Your premise is faulty. My advice doesn't include harming others. My advice is don't spend what you don't have. And by that I mean, decide what you want out of life, then create a budget that accomplishes that... then follow it.
I live in an apt. on a fairly nice street. Suburbia. Houses on this street have sold for 41,000 and 55,000, since I moved here in 2000. They are OLD houses. But I've watched a millennial age woman (and husband), with husband buy one...live there for 4-5 years, fix it up a bit, and sell it to buy a better one.
But... she didn't always have the latest phone, she didn't acquire a large student load for her degree, she didn't buy the latest and greatest cars, etc. It IS doable.

Sure, we all know someone who made it big somehow, and pretty much rides the wave of their success. Or someone who's family had money, etc. But there's plenty of people that just had a middle class life, and made the right choices, and it worked.
I know a 36 year old kid, start out retail clothing sales, while still in senior year of HS. Saved all during his childhood, (cause his mother made him save 50% of anything he earned), got out of HS, went to college, majored in business, and got a low level desk job in a small branch of a bank.

Now, he's a VP in the huge 8 story bank (same company) downtown Pittsburgh. Just bought his first house about 8 years ago, and just had his second kid. He hired me, 6 years ago to build a 24' diameter deck around his above ground 24' swimming pool, in his back yard.

Life isn't.... easy, but it is doable.

It's easy to save 50% when the basics aren't eating the majority of your budget.

If we're using bank analogies:



This post was edited by Surfpunk on Nov 16 2019 09:54am

He sent one email to Assange and forgot about it when the FBI asked him.

Well before you graduate HS it's easy to save 50% all the time. Assuming you HAVE parents.

I don't have to watch the video. I'm 63 years old, I know what things cost. At one point in time, after getting out of the service, living in Cali, I had it figured out that I needed so much per hour, just to get to work, etc.
So if I wanted anything more than that, I had to earn more.

I also learned things like...

You have to listen more than talk.
40 hours a week is just a guide.
People can tell if you really WANT to work.
People can tell if you really are FOR the company, or if it's just a job to you.
Living on the street, ain't no fun...but you can still work your way out, w/o breaking the law.

And the thing I learned, first, was... if you don't HAVE a plan or a direction, go in the service. No matter what else happens you'll come out witha trade of some sort, and w/e perks they happen to be giving at the time. Plus a bank roll of some sort.

But harming others is the not-so-indirect consequence of heeding your advice. For boomers, it made sense to have less kids than previous generations while not making the corresponding cuts to pensions/medicare. This created intergenerational debt that the generations of your children and grandchildren have to pay for.

The service is flooded with recruits these days. Its honestly not as good now. You can make more money at starbucks and they offer benefits/tuition now. You can even be a millionaire off of uber depending on your locale.

NO. The fed stealing from the SS Trust did that. You folk keep assuming that SS was to be paid for by those that came after. It wasn't set up that way.
Some in the govt. over the years appropriated money they shouldn't have. Now your generation has to pay for that.
Iirc, Reagan put a stop to the misappropriations. But you need to blame who was at fault. It was our own govt.




/e



Yeah, I know it's harder to get in than it used to be.

Nothing in my advice will help those on the wrong side of the law, or those that thought it was cooler to be a problem child in school, etc.
Somewhere along the line... we ALL young and old, allowed things we shouldn't have. Like stopping discipline in school. Like allowing children power over their parents.

What we should have done, is ONLY go after those parents that actually were bad parents. But we made ill thought blanket rules that came back to haunt us, and we're now on a slippery slope that we need to get off of... fast.



This post was edited by Ghot on Nov 16 2019 10:25am

OF COURSE you don't have to watch the video. Because Jeebus forbid you have to see a real life scenario which runs counter to your own.

LOL. First off, there ain't no invisible sky guy in my life. And I already figured those things out for myself, long ago. I then figured out ways around that seeming catch-22.

I know some things though. I know that folks in the working age phase, need to be doing that...all day, every day, and really shouldn't be spending their time posting on forums. They should be spending that time, if they have it, working on ways to NOT get trapped in that seeming catch-22.

This isn't personal, or anything. Just in general.

The best "get hired line" I ever came up with (construction) was... "hey, put me to work for a day, if you don't like me you don't have to pay me". If you do, I want such and such an hour. Worked 100% of the time.
Yes, I realize that wouldn't work for say a white collar job.

I found one thing that worked just about everytime for all types of jobs... just flood the market with requests for work. I know that "flooding the market with requests" changes a lot, but I bet it's still doable.


/e I also found out that even if your life's in the toilet... taking a shower and wearing clean clothes... helps a lot, when you're asking folks to say... use their computer to post resumes... w/e.

This post was edited by Ghot on Nov 16 2019 10:34am

Real problem here is she's a single mother. Literally all of those financial issues poof into air if that family has 2 incomes.