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Notes -
https://www.thecut.com/article/gambling-addiction-casino-world.html
I saw this article this morning, with the online headline "My $5,000 Bender in Casino World"
And my reaction was... Befuddled. $5k? That's it? I'd be modestly interested in hearing a friend tell me about losing $5k gambling. But as the subject of a whole article? Come on. With inflation the way it is, I think you have to lose at least $30,000 before it's interesting. Listing $5k might hurt a lot of people, but the real problem was their prior destitution/poor decision making, not the $5k lost gambling. Just, like, get a job?
I had a similar reaction to would-be academic Kierkegaard's changing his name and moving country to dodge a $10k judgment. Come on, what formidable person can't just pay that off? Tighten your belt for six months and you should be fine.
Maybe it's just seeing the world through privilege, but I feel weird being asked to respect these people. It's an ethos argument: if you don't have your life organized such that you can handle a minor financial setback, you're not a substantial person.
What do you think is, in 2023 first world countries, a large enough financial loss to be interesting, or to force a life change on someone, for a person you would respect?
If 5000 USD is minor, then sorry for being insubstantial.
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To put my cards on the table up front, you wouldn't respect me. But that's ok, I stopped caring much about respect when I learned I was a genetic dead end. Which is another reason I don't deserve respect.Never mind all that, I just read the clarification you wrote to iprayiam and I had misunderstood in the same way.
Nevertheless, I don't think the writer was aiming for respect - she's talking about licking crumbs of coke off the floor of a restroom and mocking her own stupidity constantly. Even the last few paragraphs, when she's trying to get better, are written in a way that makes her look silly. It reads more like a confessional or cautionary tale to me.
Sure, but I want my confessional and cautionary tales bigger and juicier. I didn't read the article until after I posted this, because my original point was just about the headline failing to grab me. Having now read it, it's the same thing: the problems strike me as banal, and the writer isn't strong enough to carry it off.
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$5k is about right. Bigger than most car repairs, smaller than most cars. The latter is the kind of thing you're supposed to plan around; the former is what you're supposed to be able to handle even if surprised. "Supposed to" in the social sense, not the rational one.
I don't think there's any particular amount that would make it article-worthy.
But then, I also doubt there's a threshold which would have made you respect the author of this article.
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Desperate situations make people do objectively stupid things.
For example, Fred Smith, the founder of Fedex, gambled $5,000 in 1973 because he was unable to secure a loan from a bank and was desperate. In this case, his gamble paid off and he managed to win $27,000. Adjusted for inflation it is a much larger sum, roughly around $33,000, but blackjack has an expected negative net return.
It's hard to say how much this gamble is the reason he was able to turn fedex around considering the company was $11 million in debt at the time, but it's likely that if he lost that gamble the entire company would have 100% gone under.
Would the impact of the story be less if it was $5,000 in today's value? Maybe, but I think the intention and situation around the gamble make the story more interesting than the amount. I know you're asking specifically about the loss here, and maybe you're more interested in how the loss impacted/changed a person, but I think the situation/circumstances that led to the gamble are more interesting. I'd also argue that if the amount he gambled was much larger, say $500,000, it be harder for me to accept that it was a desperate situation versus a stupid impulsive decision, even if you win with that larger amount.
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Looking at the article, it seems clear that the main problem isn't exactly the $5,000, but rather that she spent it descending into addiction and uselessness while an unemployed adult.
"I went to rehab and then spent several months living with my parents until saving enough to rent a closet-size room in L.A. From there, I tried to engage in the “healthy” activities sober people are supposed to love. But there was no amount of hiking, hot yoga, or acai bowls that could stop me from constantly fucking up, and every relapse got progressively worse until I stopped trying altogether." If this were a working class man, people would have given up on him by now.
It reminds me a little bit of that piece from a decade or so ago by a woman who was raised middle class, got a degree in English or something, and then alienated her family and spent several years slumming in cheap hotel rooms, writing about spearing roaches and feeling exhausted all the time. I think it was this person https://www.wesjones.com/ehrenreich.htm
Clearly, not a "substantial person," that's the point.
