Im one bad week away from being homeless and several long, gueling years away from being a hundred-thousandaire
Well, I’M okay. I’m at least four bad months away from homeless so no sense planning to change the system any.
If I was in the USA, I’d be 6 months. But I live in Spain, so I’m 13 months but a whole lot less worried.
In the Netherlands you get the unemployment support depending on how long you worked. So if you worked at least 108 hours in year 1, you get 3 months. By about 8 years+ it’s 2 years.
Unfortunately though the conservative liberal party wants to abolish that and make even more people suffer than Covid already did.
But yeah, assuming the minimum, it’d be about 1.5 years for me, with maximum maybe about 3 years.
Being “a millionaire” is outdated. There are plenty of people who are both millionaires and working class. Because the US doesn’t do pensions anymore, people have to invest in 401(k)s and the like. It’s pretty likely that someone can hit $1m through a combination of a retirement fund and a house, but still be working class. In fact, you can be a millionaire on paper but still be vulnerable to homelessness, especially if you’re at an age where you can no longer work.
It’s certainly possible to retire on $1m, but it’s not going to be a lavish lifestyle if you’re playing it safe with your retirement fund. If you want to live near family, or if you have any medical issues, or if you might need to support someone else, it might really be impossible to retire with only $1m.
Agreed. I’m actually pretty close to being a millionaire “on paper,” since my house is worth $600k and I’ve got about $100k in retirement. But the house is mortgaged, and I can’t touch the retirement for another 25 years. If I had three very good months, I could probably just barely become a millionaire. But if I had three moderately bad months, I would likely default on my mortgage.
Replace the "m"s with "b"s in the OP, and this is spot on.
Edit: no, not “bonths.” Y’all know what I mean.
If your house is mortgaged, you would have to subtract that mortgage from the calculation, would you not?
Rich people ignore their debt when making their wealth calculations all the time. I’m just following suit.
That’s not how net worth works…
If you have a mortgage, that offsets it and your net worth would only include the equity you hold.
Rich people do that sort of funny math all the time when stating their wealth, though. It’s all fake and made up.
Being hobeless?
Oof, allergy season, eh? I get it.
Hobosexual, when you partner up for the housing situation rather than for romance/love.
That’s a fantastic word. I’ll take that, thank you.
If your $600k house isn’t paid off yet, you don’t get to count its full value towards your net worth, so you might not be as close to $1m as you say. If it is fully paid off, then you shouldn’t have a mortgage to worry about.
But, 3 really bad months could mean a tree fell on your fully paid-off house. It could mean a family member without good health insurance has a medical emergency and you feel like you have to help pay.
It just seems to me that something like $10m makes John Rogers’ point much better. If this is a class war, $1 million dollar millionaires really are in the same class as anybody else who works. I don’t know quite where the dividing line is. Clearly billionaires are in a whole different class. Same with $100m-aires. $10m is almost certainly set for life. What about $3m? $2m? Maybe age comes into it. How long do you have to make it last, and can you still find a job if you need one? $1m net worth at 25 is different from $1m at 65. $1m at 90 probably puts you back in the “set for life” camp, just because “life” is not likely to last much longer.
Yeah, we poor folks would have to do that, but rich people live on fractional reserve income and stuff, and they never subtract their liabilities from their assets when reporting their wealth. I’m okay with fudging the numbers for the point.
Definitely agree that $10m is the new bar for this.
A millionaire is still never have to work again money. Its not life of luxury never working again, but its easily a comfortable life of never working again. £500k or so is probably roughly the starting point of never work again but living very frugally.
The fact you’re using pounds instead of dollars says you’re probably talking about having 1 million pounds and living in the UK rather than the US.
1 million pounds is still a lot more than 1 million dollars, despite Brexit. In addition, if you live in the UK you’re covered by the NHS so none of your million has to go towards health care / health insurance. The cost of living is also lower in the UK than the US. So, as long as you don’t try to live in London you can get by with a lot less money.
The point is, John Rogers was trying to draw a distinction between two extremes. On one end you’re homeless and extremely desperate. On the other end, you’re a millionaire and are set for life. At this point, $1m USD in the USA really isn’t “set for life” anymore. Someone hitting age 65 with no pension and a total net worth of $1m is really still in the same “class” as the people who work 9-5 every day. They shop in the same stores, have to budget very carefully, worry about the price of gas, etc.
