Health insurance is HOW MUCH!
And there are Brits here saying how great private care is and how much they want it… fucking turkeys to christmas.
People who push for private healthcare are either the type that could afford it or are the sheep following them.
And the thing is, private healthcare is great for those who can afford it. Both specialists and PCPs are readily available for appointments in the US, and the quality of care is good!.. You’ll just end up bankrupt if your employer doesn’t provide good insurance.
It’s fucked up, and it’s not equitable. But I understand why it’s appealing to the wealthy.
Both specialists and PCPs are readily available for appointments in the US
Where are you going? I usually have to schedule my appointments at least three months out, or there is no availability. My girlfriend had to wait a year and a half to see her OBGYN
6 months to see a dermatologist here in the great US of A.
Both specialists and PCPs are readily available for appointments in the US, and the quality of care is good!
My wife and I have high incomes and good insurance and she’s currently waiting 2 months for a specialist.
The system is not good by any metric.
No no no that’s only supposed to happen with universal healthcare! That only happens with socialism! Sean Hannity said so! Our system Is The Best On Earth!™
If I had a dollar for every way Hannity was wrong I wouldn’t have to work lol
You might even be able to afford the “good” healthcare 🤣
I don’t know about great
quality of care is good
That’s debatable for sure
There’s a reason why literally no other country in the world is imitating the US healthcare insurance system.
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They also just left the EU and became a laughing stock. They’re nothing to emulate.
Putin had a hand in the Brits leaving the EU and the election of Trump in the US - both massive wins for Putin.
I’m sure he’s had a hand in a lot of things. Trolls are very cheap in Russia.
But it doesn’t absolve anyone of their responsibility now, and it won’t in the future.
Britain has universal healthcare with zero deductible and zero co-pays. Not even on the same planet.
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Yes, and they are being bribed just like our politicians were
Sadly, only somewhat true nowadays.
There are plenty of parts of healthcare that are privatised and pay only. Some of this paid for by the NHS and the current government are attacking the “costs” of that. Especially as the treatments are often more expensive when done privately than they were on the NHS. Dental and optical treatment are privatised now. Much of our ambulance and rescue service are now private or voluntary. We’re seeing ever increasing costs for the ambulance services, while watching wait times skyrocket. Given private ambulance firms are measured on a few KPIs, they are targeting those over general care. Many surgeries that used to be covered (such a cleft lip) by the NHS are now regarded as cosmetic and come with insurance deductibles or are not even covered by insurance.
Many industries, such as software development, are offering private cover as a workplace bonus. What that means in reality is when I come off my motorbike, the expensive emergency surgery I need will be covered by an NHS surgeon. The insurance company will then “elect” to pay for me to be moved to a comfortable hotel/hospital where I can stay in comfort. That comfort is what I’ll be paying my insurance for, not the actual surgery.
Haven’t heard of that phrase but it’s an apt analogy for my fellow Brits. Same with Brexit. Wasn’t till afterwards did they realize that what they voted for and were upset. Heaven forbid you listen to those warning you about it.
Stop dreaming, start killing the billionaires.
Imagine outlawing plastic bags/straws before private jets.
Keeps the masses busy. I guarantee they have plastic straws on those private jets.
You don’t drink champagne with a straw
Don’t tell me how to suck.
First person to get a billionaire killionaire gets bragging rights for eternity.
That would be about 10 seconds of bragging and eternity dirt napping
They got guillotines on Amazon?
Only “action hero” size, and I’m certainly not going to cut off Andre or Wally’s head… how would we have dinner?
The last Bezos will ship us the guillotine we chop him with, or something…
Yes, do it. Take the first step. You get Elon and maybe I’ll think of taking on Jeff.
Ahh yes, that’s the problem. Who starts 😩
It’ll probably be the guy that got fucked over at every stage of their life and decides to become a martyr. So anybody at any time now really.
I’m just waiting… but I’m not a fire starter.
… median lifetime earnings for the typical U.S. worker stand at $1.7 million…
And Musk makes over 3.5x that amount in a single day.
Three and a half lifetimes of work per day, and nobody wants to do anything about the billionaire problem?
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I wish that was enough.
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I wish we had ranked choice voting so I could vote for Bernie and not fear my vote being wasted :(
Better yet, STAR voting or 3-2-1.
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Who will hold their nose and vote for whatever slop the Dems put up for them.
Bernie toed the line. Enough of his supporters did the same. You need better than Bernie.
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But you don’t understand. Billionaires earn their money. They’re superior to us. They make that much because they’re just much better people than the rest of us. If you stood next to Musk you would notice the heat radiating from his head as his massive Iron-Man like intellect dwarfs your puny brain. You should be in awe of his superiority and beg to have his children (even if you’re a guy). Clearly they should be rewarded for all their helping society and their taxes should be LOWERED, not increased.
