| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Saturday 20 October 2001: |
| Grarh! It's ranting time. Why is it that seemingly nobody in America, at all, is capable of surviving a single month without a paycheck? I'm pretty sure any of my friends in England could skip a month and still be solvent, and I'm pretty sure that not one of the people I know in America is so secure. The only reason I can see is the irritating culture of eating out as seemingly the staple of social activity. Spending $15 (plus tips) per person on a crappy meal with poor service and screaming brats at the next table, rather than spending maybe $10 for a meal of pasta for four and rental of a movie, and being able to have a conversation that consists of something other than "This food is good" or "This service is awful". Why why why? I don't like seeing my friends in financial straits, and I like even less lending money that I'm not likely to get back. The particular instance in question at the moment is similar to what happened to Kevan a while back - employer running out of money. He was able to slide for several months without pay, without being particularly horrified. The American instance, however, is unable to make rent when her one paycheck is (thus far) said to be delayed. Of course, it would be better if it were impossible for an employer to delay payment for work that's already been done. Take a credit chit, give it to the landlord, you're paid up, your employer now owes your landlord money. That would be nice. And the landlord could spend the money, such that whoever gets the chit gets the debt from the employer. Why should the employee have to go into debt just because their employer is a shit? [12:34] |
| Tom |
| Tom believes himself to be potentially solvent for up to three years without being paid (And yes, I have done calculations on this. Just then actually). Granted, this would quite possibly involve a month of extreme luxury in a five star hotel, followed by 35 months of abject poverty living in a gutter and eating dog food. But it would be a very high class gutter, and would involve the type of dog food that TV chefs salivate about as they carve it into chunks. |
| Kevan |
| I'd have thought it was a general "spending all the money you earn, and buying lots of stuff on credit" thing, rather than specifically meals. I manage to survive by only spending money I've already got (I've got a credit card gathering dust in a drawer, in case I suddenly need to spend lots of money on something important; I've never used it), and cutting back on luxuries if I notice my account balance going down, particularly. Alarm bells start going off if I see that I'm not going to be able to pay the next two-or-three months' rent-and-bills with savings alone. Maybe that's a dot-com-employer thing, though. Or a pessimist anti-materialist misanthrope thing. But I'm not sure I'd want to live under a landlord who was being as angry as I am about trying to get x-thousand pounds out of my previous employer. Particularly when that landlord might have other, easier tenants he could replace me with. |
| paul |
| I'm on far more than the national average wage, yet I'm utterly hand-to-mouth; I have no savings, and every penny I earn (and a bit more than that) disappears each month. Why? Because I live in London, and everything is twice as expensive as it really should be, and I am also paying off 6k of debt accrued through university, etc as fast as I can. Just *existing* costs a fortune in this city. |