Rule of thumb for a retirement portfolio is to withdraw 4% per year. 4% of $1M is $40k. People survive on 40k/year, but you’d be considered pretty low income in most areas.
Big point being that in the US we have many cost of living expenses that the UK does not (or rather, you get it via your taxes)
There are almost 24M millionaires in the US alone. A millionaire in 2026 honestly isn’t all that impressive anymore, thanks to inflation. I’m not saying we should feel sorry for them, just that it’s not the instant easy classification that it used to be.
As for billionaires, those should not exist, IMHO. A billionaire is a symptom of a broken economy, not a worthy goal.
Edit: fixed a typo.
Assuming we continue under neobliberalism, eventually those billionaires will become trillionares too.
Or a simple currency re-structure could turn those billionaires back into millionaires overnight without changing their relative wealth at all.
Focusing in the word “billionaire” was, in my opinion, a messaging mistake. I always preferred 1% because it scales, though 0.1% or 0.01% might be better.
A good concept to pass around is contrived desperation or manufactured desperation. The notion that desperation circumstances like the affordability crisis are intentionally developed by the ownership class so that workers will accept low wages, poor benefits, harsh conditions and abuse by their management and colleagues.
An extreme fictional example is in the TV series Squid Game. The players quit in the opening episode after they learn that the stakes of the game are their own lives, and only one final player would survive. But then (in the second ep) they return to their prior lives in which their financial situation is so dire, it compels them to return to the game.
The Epstein child sex ring is a strong non-fictional example of contrived desperation. The girls under Epstein’s employ quickly learned they were being groomed to be sexually exploited. But they were drawn from communities that offered few opportunities.¹ Girls quickly learned that they could escape their dire circumstances at home so long as they agreed to play ball, and be complicit in their own sexual exploitation.
We’re seeing another example in the US armed forces. All branches are achieving their recruitment quotas. Despite the news of the dire circumstances of the Abraham Lincoln. Despite that the military is deployed in an active theater. Despite that rates of abuse of enlisteds, especially of women, has only escalated since Hegseth’s tenure as SoD and his warrior ethos. Despite that the US is considering putting boots on the ground in Iran and Cuba.
And that’s because a growing number of people are finding they have no other opportunities to stay above water. People are going into credit-card debt and skipping meals, and working 40+ hours a week. They are three very bad months away from being homeless already, and their numbers are growing.
When the ownership class is sufficiently removed from the working class, it loses touch, and stops empathizing, and then starts contriving desperation to get workers to stay in their place. Unions can be an effective countermeasure, though they are often busted by the political class and the police.
¹ Epstein’s early victims were girls from post-Soviet Russia. During the collapse, the most popular career for young women was wage prostitute and children in the streets offering sexual favors for money were commonplace. It was an entire failing nation of desperate teenage girls.
That’s a lot of words, and in Idiocracy, they have a word to use.
I appreciate this well-articulated argument, though.
I honestly think the poor understanding of math is to blame for a lot of our problems. People don’t understand exactly how massive a billion dollars are, they don’t understand probability so they play the lottery. Most people get visibily angry when I’ve explained exactly how much money the Epstein class is hoarding.
If you counted 1 second every second until you reached 1 million it would be something like 11 days… if you kept counting like that until you reached 1 billion it would take you something like 32 years. If you were to CONTINUE COUNTING like that until you reached 1 trillion, over 31,500 years would have passed. Nobody needs a Trillion dollars. Hell nobody needs a billion. To defend billionaires is to defend the dragon pillaging your cities.
Nuh-uh. I have an uncle who lives two doors down from a lady whose nail stylist’s daughter’s teacher just won 10 million dollars from a scratch off lottery ticket.
Congrats to that teacher, but random events with astronomically low odds don’t refute everyday reality. The vast majority of people are a lot closer to poverty than they’ll ever be to financial independence.
See how many draws it would take for you to win!
You can’t count on luck, and I expect that $10 million to evaporate in less than a year. It usually does.
All but $4 million of it evaporated before it actually hit her account. But also, this was hyperbole.
I don’t love how we as a capitalist society have financialized everything into economic terms.
