Save first and spend what's left. Or spend first and save what's left. One of these will ensure you are fiscally stable.

Ya know.. when they cut welfare it only hurts kids and does nothing to the sorry assed parents

Me too.

You know who ALWAYS has $400 cash on hand?

All the escorts after I utilize their services!

Sure, but are they investing it wisely? That's the key.

Once it's out of my hands, not my job! ROFL Maybe I could charge them a small fee for financial advice or swap their services for advice? :hmmm:

Anecdotal evidence breeds fallacy myths. Of course there's a subset of people who self sabotage and can't get out of their own way. Look at the high % of people struggling. No way can that be the case for all or even the majority of so many people.

I don't know if I agree with that, from my own experiences growing up poor and still knowing having poor family and friends. All of them had/have making choices that keep them down. Growing up all of my clothes were hand me down or thrift store. This was back when thrifing was not cool. I got one pair of shoes a year from kmart and ate the fake mac n cheese and spam most nights. Hell I didnt know there were nicer stores. My mom worked 50plus hours a week and came up from the bottom, the main lesson was do well in school and learn from her mistakes.


But sadly when dealing with people today they do seem to be the majority; it is a learned/culture trait now. I have been offering free financial review, resume help, how to get a decent job without a degree, were to get free public entertainment, how to talk in interviews to people for a couple years and it is usually the same trend. Didnt care in school, 2 plus kids on minimum wage if working at all full time, single parent.

Like I said before, I learned from my mom and remembered the classes that our school offered. Some of the people I tried to help went to school with me and they do not remember the classes. They did not come away with the same knowledge because they ****ed off at school. I am not sure if schools still offer these types of life classes, I will ask this week some teacher friends as they are/were a great tool for me.

But the only way to stop the trend is to get to the younger generation earlier and keep at them on wise decision making for themselves and their future children. But I do not believe that would help the political narrative, but thats another story.

he said liquid

Either way, money available that can earn simple interest. A 3 million dollar home appreciates, but you're not seeing that money unless you liquidate that asset.

More illumination on the dwindling wages.



“Negative Growth” of Real Wages is Normal for Much of the Workforce, and Getting Worse: New York Fed

by Wolf Richter • September 27, 2016 •

And the fate of the consumption-based US economy?

The New York Fed published an eye-opener of an article on its blog, Liberty Street Economics [1], seemingly about the aging of the US labor force as one of the big economic trends of our times with “implications for the behavior of real wage growth.” Then it explained why “negative growth” – the politically correct jargon for “decline” – in real wages is going to be the new normal for an ever larger part of the labor force.

If you’re wondering why a large portion of American consumers are strung out and breathless and have trouble spending more and cranking up the economy, here’s the New York Fed with an answer. And it’s going to get worse.

The authors looked at the wages of all employed people aged 16 and older in the Current Population Survey (CPS), both monthly data from 1982 through May 2016 and annual data from 1969 through 1981. They then restricted the sample to employed individuals with wages, which boiled it down to 7.6 million statistical observations.

Then they adjusted the wages via the Consumer Price Index to 2014 dollars and divide the sample into 140 different “demographic cohorts” by decade of birth, sex, race, and education. As an illustration of the principles at work, they picked the cohort of white males born in the decade of the 1950s.

That the real median income of men has declined 4% since 1973 is an ugly tidbit that the Census Bureau hammered home in its Income and Poverty report two weeks ago, which I highlighted in this article – That 5.2% Jump in Household Income? Nope, People Aren’t Suddenly Getting Big-Fat Paychecks [2] – and it includes the interactive chart below that shows how the real median wage of women rose 36% from 1973 through 2015, while it fell 4% for men:

http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/2016...36e6a44b70.jpg


Median Annual Earnings in the United States | Graphiq


This illuminates the New York Fed’s article with a slightly different hue.

The New York Fed report goes a big step further – with white men as an example, perhaps to avoid getting sidetracked into discussions about wages of minorities. It picked men born in the decade of the 1950s to show what happened to their wages over time. And since women’s real wages actually rose over the period, they might make a less persuasive example of how declining real wages should be considered the new normal.

In their analysis, the authors found a common pattern: Wages increase sharply early in the work life, but as workers age, wage growth begins to slow down. There are also variances based on educational attainment, which they separated into five cohorts: Master’s or higher, Bachelor’s, some college, high school diploma, and less than high school.



The chart below shows the percentage change of real wages (left, y-axis) as these men aged (horizontal, x-axis). As young adults, their wages soared by up to 10% a year. Then the rate of growth fell off sharply. When the men in this cohort turned 40 in the 1990s, wage growth disappeared. By around the year 2000, the real wage peak in the US, when the oldest men in this cohort turned 50, wages had begun to decline for most of them. By the time these men were in the mid-50s, their wages across the board were heading south – and for many of them, rapidly. Hence this colorful, drooping spaghetti:

us-real-wages-white-men-born-in-1950s-by-education

http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/2016...1d89f095fd.jpg

This “negative real wage growth” – devastating as it may be for those experiencing it – is nothing special, according to the New York Fed. And it crushes not just white men, but everyone:

Real wages tend to rise early in a worker’s career, flatten out mid-career, and then decline as the worker approaches retirement. This inverted U-shape pattern is a well-established feature in the labor economics literature.

The report explained it further:

Labor economists explain the rapid real wage growth early in a worker’s career as a combination of on-the-job learning and better matching of workers to jobs. A large portion is due to job matching as workers change jobs in search of a position that better utilizes their skills. As workers age, the decline in the pace of their real wage growth reflects a diminished incentive to invest in new skills (because their remaining work life is shorter) and fewer job changes (because they have found a good job match).

The report divides life for its purposes into three phases, terms of wage growth:

Fast growth, up to age 40
Flat growth, ages 41-54
“Negative growth,” age 55 and older.

Now there’s another problem mucking up the overall and ever-elusive real-wage growth miracle everyone has been counting on: demographics. The US population is aging. There are more people aged 40 and over in the workforce, and their incomes are now flat or declining.

The portion of the population in the first phase when wages are growing fast has plunged from close to 60% in the 1980s to the mid-40% range currently, the report said. And the portion of workers with wages in the “negative growth” phase has ballooned. Given the demographics, real wage declines among workers over 50 will continue to hammer the national averages.

That is why real wages in the US economy are in such trouble, and it’s normal, and the fact that it’s getting worse is normal too, according to the report.

But real wages determine consumer spending. Consumer borrowing can fill some holes, but not in the long run. In the long run, only wage growth can prop up spending. And if the current trend holds, as predicted by the report – with the number of workers over 40 ballooning – then consumer spending is going curdle further, for years or decades to come.

Or is it really all just inevitable demographics, as the New York Fed would have it?

Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton, who presides over endless surveys of American consumers and businesses and knows a thing or two about them, begs to differ. Read… “Or We’ll Lose the Whole Middle Class”: Gallup CEO [3]

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/09/27/neg...-new-york-fed/


[1]
http://libertystreeteconomics.newyor...ng-blocks.html

[2]
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/09/14/tha...fat-paychecks/

[3]
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/09/20/or-...ss-gallup-ceo/