Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?

In my experience, it’s not a choice they’ve made. Some people are bad with money, to be sure. I’m related to a few. But they don’t typically just decide they’re going to blow August’s grocery budget on a new wardrobe; they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills. Some bad choices, some unavoidable occurrences, some terrible luck, but nothing that crosses the line to them being frivolous.

Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.

I don’t live a whole lot different than my parents did then. We have more kids than they did, but I’m in a higher earning potential career than he was. Plus, my wife and I are both employed. Yet if either of us were laid off, we would not last long on savings.

One thing I’ve learned as I get older: yeah, people are irresponsible. But the generations are pretty much the same, and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way to get clicks on your article but a bad way to actually get any meaningful insight about people. So if our generation is having more widespread problems than our parents’ generation did at this age, it’s probably not because we aren’t as responsible as they are. Something systemic probably changed.

not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc).

It’s easy to say “stabilize your finances!” but on a practical level it’s almost impossible to do when there’s no wiggle room. You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month. It’s not like there’s any money to be put into savings if you’re making $2,000 a month but putting $1,000 toward rent, since most people rather like to eat.

I’m thankful to not be in that situation, personally, but it’s not something you can just wish your way out of. Even your examples require a certain level of financial breathing room that people don’t tend to have when every dollar is spoken for. You can’t finance a truck if your DTI is already high. You can’t take CDL training or night school if you have to work two jobs just to keep food on the table.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.

But if you get into that scenario, you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever. That’s not really an option for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is,

I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.

At the end of the day, irresponsibility with money is still a problem for sure. And keeping-up-with-the-joneses is probably a problem for some people. I’m not one of them, and none of the people I know are either, but I suppose some people have that issue. In my experience, though, most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations. They’re just trying to keep their heads above water.

I disagree strongly that $1k is enough for any one emergency. My healthcare deductible is higher than that. The last two times I’ve needed car repairs, the bill was $2-3k to get the thing back on the road. If one of our appliances breaks down, we might be able to replace it for $1,000 if it’s the dryer or the dishwasher, but if it’s the fridge, that’s not close to enough.

$1,000 was plenty when I was in college back in the mid-00s, but I was single with no kids. That’s just not a realistic emergency fund in 2024, and even less so if you have a family.

Honestly, what you see isn’t familiar to me at all. The people I know are very good at being frugal and wringing the last out of every dime, not being extravagant or frivolous, etc. We have no car payment on our ten-year-old minivan, own our home, and haven’t been clothes shopping in years except to replace things that wear out, that sort of thing.

The problem isn’t budgeting; we have a budget, and we stick to it pretty well. There are very few things we could cut, and doing so might save us a hundred or so dollars per month. The problem is that inflation has eaten up every dollar from my paycheck we used to have in surplus. The problem is that my salary hasn’t kept up with inflation and nobody else around here is hiring.

Yes, you can budget yourself from the top of one financial class into the bottom of another one; and you can manage money poorly enough to drop from anywhere to the bottom of the heap. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant financial crunch happening for most people in the world right now.

Seems like everyone has their own preferred explanation as to why that’s happening (corporate greed vs. government overreach), but the fact that it’s happening seems pretty clear.

For sure, but like…I’m a middle-aged software engineer in a low cost-of-living area. My parents always had enough on one income, but we’re struggling on two.

We’re very much NOT upper class.

I kinda think that not being strapped for cash is being upper-class.

Upper-class: Always having enough

Middle-class: Always having almost enough

Lower-class: Never having enough

Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash.

Whoa. What group do you run in? Literally everyone I talk to on a daily basis is.

I actually just thought through an average day, and the people I talk to regularly. I’ve had conversations with each and every one of them over the past few months about how we’ve had to make major changes to our lifestyles in one way or another because the money is going out faster than it’s coming in. We’re all solidly middle-class, for whatever that means anymore.

So what circles are you in where not everyone is looking for every possible discount they can get? Saving $5 on groceries means I can afford another gallon and a half of gas. I can’t afford to be principled about privacy when those are the stakes. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Sure, though it’s not something that anyone is likely to switch OSes for.

Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.

Yep. The “always open in container tab” gets a little fidgety because Reddit uses a whole bunch of different domains (some of which it only flips to for an instant while redirecting elsewhere), so it takes a bit of work, but I’ve been able to successfully silo off Reddit, Xwitter, Meta, etc. into their own distinct containers that are independent of everything else I do.

I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.

No doubt, but I don’t have that kind of cash to burn on the aesthetics.

Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.

Hosting and maintaining an application actually has some pretty non-trivial cost associated with it. If it’s half of revenue, then MKBHD actually isn’t taking very much at all.

I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.

I’m not brave enough to use my phone without a case, because I know I’ll drop it. Either you’re braver than me, richer than me, or you have better grip than me.

Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure.

50% of the revenue or 50% of the profit? Because if they’re paying the artists first and footing the bill for hosting the app out of the other 50%, that’s a pretty good deal.

There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

Im not rich and I use my phone without a case

I guess you could also have fairly sticky hands.

and watch some of those reviews.

Yeah, sometimes I do too, if only for the novelty of it. But they’re certainly not for us.

The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.

Citation needed. Do you have any data on the app’s profit share structure? Because at the price they’re charging, if they’re passing on a decent share of it to the artists, it sounds like it’s not a bad gig.

There’s also this infamous story. And also this one. I recognize that anecdote is not the singular of data, but there’s a pretty substantial paper trail on Fiverr.

Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).

I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.

Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.

They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don’t lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.

And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and rent seeking software subscriptions are a scourge.

But I think they’re just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don’t think it’s possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore, not because they’re dumb, but because the good decisions literally don’t exist. It’s like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward “devastatingly bad.” They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry’s sake and for their own.

Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I’m not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).

If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn’t super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe that’s all become web-based.

Yeah, I still use it too, almost weekly.