I’m rich now, but I grew up lower middle class (had food security and shelter security, but many aspects of middle class lifestyle were out of my family’s reach, like being able to dine at restaurants or go out of town for vacation or afford most of the things or experiences advertised on tv). I was also fairly financially insecure in college and the few years after (playing games with back dated checks to make rent or pay bills, lots of late fees and overdraft fees).
Even in those relatively insecure times, though, I was never anywhere close to 3 (or 6 or 12) months away from homelessness. I had a strong network of friends, family, neighbors, etc., who could keep me on my feet. Some of it was money (where people could chip in to help with an uninsured medical expense or loss to a car or a house), but a lot of it was social, like being able to get a ride from a friend when your car is in the shop, a meal train while someone is sick/hospitalized or bereaving the loss of a family member, etc.
By steering the discussion into purely what can be bought and sold with money in an economy between strangers, I feel like this misses out on what actually makes us secure, and what keeps us from homelessness and food insecurity. Those parts of society should also be protected and bolstered, even if they don’t fit cleanly into financial, economic, political, or policy categories.
It also misses who among us are actually the most vulnerable or the most secure. There may be people who have solid net worths on paper but aren’t actually resilient against bad months, and other people who might not look like they have much property/wealth/income but actually can manage a crisis just fine.
If your target audience consists of people who already agree with the basic economic principle, then by all means, add as much nuance as you like.
If your target audience is a single, white, cis male, 55k per year salary-making, apartment-renting, roommate-having, college dropout normie, then maybe a simpler distinction will be more effective?
That second paragraph of distinction is more clear
Depends on what the purpose is. In this thread we have people who very legitimately feel that despite literally being closer to millionaires than homeless on this “three months” test, they don’t feel financially secure. That feeling matters, and we shouldn’t ignore it.
And my point is that implicitly conceding ground by framing things in the language of emotionless finance and economics may actually be fighting things on less friendly territory to begin with.
implicitly conceding ground by framing things in the language of emotionless finance and economics
Your mileage may vary, but I do not consider this a concession. Anyone can make an emotional argument. You usually need to actually be right in order to make an emotionless academic argument.
may actually be fighting things on less friendly territory to begin with.
When it comes to arguing for the claim being discussed… whether you’re closer to homelessness or being a millionaire (the three month thing is incidental to the main point)… then whether these disciplines are friendly territory pretty much boils down to whether you can explain it or not.
Your mileage may vary, but I do not consider this a concession. Anyone can make an emotional argument.
No, I’m not making an emotional argument. I’m arguing that the subjective feeling of financial security specifically traces to certain hard-to-measure factors that aren’t easily reduced to quantitative metrics.
That’s why many people will look at the argument and say “oh I’m actually not that close to homelessness” or even “I’m basically a millionaire but I don’t feel like one.”
By highlighting the easy-to-measure metrics (net worth of a million dollars, not having a legal right to occupy a residence), it steers the discussion into the quantitatively easy metrics rather than the lived reality of people in the economy, which depends on other less quantitative factors. And then we’re talking about “winning” an argument that no longer cleanly maps onto what actually matters.
No, I’m not making an emotional argument.
Perhaps not, but you indicated that the “emotionless language of finance and economics” constitues “conceding ground”.
If you’re not making an emotional argument, then why would emotionless language be a problem? If we have no intention of making emotional arguments, why would we be conceding ground by focusing on “emotionless” disciplines?
And then we’re talking about “winning” an argument that no longer cleanly maps onto what actually matters.
I entered this conversation by specifying a target audience. In the same capacity, “winning” depends on who you’re talking to, as does the mappability of the argument onto real life.
If someone already agrees with the same basic principles you do, you can just talk, and they’ll believe you, because people aren’t skeptical of people they agree with.
But I’m not always having a discussion with someone who shares most of my fundamental beliefs. That’s simply not a situation where nuance matters. Just getting them to understand a single basic principle that they disagree with is already hard enough.
Perhaps not, but you indicated that the “emotionless language of finance and economics” constitues “conceding ground”.
If you’re not making an emotional argument, then why would emotionless language be a problem?
I think it is reductive to ignore/deemphasize the factors that cannot easily be quantified, in favor of only talking about the quantifiable factors. The subjective feeling of the people involved is backed by real factors, albeit factors that are difficult to quantify.
So shifting the discussion towards that rigid quantitative numbers is shifting away from where the conversation should be. That’s been my point this whole thread.
