this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
1375 points (97.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
5837 readers
1826 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay but they can easily invest 2/3rds of that for a decade and then live off the dividends. That's not middle class or working class.
For that amount of money, they'd be lucky to get a couple hundred in dividends each month. I used to work for a company that gave dividends, and their reasoning for laying people off instead of touching the dividend was that a lot of people relied on the dividend to make ends meet.
A coworker of mine did the math, and you'd need to have millions invested in the stock to get a dividend you could actually live on. The fact of the matter is that working class goes up to over 1 million. You have to be born rich or be an immoral businessman like Gates or Bezos to live off just investments.
Even a lot of celebrities don't qualify! You had John Boyega protesting with people because even most actors aren't that rich. It's why Hollywood tends liberal instead of conservative.
Then your coworker fucked up the math. Once you get about 1.8M in stocks you can get around 80k in dividends. 200,000 a year (2/3rds a 300,000 take home) would reach 1.8M in about 9 years.
This is how people retire in their late 30's (or earlier if they got handed that kind of pay via nepotism/networking)
Getting a million dollars a year and calling yourself working class is fucking ridiculous. At that point you have so much access to assets that if you don't create a self sustaining income it's nobody's fault but your own.
Our company has a 3.88% dividend rate, and when things were okay and stock price was like $60. That's $2.328 annually from one stock when things are mediocre, and at the time, it was worse than mediocre. For that annual dividend, you'd need to own roughly 34.4k stock, or $2M worth, to make $80k a year.
Your math on take home pay doesn't check out. Someone making $300k is looking at like $60k in income tax, plus $60k in housing if they follow the 20%ish rule there. If they're making $300k they're probably in a high cost of living area, so food and gas and electricity are going to add up too, not to mention insurance. If they're lucky, they'll put away $100k, tops, but only after their savings cover 3 months of expenses. Long story short, they might have enough for $80k a year after 20 years of intense saving from a $300k a year job. They'll probably need closer to $150k, frankly
My coworkers and I were upper middle class at $100k or so a year, and I lived significantly below my means. I was able to put away roughly 40k a year at best. It would've taken me 50 years to buy enough stock.
If you're making $300k a year single, you're almost definitely not able to put $200k away into investments each year unless you have significant expenses covered through other means.
I don't have to invest in your company dude. And assuming we're not talking about take home pay in general finance stuff is just ridiculous.
If you want to talk about 300k before taxes though then let's do that. Your take home will be around 182k in California, (more in other states). You can easily live off 70k, leaving 110k for early retirement savings. So it takes about 18 years instead of about 10 years with a 300k take home.
The biggest mistake people make is living larger instead of saving larger.
I agree on your last point. I still think though 70k is way too low an estimate, especially for California.
Rent for a two bedroom close to the coast is 36k. It just gets cheaper from there as you move away from downtown/coastal areas. That leaves you with 34k for food, utilities, healthcare, and car payment. There's about 5,000 left over for incidentals at that point. It's tight but it's certainly doable.