daswig

Hey, I'm in my late 30's, so if my references are too archaic for you, sue me. It's all about education and hard work. Actually, more than hard work....working smart. If you go through life with a goal of being a sports star or a rap star or whatever, odds are good that you're going to end up disappointed unless at some point you re-evaluate your goals and come up with something realistic. That means putting down the nintendo controller and studying something that you may find to not be glamorous or fun, and may in fact find deathly boring, like accounting. (/sings "It's fun to charter an accountant, and sail the wide accountance-sea! To find, explore the funds offshore, and skirt the shoals of bankruptcyyyyyyyy! It can be manly in insurance. We'll up your premiums semi-annually! It's all tax-deductable, we're fairly incorruptable, we're sailing on the wide accountancy!!!") It also means delaying gratification in some cases. I've got friends I went to highschool with who got out of school and went directly into the workplace. Now, they're looking at their lives, their mortgages, their wives and 2.3 kids, and wondering "Is this all?" They've gotten the rewards that they wanted, but have foreclosed on their own opportunities, so now they can't AFFORD to go back to school, because they need that paycheck each month.


The "poverty line" is a statistically formulated figure based upon averaging. It's not a thing that denotes something "real", like at what point malnutrition sets in. It's a statistical deviation on the average.

If a person making $75K a year has 50 kids, they may well be below the poverty line. People have a choice. They can do what they want when they want, which will limit their ability to make themselves more marketable, and therefore will limit their ability to make more money. That's a result of the decisions that THEY made, and they must take responsibility for their own actions.

100% WRONG. You're not unable to afford a mortgage, you're unable to afford a mortgage in the part of town you would want to live in, or one you would want to live in but still manage to afford to keep all of your other toys while living there. There's a major difference.

The problem is that people don't want to live a lifestyle that is within their means. We live in a country where the drug addicts that are the poorest of the poor still manage to buy hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of drugs on a monthly basis. Just recently, there was a janitor that died and managed to leave over $2 MILLION dollars to a university. How did he do it? He worked, and more importantly, he lived below his means and SAVED. If you're poor, you shouldn't be spending your money on "felony flyers" or Hilfiger clothing or whatever's "big" now, you should buy generic. Instead of conspicuous consumption, go with the old "use it, fix it, make do" philosophy. It's a LOT cheaper, and it allows you to save your money for things that actually matter to you. $120 for a pair of freaking tennis shoes? Get fucking REAL. That works for everybody....not just the poor. I've NEVER spent more than $50 for a pair of shoes, even for work. And I don't throw out clothes because they've "gone out of style". I wear them until there's no more use in them, and I don't buy stuff that is likely to become "dated". And when I shop for cars, I look for how long it will last, how expensive it will be to fix it, and what kind of costs are associated with it. Needless to say, I don't drive a luxury car, and I don't have a $4,000 set of rims on the car I do drive.