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Money

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Pringle, Feb 14, 2011.

  1. spnited

    spnited Active Member

    Actually, I did live OK in this area when I was making $25,000 -- 30 years ago.
     
    BitterYoungMatador2 likes this.
  2. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Okay, three options.

    1) Don't live there.
    2) Make more than $25k.
    3) Travel back in time 30 years.

    And they say the poor don't have good choices in this country...
     
  3. spnited

    spnited Active Member


    I don't have to do any of the above because, as I said, I'm much, much, much more than 25K a year.
    I make a confortable living wage for my part of the country.
     
    BitterYoungMatador2 likes this.
  4. Trey Beamon

    Trey Beamon Active Member

    I'm sure this has been asked 1,000 times since the birth of SportsJournalists.com, but why are we even having this discussion? Why are so many (mostly) intelligent, college-educated people with a specific skill being paid as much as a McDonald's shift manager?
     
  5. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Because they're the lucky ones who got the job. And if they didn't want the job, 10 more people would crawl over broken glass to make it to work the first day.
     
  6. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Because those people are choosing to work in a field where the supply far, far, far outstrips the demand for their skills.
     
  7. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Umm, read it again.

    You just said "I don't have to do any of those because I'm already doing one of those." ?
     
  8. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I wasn't saying. I was asking.
     
  9. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    To be fair, you can make more at McDonalds than you can at some newspapers.
     
  10. 21

    21 Well-Known Member

    Hate this topic.

    Why in the world would anyone judge someone for leaving a job for more money?? That 'sellout' concept is so lame....no one takes an oath to stay in a job or career forever, you don't owe it to your colleagues to 'hang in there' like there's a badge of honor attached to the paycheck.

    This reminds me of those snarky NY Times stories about reckless affluence (Summer camp! Fancy baby parties! Desperate Wall Street Wives!), someone posts the story and everyone responds 'If you can't be happy on $100k you should be killed by a bus!'

    Money has nothing to do with happiness. Money buys you comfort. It doesn't spare you from divorce or disease or layoffs, it may give you more options for dealing with tragedy and tough times, but that's about it.

    'Happy' to me is about liking who you are, who you're with, getting up every day feeling good about something. Unhappy people are never happy, regardless of their bank accounts.
     
  11. TrooperBari

    TrooperBari Well-Known Member

    Shouldn't have clicked on this thread before bedtime. I don't feel nearly as clever as I did a few minutes ago.

    How much do I want? Whaddaya got?
    How much do I need? I'm debt-free (for the moment) and living somewhere with a fairly low cost of living, so probably not that much. Of course, none of my previous four stops had anything in the way of 401k matching or retirement plans (and neither does this one), so my only cushion is the money I have socked away in a checking account. That's something I should probably fix. I'm also considering leaving newspapers and going back to school, though, which will take care of that whole debt-free thing right quick.

    Providing for one's spouse and/or children seems to be the biggest factor. The thing is, I don't have any of those and don't envision that changing for a good, long while (if ever), so part of my brain keeps telling me that making $30K per year is fine. After all, I live in an interesting city that will likely never lack for news and where newspapers are doing comparatively well. I can certainly keep living on this salary -- and considering the area, it's at least above average -- but all signs point to having to make big changes if I want to upgrade my surroundings or position.
     
  12. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    You can't cherry pick a rural area with a very low cost of living and make a statement like that. Let's go apples to apples. The per capita income in Idaho is somewhere around $32.5K, indeed. The median income in the U.S. is about $53K, though. Which means $32.5K in Idaho is probably more equivalent to $53K in the typical place in terms of cost of living. If you are earning $32.K in New York or New Jersey or Connecticut, it's not as simple as moving to Idaho, doing the same job and earning the same amount. You are going to take a significant pay cut.

    Also, your statement about janitors or teachers donating million dollars isn't impossibly unrealistic. But the odds against accumulating that much money in a lifetime on that salary are not very great. You'd have to start saving pretty young--say $2K a year from the age of 21--to get the compounding power and you'd have to have grown the money fairly aggressively. Even if you just replicated the S&P 500 for say 50 years, after taxes, you'd be in the $1.5 to $2 million range. It's certainly doable. My two points: 1) How many people earning that kind of salary actually have managed to continually save say $2K a year for that length of time and replicated the returns of the S&P 500? 2) More importantly, if you have a million dollars to donate, your income wasn't $32.5K a year. You have grown your money aggressively somehow and that money is income too. A much more significant source of income than the thing that is earning you $32.5K a year. Your total income has obviously been much greater than $32.5K a year, though.

    That isn't an attempt at shifting the goalposts. It was kind of my earlier point. Small amounts of money don't just grow to a million dollars without you earning it (i.e. income) somehow.
     
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