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Yeah, losing $5K gambling and having it actually sting is basically a sign that someone is just a complete fuckup. Really, that's true of any sum of money. Gambling is fine and losing a decent bit can be a funny story, but betting money you can't afford to lose just means you're a degenerate loser. I lost $800 on a day of football bets and was irritated, but not genuinely upset. I watched a buddy roll up to the $100 blackjack table at Caesar's, go up $2K, then proceed to lose that and the $1K he walked up with in the first place. That one stung a little because he could have walked and bought us steaks - what an asshole!
I have a hard time picturing chance financial losses that genuinely damage people's lives that are generally well-arranged, because deliberate exposure to excessive risk is just a stupid thing to do. That said, I would feel great empathy for anyone who had their business collapse, even if it was a small business and their business plan didn't seem all that great to me. I suppose that's generally going to mean at least a six-figure loss, but at the end of the day, it's more about the loss of labor, pride, and self-worth. For the standard W-2 guy, I have a tough time figuring out why they don't just not spend more than they make.
Where I disagree, or maybe I'm just making a different point, is that at a large enough sum of money the story becomes interesting to me. Obviously the gambler that loses a fortune is more degenerate than the gambler that loses a small amount, but I'm more interested in the story of how it happened. Take the film The Donut King, where (spoilers for a documentary) the Cambodian refugee protagonist comes to America penniless, builds an empire of donut shops, makes millions, only to gamble it all away in Vegas, leaving his family destitute. That's obviously worse in every way than losing $5k on online slots, but it's interesting, it's a great topic for a documentary (Highly recommend the movie, actually, the guy lived at least three fascinating stories in one).
Oh, sure, I'm not saying that degenerate losers are necessarily boring.
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Maybe I'm not a 'substantial person' but 5k would be a pretty painful loss for me. That said: I don't gamble, it's a mug's game.
Thinking about this has made me curious to what percentage of this forum isn't working in a high paying job/career path. I don't think of myself as stupid or even average intelligence but I've geared my life towards what I find rewarding and until I start my own business in this industry I most likely won't be hitting the big time anyone soon.
I make six figures and would hate to lose $5k. Given investment yields etc. that translates to retiring like 2-3 months later which is pretty significant.
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A minority, I think. The forum might lean towards disagreeable, but people who bear with huge chunks of texts and the rules are usually not that dumb. Students, those who failed, maybe a few people who're just lazy or never cared.
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To your last point, I'm a little bit hesitant about going into detail about my specific situation, but I made less than $35,000 last year working full time, and while this year is an anomaly, I probably won't break $15,000 this year.
If I were to land a position in the coming year that paid me $50,000/yr, which I'm hopeful about the prospect of pending an interview here soon, I'd consider that a substantial upgrade from any position I've ever had. I am 30.
I do consider it a major personal failing that I did not pursue a career track more optimized for income over the past decade. I've gotten in on the ground floor of about 4 different lines of work whose skill sets largely do not overlap. This was avoidable, I had the sense to know it the whole time. I have half of a BFA degree from ten years ago, which is almost as embarrassing as it would've been to pay for the whole BFA degree, and exactly as useful. I have several well-developed skills in lines of work that there's not really any good money in in the first place, and have spent many of the last few years committed to working at low wages for small to medium-sized local businesses that I knew very well from the beginning had no capacity for upward mobility or even guaranteed longterm solvency.
I'd say it's the central failure of my life, not to get too dramatic in the Friday Fun Thread. I get by alright, day to day, it could absolutely be worse, and I manage my expenses well enough, but there's certainly no room in my life for supporting a partner or a family the way I would want to be able to do at my age. I may be starting to wrench myself out of the bottom of the trough now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes me another decade to get where my peers are right now, assuming I ever do. I like to think of myself as a relatively capable and intelligent person, but the hard facts of my education choices, employment choices and resulting income over the last ten years could make a pretty solid case that I might actually be stupid.
I guess at least I don't gamble.
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While I am not @FiveHourMarathon and he may feel differently, the part that makes someone utterly disreputable isn't that losing $5K gambling would be a disaster, it's that they would bet $5K that they can't afford to lose.
