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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Dude, i pay near $400 a month in just student loan payments. I had to buy a "new" car last year and this 8 year old Subaru cost me $360 a month. I could have bought another $4000 beater, but that's a hole you never get out of because you are constantly having to replace cars that aren't worth the scrap they are made of. Everyone has been on a knifes edge for the past 16 years and now everything costs double from them but wages have been the same. No amount of budgeting is gonna fix that.
Didn't you just say you improved your budget situation by buying a more reliable car?
No, they said that their choice was either an extra expense of $360 a month for the car that they bought, or $4,000 for a cheap beater that's guaranteed to die on you at some point and be a hole that you perpetually shovel money into if you keep replacing it with more junkers.
That doesn't mean that they can afford the extra $360 a month. Just that it was the cheaper option.
Yes, that's what I was pointing out. He reduced his expenditures.
I suppose he could also go without a car entirely, depending on the circumstances.
He's still paying $360 a month more than he was before he had to buy a car. His expenditures have increased overall, though not by as much as they possibly could have. But that doesn't mean that they've reduced, unless you're for some reason considering the cost of the previous car as being more expensive than the new payment in some way.
In fact, if he had bought the $4,000 beater and had to replace it after a year, it actually would've been cheaper than the new car - $4,000 over 12 months comes out to $333.33 a month. Of course, that doesn't include anything like gas or maintenance, but neither does the monthly payment on the other car.
He didn't specify how frequently he had to replace the beater. Since he was complaining about how it would be more expensive than the car he did bought, logically I would assume it would be more frequent than that (or would require costly repairs more frequently, with the same result).
If he chose the less economically efficient option, that's even sillier. Why would he do that and then complain about it? This is really the whole point here - budget your money and choose the expenditures that make sense within your budget.
That's irrelevant to the point I was making. I merely gave that as an example of how the beater could theoretically be cheaper than the car payments if it lasted that long without needing additional expenses. It could've been the cheaper option, but that would be gambling that it wouldn't require additional work and still be running for a full 12 months.
My point is quite simple: He paid $400 a month in student loans. Now, he pays $760 a month due to having to buy a new car. That's not reducing his expenditures, it's increasing it. He didn't go from paying $400 to $360. The $360 is an additional unplanned expense he has to pay now on top of his other monthly expenses because he had to replace his car.
But previously he was paying $4000-per-however-long-his-beaters-last. That was a planned expenditure too.
Whether this is an improvement or not is impossible to say without knowing how long his beaters lasted, that would be on him to figure out. Since he made the decision to switch to the non-beater I assumed he'd worked it out, but evidently that's a bad assumption so who knows.
What i am saying is thay it currently costs X to actually live in my low cost of living area, but most jobs around here only pay around .8X instead. No amount of budgeting and cutting out frivolous expenditures is able to buget you out of inflation
Then you're living in an untenable location.
If you think small toen rust belt is untenable, then the country is fucked and not worth saving
Small towns in the rust belt are not the entirety of the United States. Different people value different parts of it in different ways, just because the part of it that you like isn't doing well doesn't mean it has no value to anyone else.
I work two jobs, one of which is a union manufacturing job. If that isn't enough to live in a low COLA area then we're cooked. That's the point i am making.
That hinges on the assumption that the car he's replacing is a beater, which isn't necessarily true. All he said is that he could've bought another beater, which says that he had bought one before, but the car he's replacing could've been a non-beater that he had bought because he had already learned how pricey constantly replacing beaters is. And by the sounds of it, having to replace the car was an unplanned expense, which says to me that he wasn't driving a beater.
Why not just ask him instead of trying to finely parse ambiguous wording like this is some kind of murder mystery? I asked him for clarification myself earlier but he never responded to that.
I didn’t say that… my comment isn’t directed at people who are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s directed at people who think they should be rich because they have a high income, yet always seem to have found some unnecessary thing to spend their money on, which prevents them from building wealth.
If you’re always struggling to pay your bills, you need to increase your income. Not saying it’s your fault, just that practically that’s the best thing you can do for yourself in an imperfect system rigged against everyone but the very rich.
"just make more money" lmaooooo
You’re maliciously trying to misrepresent my comment.
On Lemmy financially irresponsible people don't exist, and when making any statement to the contrary, all they can hear is "blah blah blah avocado toast".