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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, letβs try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
sure, maybe. but FUCK Dave Ramsey.
I'm out of the loop. What'd they do?
He plays a daddy capitalist on teevee while being total boomer.
Also his debt pay off advice is bad financial advice. "Snow ball" method π€‘
Entire grift is dunking on peasants and blame their personal failings for systemic issues.
Some of his advice (mainly the first "baby steps" of paying off debts and getting some money saved) is reasonable enough. Snowball method of paying off debt may not be the most mathematically advantageous, but it does give psychological quick wins to those who may need it most. Paying off high-interest loans first doesn't mean much if you get frustrated and give up. Setting a budget is also important.
Once you get past that his advice is pretty awful though. Yes, I use credit cards but I pay it off. Yes, I have a car loan but its interest rate is so low I pay a rounding error's worth of interest through the life of the loan. No, I'm not paying my mortgage off on a 15-year schedule because its interest rate is plenty low as well and I've got better things to do with my paycheck.
I pay about $450 a month for my mini cargo van and another $80-ish for insurance. I also drive about 3,000 miles a month (my commute is long and I spend most weekends out of town helping my parents), so I average about 350 dollars a month in gas. Let's call it another 100 a month on average for maintenance (I do my own oil, the tires are pretty cheap, but there will be occasional large expenses).
So that comes out to pretty close to a thousand dollars a month total. That's a lot of money.
But by living in the middle of the country far from work, I can rent a trailer home that costs about $1500/month less than a tiny apartment close enough to work to walk or bike, and I have the freedom of owning a car and being able to go anywhere and haul anything I need.
So yeah, it's expensive, but it would be even more expensive NOT to have it.
If it works for you, great, but are you sure you declared your vehicle use on your insurance correctly? Seems like you may have said it's not a commuter vehicle
I have an impeccable driving record and only have liability abs gap on my car since it has so many miles it's basically worthless as far as the insurance company is concerned. If it were to be totaled they'd give me like 500 bucks if I carried full coverage.
The US sounds extremely expensive. In the EU 1500$ a month will pay for a very nice apartment close to work.
I work for a tiny city that's basically a private enclave for the ultra-rich in the middle of a major city.
Literally every household is millionaires or better, and we have a lot of citizens whose names you'd know.
Spoken like someone who's long since stopped worrying about having to commute without mass transit available.
If mass transit is available and reasonable then yeah, go off. But otherwise please stop blaming the victims of Capitalism.
That's really exorbitant insurance. I don't know where he lives or what is situation is but $350 a month is insane.
Or you can take the train, walk or bike. All of which are much much cheaper.
lol how is this comment getting downvotes in this community
Unfortunately, it's not too practical to bike 12 miles on the motorway.
I would love to.
Please build trains or stop blaming me.
$2.50 for an all day bus pass in my area. Even taking it 5x a week is only $50/mo. And yet all of my peers refuse to use it and act disgusted when I tell them I prefer to take the bus, like it's below them. I don't get it.
insurance is whats insane nowadays. i was paying 600 a YEAR for full coverage on my truck until last year when they spiked it to 2100. dropped to just liability and that alone is 650 a year now
Millions? I don't think so. There is no investment that would turn $30K or whatever into millions that was safe enough to work for the majority of people. But it would be a significant help.
That being said, for most people, the amount you'd spend to live in a place where a car isn't needed or constantly paying for ride share or taxis greatly exceeds the amount you'd save by not having a car for the vast majority of people, and that's not even getting into the ableism issue.
And sure we could get into buying a cheaper, used car or whatever, but in the long term the maintenance costs, having to buy another car sooner, and other financial risks to cars outside of warrantee over a lifetime will add up similarly unless you're really lucky or can repair your own cars.
The whole, where do you live thing is super important. The last time we moved my wife and I were very adamant about a specific maximum commute length in car, or a length by transit. And getting somewhere to live that was easy to commute from. We compared the price including mass transit commute at the max distance to anything we were getting closer with the commute included from there too.
The differences were absolutely significant. Many places were cheaper to live an hour away, even with car payments, insurance, and gas. That's absolutely ridiculous and part of so many problems from climate change to motor vehicle deaths.
We need to enforce mixed development, the people who work in an area need to be able to afford living in that area. Pushing the workers out should not be acceptable.
and thatβs not even getting into the ableism issue.
Infrastructure that requires people to drive is far more ableist than the inverse. As many people with a disability can't drive at all (or driving is a significant challenge).
$554 a month at 5% growth is $440k after 30 years. So yeah not millions.
Working life is more like 40 years. Those back end years are huge, it goes up to 840k. Which is why you're supposed to start on your 401k right away. Of course 99% of people don't get this talk until they're 40; go through a poverty period after high school; or never make it out of paycheck to paycheck living for other reasons. (Like medical debt)
Very few people get the good pay, good contributions, and consequently the good retirement. We also completely lie to people about retirement. We tell them they have to scrimp and save so they aren't homeless when they're 80. In reality half of us will be dead by 75 and half again by 85.
S&P averaged about 10% over the last 30 years. That means it would be over 1.2 million.
And sure we could get into buying a cheaper, used car or whatever, but in the long term the maintenance costs, having to buy another car sooner, and other financial risks to cars outside of warrantee over a lifetime will add up similarly unless youβre really lucky or can repair your own cars.
Buying a low-mileage used car and even paying for a shop to do the maintenance is almost always cheaper than buying something with $500+ monthly payments. I don't actually agree for the most part with Dave Ramsey (even about the entirety of this post)...but he's correct that it is cheaper.
Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. So any car for that amount is not going to survive long. So most Americans still get loans for used cars.
And with interest rates so high, a payment of $550 will only get you about $25K. That's enough for a decent new small sedan, but if you have kids (especially if 3 or more), that's probably the minimum needed to get a used minivan that will last a while.
Anything else is only going to last a few years at best before needing major repairs.
I just did an autotrader search and in my (very unaffordable) area, there were lots of serviceable cars under 10k. If you live in a place with a garage you can even buy a used EV and eliminate whole categories of maintenance costs.
The whole point is to buy something that requires smaller or no monthly payments, and then bank the savings and eventually buy something better. "A couple of years" can do the trick in some cases.