To be honest though, I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K. Yes, I know, people have various extenuating circumstances and even many of the people that don't have those circumstances are basically decent people even if they're kind of fuckups financially. I am disinclined to treat them as "substantial" if they're 40 and can't afford to buy a nice watch if they wanted to though. Being broke indicates either a lack of ability or interest in earning a decent wage or a severe inability to exercise financial discipline and planning. The latter is worse than the former; someone that makes $200K/year and lives paycheck to paycheck is much more disreputable in my eyes than a guy that just doesn't really have a marketable skill.
Given that you can't think of anything more substantial to spend money on other than baubles and gambling, it's not obvious to me why it's so important to earn a high wage. So you can waste money in a high status way?
I assure you that I have used my income to structure a highly secure life. That an occasional trinket doesn't interfere with anything meaningful is a nice perk of having earned well and invested well.
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This seems unnecessarily condescending, but regardless, I wonder how far you define these boundaries.
I'm in my mid 30s, and while I make a pretty good salary, every dollar I have is basically accounted for and then some. I have no debt outside of my mortgage and I'm not living pay-check-to-paycheck, but the productive things that I want to spend my money on far far outstrips my income, to the point that there's plenty of things I can't 'afford' to spend money on, and a nice watch is actually on that list.
By the time I pay for my kids, their preschool school, put money away for thier future years of Catholic schooling, daily living expenses, pay my bills and mortgage, put money into my 401k and other retirement vehicles, tithe, and put money into the savings account for a smallish home expansion (since I'm priced out of ever moving), yeah I don't even have enough income to put as much into each of those buckets as I would like.
My windows need to be replaced, my roof will need to be attended to eventually, there's some other non-trivial home repair to be addressed, and so forth. I'd like be able to afford to to take my wife out on a date and pay a babysitter more often, my phone and my wife's phones are hopelessly outdated. I wish we could afford to go on the same type of vacations our middle class parents took our families on. Our hand-me-down sectional is on it's last leg. Our water heater ought to be replaced soon. There are several hobbies I'd like to invest in with my kids. None of those things make the budget without taking something out of the above list.
This is not to say I couldn't tighten up my weekly expenses. And I could certainly hand you 5k tomorrow if I needed to without blowing up my life. But, no I can't really justify paying for a $2-3k watch, even though I've been thinking about it for some time.
Am I of no substance to you or @FiveHourMarathon ?
What you just described is someone that doesn't have any trouble coming up with $5K. I don't see how it stands as an example against what I wrote above. The fact that significant amounts of resources are deposited in various savings and investment vehicles stands in stark contrast to the kind of degenerate that had only $5K to their name and spent it all at casinos.
The watch part is just an example. You don't want to because it doesn't make sense (or, at least you don't want to enough to overcome the fact that there's a tradeoff). I'm not critiquing that in any way. I like watches, but watches are a stupid purchase, an expensive toy that doesn't really do anything. My usage in that paragraph is about capacity rather than the actual choice.
No, I suppose it doesn't. You've sufficiently removed my doubt about how I was to interpret your point.
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I would re-read the question at the end of OP:
You state directly that you wouldn't need to blow up your life to afford paying $5,000 in sudden expenses. You're making enough, and spending little enough, that you could find the slack in the system. Which is exactly my point: a man of substance might be stretched thin, but he can come up with the money, it won't break him. Presumably, you'd get into a serious fight with your spouse et al if you bought yourself a Rolex out of nowhere (I would too); but you wouldn't change your name and move across the country. You might write a Wellness Wednesday post about what happened if you lost $5k on a bad bet, but it would all be rather banal for a magazine article ("We had to cut expenses for a few months, buy off-brand more, delay replacing the couch and the water heater, and then we were fine.")
Since you seem to be the perfect example of what I'm talking about, what is the financial loss that would cause you to flee? The point at which you would say, like Springsteen in Atlantic City that "I got the kind of debts that no honest man can pay?"
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Point taken, but im interested in what counts in Walterodims heuristic of 'can afford an expensive watch'. I don't think I could really call myself 'broke', as I have quite a bit in net worth and a positive cash flow. But simultaneously I can't 'afford' an expensive watch, in terms of having several thousand to spend on myself.