So shifting the discussion towards that rigid quantitative numbers is shifting away from where the conversation should be. That’s been my point this whole thread.
You’re implicitly assuming that there’s one place that this conversation should be. MY point this whole thread has been that “where the conversation should be” depends on your audience. To repeat myself, “if your target audience consists of people who already agree with the basic economic principle, then by all means, add as much nuance as you like.” That’s a situation in which you can have “where the conversation should be” wherever you please.
But if someone disagrees with you, and if your goal is to be persuasive, you need more than just being right. OP is not about the pure distillation of facts. OP is about how to be persuasive. And he’s right. That IS something that can be persuasive.
This won’t work on boomers. A lot of them have a property or two with a good amount of equity. My dad for example has a home with 700k+ equity and millions in investments. Granted he’s more responsible than most boomers and we weren’t wealthy during my childhood.
Because of that whole exponential thing, millionaires and ten-millionaires are actually closer to the rest of us working class folk than they are their billionaire owner-class brethren.
And this is going to be important when the ultra-wealthy decide to reveal their less-rich near-peers aren’t actually in the oligarchs club, and don’t get to live in Thiel’s Rapture-style hypercities with the real people.
That’s true, but if you have $10m, you can live off the “work” your money does for the rest of your life. If you have decent, conservative financial planning, you are in no danger of homelessness no matter how bad 3 months are.
Billionaires are today’s emperors, but someone with $10m is at least a member of the aristocracy and is living off the labour of others, rather than having to live off their own work.
The problem with being at the bottom of the second estate is that the ones at the top are entirely cutthroat and exclusionist. As Corey Doctorow notes, the owner class thinks there’s just too many people, hence the AI fantasy of automating all the peasant and middle-class work. (Both the first and third estates.) But they also think the owner class itself is too populous.
It may be a while before the goon squads get down the purge list to come for the Thromby level plutocrats, but they are on the list.
The ultra-wealthy are also greedy AF. There’s a story about when Carnegie figured out that J.P. Morgan would totally knife him if it meant getting his assets. He stopped associating with Morgan soon after. People like Thiel, Bezos and Musk have revealed themselves to the public to show they are exactly that level of ruthless.
You know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About one billion dollars.
But yeah, like the other commenter said: $10m puts you WELL outside of working class. That’s enough to retire on anywhere on the world, and with a high degree of luxury outside of a handful of the most expensive cities. That money, invested by anybody with half a brain, will make enough money per year than many extremely skilled professions make. We’re talking doctor salary without doing any actual work. They’re not buying senators wholesale like billionaires, but their house rep probably knows them by name.
Larry Lessig made this point, that the people who get representation are the ones who donate the maximum allowable direct donation to their campaign. (Even that is peanuts compared to super-PAC money and dark money, but it’s worthy of an annual Christmas card, and even a fruit basket.)
The difference is that you still need half a brain. This is the 1970s George Lucas level, where he still has to listen to experts or (in the case of ESB hire experts to direct his movie for him). In fact, a note to boards of directors everywhere, this is where you want your C-Suite to be and stay, so that they use data-driven science to determine their management policies, which will maximize profits. Contrast our vindictive tech billionaires whose hiring and firing practice is brain-draining their own companies, and wrecking the entry-level job market which is where they would glean their future expertise. (Sorry. This is a specific rant of mine.)
Once you get sufficiently rich (a billion will more than qualify) then you make money whether or not you do anything, and, as Zuckerberg and George W. Bush have demonstrated, you can do an awful lot of stupid and still fail upwards.
Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter how many good months you have. You’re still 3 months out.
Sure, but many people who aren’t really grappling with where they are in class struggle will still see that and believe it makes intuitive sense because of some aggrieved entitlement. Lemmy is a great platform to find people who know some element of socialist or Marxist politics, but then think the problem is “oligarchs” who are just exceptionally naughty and greedy and not like, a system that produces food and fabrics for insanely cheap and specifically to their benefit.
Jokes on you, I am the monopoly man
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.
Your order of magnitude is off. Days, not months. I’ve already had 2 and a half of my bad months. Whee!
Ngl, love to hear hard times for people I have tagged as being bad people. 🥰 just a fortnight more. I believe you can do it!
Very relatable perspective!