The REAL billionaire problem is that we don’t have enough of them!
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If money is imaginary then why can’t we guarantee food, shelter, clothing, and education for every single human on this planet.
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You’re half right (there is no finite pool of money) but your conclusion is bonkers. Rich people are not spending their money, they’re using it to outbid each other for control of existing assets. So that they can overcharge ordinary people to access the things that they need.
The boots are not that tasty. Stop fucking yourself over for a chance to lick them.
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You are not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. You’re one of the people the wealthy gladly step on. We’re all in the same boat, sharing the same crumbs, rowing our hearts out.
We’re tugging a yacht behind us, full of billionaires having a banquet on the backs of our labor.
Man I love the image of us rowing to tug a yacht that is still belching out smoke but I’m personally a fan of the idea of a runaway train
If you spent $35K on a wedding, you’re doing it wrong.
If you read the actual original Investopedia article, most of these claimed costs make silly assumptions about the definition of “The American Dream” and a lot of the data is cherry picked.
They claim the “American dream” requires an $800k house at an over 7% interest rate and they assume you only put 10% down.
They claim the “American dream” involves buying a different used car every 6 years.
They claim the “American dream” involves spending $70k on pets over the course of your lifetime.
Its an interesting exercise, but the assumptions are weird and the headline is sensational.
If we assume a generous pet lifespan of 15 years that’s not unreasonable that’s like $400/mo which depending on what your pet needs food wise and how much you spoil them is easily met
If you have pets bigger than a hamster, 70k in your lifetime seems reasonable, even low. That around 1k per year.
And a different used car every 6 years is borderline frugal. My dream would be a new car every 3 years.
I don’t see the data to be so bad. Even the house financing is realistic (heavily dependent on location, of course).
I bought my current car new 14 years ago. It has some issues that might be too expensive to fix so I might need to buy another car. My ideal car would be an electric car, but that is way too expensive for my budget. So I looked at hybrids. I might be able to make a hybrid work, but even a gas car will be stretching my budget.
And I plan to keep my next car until it breaks down - which hopefully would be about another 14 years.
I’ve never understood the mentality of ‘its too expensive to fix’. $3000 is unobtainable, but $15000 just fine? My jeep needed a new engine, instead of buying a new car I just put a new engine in it. Saved me over ten grand and I’ve got transportation for at least the next ten years. Just fix your car, you’ll be better off in the long run.
Cars devaluate around 50% every 3 years, so if you bought a 3 year old car instead of new, you could swap it every 7 years for the same cost. And if it holds some residual value, even more often than that…
Some manufacturers even offer warranties on 3 year old leasing returns.
As an average, those assumptions are downright modest. The cliche of a house with a white picket fence, a wife, 2.5 kids, a dog, and a mortgage line up pretty well with that.
Granted, this isn’t everyone’s dream, and it doesn’t apply everywhere. But I would bet that the majority of people in this country would describe that as the cost to live that cliche.
Now, please don’t tell me the dog ate that 0.5 kid!?
The $800k house figure includes interest payments. So the value of the home will be much, much less than $800k.
Buddy you need to move out of Nebraska. Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions.
I live on the west coast. Maybe check your own assumptions as well.
It costs lives too. Exploitation is hard baked into any $ucc€$$fu££
vultureventure or ideologyTo put it in perspective… I inherited my mom’s house, retirement, life savings, car, etc. And I am still very limited in buying a new home where I actually want to live, bc of how outrageous prices are. Just imagine… almost 70 years of her life, and I can’t do what my dad and his first wife easily did at age 20 working as a restaurant manager. Insane.
Retirement: $715,958
And this is why I likely won’t be able to retire. At a recent retirement meeting my company gave, they said that people should be putting 15% of their income into retirement. However, I can’t afford to do this. Not even close.
I live a pretty frugal life. I don’t vacation. I rarely go out to eat or order food in. I plan my meals and only buy what we need. I drive a 14 year old car that’s paid off. Still, my expenses, while less than my income, wouldn’t let me reduce my pretax income by 15%.
I’m 48 and I doubt if I’ll have 20% of the figure above when it comes time to retire.
And still 700K for retirement is still low since I’m sure they’re using the US median salary and the old adage of saving 10 times your salary for retirement. So far every place I’ve worked and attended the financial seminar, my own retirement manager, and my sister who works in the industry have told me you really should be saving 15 - 20 time your salary if you want to live comfortably.
So to me what this article is saying is that you’ll need that just so you can live pay check to pay check through retirement and still be stressed the fuck out and at risk for being homeless in your golden years.
How exactly is one supposed to store more than one makes?