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You don't have much respect for people who lack the ability to earn a decent wage? What about a hard-working dad whose wife stays home to take care of young kids and who just doesn't happen to have marketable skills beyond $20-25/hr low-skill labor sorts of jobs? In today's economy, I doubt those wages would be enough to escape living from paycheck to paycheck.
The word "generally" is doing a non-trivial amount of work. Life happens, I can find many examples of respectable people that don't earn much money. Nonetheless, the median broke guy in the United States is not actually a particularly hard worker that's making all the right choices and just can't get ahead.
Okay, I appreciate the clarification. I think we're in agreement after all. As a very frugal person in a single-income household that's struggling financially, I am frequently shocked and disgusted by the spending habits of people who make almost twice as much as my household and have the gall to say they can't afford a setback of a few thousand dollars. Motherfucker, you go on two cruises a year, just bought a pool, and go out to eat twice a week.
It's because of people like that - and I think that describes the median person quite well - that, despite my financial struggles, I am so deeply skeptical of government financial assistance programs.
I just lament that a lot of people, and apparently some commenters around here, seem to struggle to imagine common scenarios where someone could genuinely be making sound decisions all around and still struggle.
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Intellectually? Hell yeah. Intelligence and Income correlate up to the point where one reaches a comfortable middle class existence. Cowen discusses the same study here. Both interpretations are focusing on the question of "Are top 1% earners super-geniuses?"; I'm more focused on the question of what does it take to get one to the $40k-$60k income range.
Returning to your hypo, $25/hr is warehouse worker wages in my area at this point, low-no skill involved, and if one holds down a full time job equates to about $50k/yr; I would respect such a man morally, he may be a good man, but not intellectually, he is unlikely to be a man with great insight into the world in the motte-ian sense. For reference a McDonald's manager nationally will make about $65k on average, ranging up towards $84k, and I know from Chamber of Commerce stuff that a lot of Taco Bell and related franchises are aiming to raise managerial salaries towards $100k. And, for that matter, I doubt a man making $50k/yr would change his name and flee the country to dodge a debt under $10k! Which was the original question.
For myself, I've been in the position of "losing everything" professionally, my career completely derailed and only minimal savings. Within eighteen months I had cobbled together two jobs (neither of which had anything to do with my prior skillset) that combined earned me about $75k/yr. So maybe that perspective tends to give me faith that intelligence and talent will out itself over time.
You don't seem to recognize the incoherence of the implication that everyone can be a manager (who are they managing if everyone is a manager?)
Anyway, I would simply suggest that you keep in mind that many people have struggles and limitations that you seemingly don't/can't even fathom. There are lot of physical and mental health issues that can preclude the life path you're sketching out. But even aside from that, people can get stuck in a subsistence trap that's very hard to break out of.
For example, let's say you're currently employed in a contract job with a temp agency and you want to get a better job. That requires physically going to interviews. But those interviews happen during business hours, when you're working. Your contract gives you no paid time off and you're unable to change your shift schedule to get time off during the day to attend interviews. What are you supposed to do? If you take a day off, that's a couple hundred dollars of foregone wages you simply cannot afford because your cashflow is already razor thin. And realistically you'll have to take a lot of days off to take enough job interviews to finally get accepted somewhere else.
Let's just say I speak from experience.
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This isn't 4chan. If you have something to say, then say it, don't vaguely gesture to it with lazy quoting.
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Perhaps this couple had a higher paying job when the kids were younger but has since been laid off. Perhaps this couple used to be able to afford things but haven't gotten raises despite inflation. Perhaps the female was in her mid 30s and they decided to have kids despite not being financially stable because it was now or never. Should people who don't make enough money be effectively consigned to end their genetic line because you (or the other commenter I was responding to) "don't have much respect" for their decision to have children?
"Financial discipline and planning" includes planning for uncertainty.
Choosing expensive children and a late retirement over cheap living and an early retirement is a valid choice, in the context of the human mind—but calling it a financially-intelligent choice seems a little too much.
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Did you mean to add more to these two comments?
