Financial literacy should be a topic in school. Repeated every couple years going from simple budget planning to mortgages, stock market and exotic derivatives. Plus a course about all the scams and basic computer security. Heck we even modeled back then strategies of fake company before graduation. But that was special school.

The "50k automobile" sounds like almost an aside in this conversation, but it's still bothering me.

I know there are reasons that new car prices have gone up so much in recent years, but is $50k still "reasonable" in the context of a financial literacy conversation? I too ended up going down the path of buying new cars when I became an adult, partially due to having no car repair education (something I only gained on my own later in life), partially due to living in apartments with no place to work on them early in my career, but mainly due to the incredible pressure to be able to get to work reliably in a society without adequate public transit.

But my new cars cost more like $18k (2009), $26k (2014), and $31k (2019). Each felt like a luxury at the time, having grown up with used cars generally 15-20 years older than the year we drove them in. Is $50k not still a good $20k more than a base model Camry? It sure still sounds like a luxury to me.

My BMW 328xi had tired automatic gearbox. Only Tesla wanted to have it for trade in, because the gearbox was still working more or less normal. No person would buy it in such shape, trade-in elsewhere didn’t work either. I was also driving a lot in that time. 110€ weekly gas bill. And Tesla had a small discount plus zero interest offer at the time. I signed for it and got model y long range. My first new car in whole life.

My alternatives were dire: repair the gearbox for 8k. Ditch bmw and get some used vehicle for 25k. Take some other new vehicle with 6-8% interest rate. Or buy some 15 year old crap car and spend tons of money repairing it.

Fast forward to today: I forgot broken bmw, got used to comfy, fast family car. My current workplace offers free electricity as a benefit, so I use supercharger only few times a year on vacation. Financially it looks good: gas and repair costs are gone.

I can tell only one thing: each buy or not to buy decision is very individual. If bmw wouldn’t start falling apart after 80k miles I would keep it as long as I can. I also wouldn’t buy Tesla in first place if somebody else would buy bmw. I wouldn’t need a car at all if I had no relative to care for 30 miles away.

I buy a half-cow from a rancher every 6-7 months. I prepare all of my meals and all of my son's meals. I cook fresh meals for us six nights per week and take my lunch to work daily.

We eat out exactly once per week, and it's always the same place. It has counter service, so no tipping is expected.

It's the only restaurant in the area that prepares a meal better than I can at home. I know the owner, and we text each other occasionally and lift together at the same gym.

I've only had one issue at his restaurant, which was resolved by simply calling him.

My Land Cruiser costs me <$3k per year to own. That includes gas, insurance, and maintenance parts. I spent fewer than five hours on yearly maintenance for the four years I've owned it. The only exception was last year when I had to do the timing service, and that repair alone took me ~11 hours. It was much cheaper than the $2600 the import shop wanted for the repair.

I bought it because the 100 Series is probably the most reliable vehicle ever.