Probably 15-20 your annual salary. So if you make 50k you should have $750k- 1 mil saved when you retire.
Sure thing I will get right on that.
I assume you’re in the US? Because many other developed countries rely a lot less on private retirement savings and a lot more on public retirement programs in order to get everyone covered.
Of course, that means higher earners would have to pay more into programs similar to social security through taxes to cover lower earners, which many Americans are not willing to do.
I’m willing.
Are you me? Wow.
Now, I don’t know where you live, but Canada at least has old age security (and a pension plan) that should offset a good chunk of your expenses when you retire.
That’s in addition to whatever you do manage to put away.
However, it really helps if you own a home and are mortgage free by the time you hit retirement age.
I do own my house and hopefully will be mortgage free by the time I retire (or hit retirement age). I’m in New York State. Social Security would theoretically help, but who knows if it’ll be around in 30 years. If it’s not, I’ll be working until I’m 90. If it is, I might be able to retire at 75. Assuming I don’t have any large, unexpected expenses (which is a huge assumption).
Our future looks grim, friend. May the odds be ever in our favor. 🫰
US also has Social Security to help fund a basic retirement but it’s pretty minimal. It is enough to keep you from living on cat food
I also can’t finish paying off my mortgage before I should retire and given rampant ageism, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to find a job that long. And Social Security won’t cover my mortgage plus utilities
And even worse, Social Security needs adjustments to be able to continue meeting its commitments. The longer our political leaders avoid that, the more impact it will have when they are forced to do their jobs
What’s your employer match for you 401k? that 15% saving should be the savings after your employer match. So if you have that, you might be able actually sacrificing less than 15% of take home pay to save fore retirement.
I’d have to look it up. My company actually just changed the entire system to help out younger employees - but with the effect of hurting employees who have worked here longer. So it actually ends up being harder for me to save up. They acknowledged this, but argued it off as not affecting that many people. (Not many people - just the folks who stuck around the longest!)
The explanation we were given, though, was that 15% came before the matching. So I should take every $100 I earn and stick $15 into my retirement fund. Then, of course, I’d need to put some into healthcare, some into taxes, and some into basic costs of living. Then, when I’m done, I might be lucky enough to have a shiny penny left over. Unless I have any unforeseen expenses in which case I’d go deep into debt.
I think that advice makes sense. Ideally put away more than 15% of your gross income if possible, but I think the general advice is that you should be saving 15% of your gross income every year. Whether part of that 15% of gross comes from employer match or directly from you doesn’t matter.
I think my employer did have a grant or something for new hires as well. The other thing I think they have is automatic increases annually of 401k contribution. So just in case you are an employee that doesn’t manually go in to modify contributions, those employees will automatically have an increase of 1% contribution to 401k every where up to a certain upper limit, iirc.
Good luck on the retirement. Hope it works out. Also, when you look at the calculators to project future retirement, they tend to assume the market will greatly underperform historical market performance. For me it looks bad on that default. When I flip the project to match historical performance, or out perform historical performance, my retirement looks excessive. So save as much as you can and follow the guidelines, but there is some luck of market factors involved as to how you will end up.
I work in a municipality in Texas, and despite our state government being crazy the benefits at most cities are fantastic.
We have the Texas Municipal Retirement System in most places. At the last several cities I’ve worked at there’s a mandatory 7% employee contribution, but then the city double-matches the contribution, so I’m paying 7% in while putting 21% away.
The catch is you have to work in TMRS city for a minimum of 5 years before you vest. If you don’t put in your 5 years you only get the 7%.
And the really big cities don’t participate. So I ain’t gonna go work for Austin or Houston.
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I’m a web developer. I own my house, but am still paying the mortgage. (So I guess I don’t technically fully own it yet.) I’m in a decent position financially at the moment - my income exceeds my expenses. Still, I’ve had some big financial hits recently ($3,600 for hearing aids for me, $1,000+ for tests to rule out cancer for my wife, $750 for a new dryer when our old one died, the potential new car that I might need to buy,…).
So while I’m able to keep my head above water, financially, I’m not able to put enough away to secure my retirement. Also, one big adverse event (medical crisis, job loss with unsuccessful job search, etc) and my current financial state could go from “decent in the short term” to “drowning in debt.”
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Yeah, I think these rules (US) were made by people doing the math, without considering reality. It’s real easy to set aside a good amount to retire, as long as you set aside the recommended percentage throughout your career.
Of course the reality is that most of us will never do that. Many of us will get divorced and lose half what we put aside. Many of us will have financial emergencies such as medical emergencies, or being out of a job. Many of us will just be scraping by and can’t afford to set aside that much of our pay. Many of us just won’t have the perspective to be willing to set aside money for retirement many decades away. Many of us will live through times when our investments lose significant value over years. More importantly , most of us will hit those conditions sometime in our career and the basic premise is just not realistic. At least as importantly, with so much dependency on compounding returns over decades, there’s no way to recover when all those rosy assumptions don’t pan out.