No. The juxtaposition of the two quotes concisely points out that the first quote has already addressed the second quote's concern. It's a convenient convention that I first saw on 4chan.
I don't think it does. It leaves it to the reader to guess what you meant, which isn't usually the practice here, and is one of the reasons I prefer this board to 4chan.
My guess would be you're asserting that having young kids when not already wealthy shows a lack of financial discipline and planning. That seems to be, empirically, a belief of many middle class couples, but the cracks in that strategy have been showing for several decades now.
I think you are being obtuse my man, it's plainly obvious he meant you should get your small children to manage your finances.
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It's not even that. Imagine a guy, with 3 kids, who's wife homeschools, who bought a house in say, 2021, paid a fortune for an old house needing tons of maintainance but locked in at a good rate. The guy could be making 100k+ and is likely still living so tightly that he couldn't imagine buying luxury jewlery for himself or adjusting his budget by 5k without significant pain.
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But it’s not about making a lot of money. You can just walk into a mcD’s, shuffle some fries around for a while, and they will give you the 5k. I don’t understand the drama 5k represents to these people , whether by losing it at the casino, or by having a debt. The only explanation is that their default is to always spend all their money, and therefore the sum represents a ‘deficit’, which they have to compensate by the extremely difficult and painful process of ‘saving’. Their leaky bucket is the problem, not the flow rate of the faucet.
Because of nondiscretionary expenses. If that $5k has to go to food, rent, utilities, healthcare, car insurance, gas, etc., then you're basically just working that McDonald's job to exist and not actually accumulating money you can use to pay off a $5k gambling debt (or, y'know, buy a laptop or a couch or something).
Very few common expenses are truly nondiscretionary. One can easily live on like 8k a year. Most students do it. It does not require one to compromise on health nor on time. Just a bit of superfluous comfort and convenience. People go camping for fun, and that’s way less comfortable. Even the middle class mostly spends money as a status signal. The explosion of the luxury goods industry in recent years reveals how hollow the reason for most purchases are. Just like cima’s million dollar handbags and gladrags, of course they’ll swear up and down that all the stuff makes a difference to their QoL, but it really doesn’t.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a figure of 25 k$/a is the average for a single low-income person. That figure includes 590 $/mo for "shelter" (including mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and rent) and 173 $/mo for "utilities, fuels, and public services". That figure also includes about 5 k$/a of non-essential expenses, but 8 k$/a for total essential expenses seems a bit low.
(Two-person low-income household, consisting of 1.8 adults and 0.2 child: 39 k$/a, including 686 $/mo for "shelter", 280 $/mo for "utilities, fuels, and public services", and 6 k$/a of non-essential expenses)
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I'm fully with you on how most people spend way more on frivolities than they think they do, and that most people living paycheck to paycheck are just spending irresponsibly. But I think you vastly underestimate how expensive nondiscretionary expenses are. Let's just take rent as an illustrative example. Typically people pay 1/3 of their income on housing. At $8k/yr, that's $222/mo. There's no way you're going to be able to spend $222/mo on rent without roommates. Indeed, an income of $8k for a family of four is 1/4 of the federal poverty level.
Your estimation of the expenses of living are so astronomically far from reality that I am a little vicariously embarrassed that you're suggesting them. You seem to act like bills practically don't exist - that a $5k expense is trivial because one can "shuffle fries around for a while, and [McDonald's] will give you the 5k". Frankly, it's like a child's imagination of where income goes ("Woah, you make $5k in a year?!?! Think of all the toys I could get for that!!")
I guess I stayed young at heart. Granted, even the other kindergarteners thought I hated wine and overhead too much. I’ve lived on that budget for years (I also hate work). I didn’t say 8k without roommates, for a family of four. Now that you mention it, people spending too much on their kids and their kids’ “education”(including public education) is also largely pointless and/or status signaling, and imo the main reason why they aren’t having more of them.
The poverty threshold is a relative measure, in practice if not in theory. People complaining about the working poor in the west are complaining that they don’t get to spend as much on status as others, which of course is a zero-sum game.
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Yeah I live on less than 20k a year at the moment and I'm very comfortable. I even eat out occasionally. Frankly I could cut costs a bit more if I wanted too.
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