I’m a good example, where I make a good income and realized the importance early on. At the beginning of my career I was able to daydream about my expected millions to retire. A few decades later and I’ve hit all of the above so am not even close. Even now as I panic about how soon I need to retire and how little I have set aside, and am making renewed effort, there’s no way to make up for all those missing years of compounding returns, and there’s only so much I can do while paying kids college expenses.
That’s why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
George Carlin
You beat me to the punch.
No pun intended 😂
Is using an expression literally considered a pun?
WE KNOW
Some costs might be lower or higher, depending on a family’s goals. For instance, some might pay for more than one-year of college for their children, while others might buy fewer cars.
Wedding and engagement ring: $35,800
One year of college for two kids: $42,080
Pets: $67,935
Average cost to buy a home, including lifetime mortgage payments: $796,998
Are you really buying a house if you never finish paying for it?
That’s roughly a 30 year mortgage on a 400K home (5% interest).
Yes, because you have equity. You have partial ownership from the first payment until the last. If shit hits the fan, you can choose to sell it for whatever your portion of ownership is worth.
You also don’t (generally) have to ask permission on what you do with your property.
I need to take a finance or accounting class. I don’t know anything about either.
Nope, the Big Brain Compassionate People have since informed me that the American Dream™ is ONLY that you have the OPPORTUNITY to maybe afford that life.
So the American Dream™ is that CEOs exist, you can be one. The end. Get fucked Mr.Factory worker, your time passed and even though we still need you we don’t care about your quality of life, just be a CEO.
It’s amazing, because in that world the American Dream™ is literally impossible to deny. Rich people will always exist and Big Brains will always point to them and say “you can be that” so shut up.
Do we have some kind of list of CEOs, where they live, and how much they’re paid. Maybe with photos of their faces. To show people that the American Dream is “real”, of course, and not for any other purpose.
Mostly, yes, except addresses. Public companies publish that data.
Start a list. I assume musk is first.
Going through SEC filings is not on my hobby list.
Save up a million in 401k, investments and equity just to spend it all in a couple of years for senior care.
Most of the.math here makes total sense but what the fuck is this shit
Wedding and engagement ring: $35,800
If anyone here spends $35k on a fuckin ring when you can’t afford hospital stays and shit, let me know so I can come slap some sense into you.
Like why is this even on the list? It doesn’t even materially change the final outcome.
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Still, spending nearly 7K on a shiny rock and some metal is bonkers dumb.
Good lord I almost had a heart attack lol.
Coffee time it is
Okay, this may be just a side note, but I hope they mean “wedding (as a whole) and engagement ring” because 35 THOUSAND for three rings is excessive.
Bridal jewelry worker here. I can absolutely confirm that, yes, you can indeed spend $10k on a ring setting and stone very easily. You can also spend $35k on a single ring if you got something from Hearts on Fire or Tacori.
Most of the cost comes from the stone and not the ring setting itself though. Like you can spend maybe at most like $5k on a platinum ring setting and another $10k+ on the stone.
Completely agreed, and none of this is directed at you. I’m responding to more of the overall sentiment in this post.
Jewelry and designer fashion is expensive very much on purpose. Yes, there’s an obvious quality element. That doesn’t mean that a Christian Siriano gown is going to last like a Carhartt jacket or that those Louboutin boots will outlast a pair of red wings. It’s wearable art, and it also makes a social statement.
We’re not even talking that level, though. The average cost for an American wedding is about $30k, so $35k all inclusive is absolutely in the ballpark. You can obviously get married for far less, but this article is talking about the reality of the “American dream” - which is really just a middle class lifestyle - versus various average expenses. The point isn’t that you can’t get married at the courthouse for $50, or even that you shouldn’t. The point is that people who subscribe to the concept of the American dream expect to be able to live an average lifestyle. Modest house. College for the kids. A “proper” wedding. Retirement. Leaving something behind. Those are increasingly moving out of reach.
You could hop over to Tiffany right now and find a nice necklace for $10k that would make a lovely Christmas present. That’s not what this article is talking about. It’s going beyond the basic “basket of goods” economists use to look at things like inflation and cost of living to include expenses that the average middle class family has traditionally expected. That’s exactly the approach many of us wish more people would take.
So strange that anybody would though.
Anyone who isn’t rich enough that they don’t even notice, anyway. So many issues Americans have stem from spending above their means.
I’m sorry but I’m struggling to even justify spending $500 on a shiny rock.
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This explains alot, a life without love has made my checking account stable.
