Sickness and Health – Rich vs. Poor

Rich vs. Poor Series

Sickness

Rich: Sickness is a normal part of life, acceptable, tolerable.  Sickness is met with compassion, care, attention, and medicine–whatever is necessary for recovery.  You have health care, you have access to doctors, you have knowledge of health.  People want you to live.

Poor: You are not allowed to get sick.  You are paid per hour or per job, and every day you are sick, you are missing income.   This may cause you to become homeless because you are working paycheck to paycheck.  Sickness is met with punishment, cruelty, capitalism (bills don’t care, creditors don’t care, your boss doesn’t care, teachers will not stop the curriculum for you), you feel deep shame to burden your family with your sickness, if you’re even lucky enough to have family members who don’t tell you to shut up and deal with it like everyone else does.  With each passing day, your debt grows while your income remains zero. You’re digging a hole in what is already the deep hole of your life. Capitalism wants you to die–you are a plague upon society, as are all social welfare cases, a burden for the rich and powerful, for the system: a leech.  There are too many mouths to feed, not enough money to pay for your life.  [Ironic since we have enough food to feed everyone, but I’ll write a separate article for social commentary]

Health

Rich: Life is about being healthy.  Your quality of life is higher, your idea of health is better than that of a poor person.

Poor: Life is about survival.  If you’re not dead, you’re healthy.  Shut up and deal with it–whatever pain and suffering you have, you can adapt, you can endure it, you must, or you die.  You think because you survived it once, you can survive it again (starvation hunger dehydration exhaustion). If you haven’t died yet, you must be healthy.  It’s a question of survival, not of how healthy you are: the fact that you are alive, puts you ahead of those who are dead.  Because you have experienced a much wider range of health, you are less scared of variations in your health than a rich person whose health stays within a stable range.  Whatever sickness symptoms would sound off alarms to a person accustomed to good health, to a poor person means nothing: you’ve lived through it before and survived.  If it hasn’t killed you before, it is survivable: deal with it.  What matters is surviving at all: health is for when you’re successful and deserve it, for the rich people.

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

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Paths to Wealth, Socioeconomic Mobility in America

Life Education

Path 1: Invest in Education

Back of Envelope Investment Profile of Education, using data from links above.  Retirement age is 67 for those born after 1960.

Education Amount to Invest Calculation Lifetime Earnings Calculation
High School Dropout 74k-146k [Raise an 14-18 year old] + school costs $1,225,000 to $1,325,000 (67-18 or 67-14 = 53 or 49)*25k
High School Degree 94k-241k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs $1,666,000 (67-18 = 49)*34k
Some College 150k-320k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + some college tuition + some college living expenses $1,786,000 to $1,824,000 (67-19 or 67-20 = 48 or 47)*38k
Associates Degree 180k-380k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + 2 years college tuition, expenses, living expenses $1,927,000 (67-20 = 47)*41k
Bachelor’s Degree 240k-490k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + 4 years college tuition, expenses, living expenses $2,497,500 (67-22 = 45)*55.5k
Master’s Degree 300k-600k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + 4 years college tuition, expenses, living expenses + 2 years master’s tuition, expenses, living expenses $2,924,000 (67-24 = 43)*68k
Professional Degree 300k-720k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + 4 years college tuition, expenses, living expenses + 1 to 3 years professional school tuition, expenses, living expenses $3,780,000 to $3,960,000 (67-23 or 67-25 = 44 or 42)*90k
Doctorate Degree 350k-700k [Raise an 18 year old] + school costs + 4 years college tuition, expenses, living expenses + 4 to 8 years doctorate school tuition, expenses, living expenses. $3,295,500 to $3,464,500 (67-26 or 67-28)*84.5k

*For the calculations above, I used the lower end (94k) of estimates of raising an 18 year old for people who dropped out of high school, and I slowly raised that estimate to 180k for people who pursued post-graduate degrees, since I believe the chances that someone pursues a higher degree is tied to their initial socioeconomic status: if the parents could invest a lot in them early on, they will probably get a more advanced degree than if the parents did not.  (To be done later: Can anyone recommend good software to make this into a info-graphic/chart/diagram? I will add probability distributions to each path’s potential earnings, as right now it’s based on averages, and I will further break down costs based on income brackets, and show it’s affect on the success probability distribution)

Path 2: Invest in Investments

  • Live below your means, and invest your accrued savings in assets you can afford.
  • Unavailable option to those who barely survive

Invest in Career Earning Potential

  • Work hard to get recognized and handed more responsibilities.  Leverage position and skills for a promotion at the same company or a different one. Networking critical.
  • Unavailable option for many careers–must avoid dead-end jobs.

Path 3: Invest in Creative Hobbies

  • Put in your 10,000 hours to develop a unique skill, apply Networking and hope someone, possibly yourself, finds a monetization strategy for it.
  • High likelihood of no payoff.

Paths to Poverty: Invest in Consumer Hobbies

  • Consume content, entertainment, products.  Invest in little to nothing.

Capitalism awards investors, and punishes consumers.  On the surface, capitalism promotes consumerism as a means to achieving happiness, behind the scenes, capitalism consists of delayed gratification and intelligent investing to maximize lifetime consumption as measured by monetary value.

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.  Look under “Understanding Life in America”

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Perception of Money – Rich vs. Poor

Rich vs. Poor Series

The poor mindset:

You do not have a stable income.  You do not have a stable job.  You have little control over your life so life is chaotic and inconsistent.  You do not have stable expenses: you can’t afford the risk associated with committing to memberships or healthcare due to inconsistent income, so you pay a-la-carte for everything.

Your income range has a consistent max, your expenses do not have a consistent max.  Consequently, every dollar in has a unique significance: you don’t know when the next dollar will come in, and you don’t know when this dollar will be forcefully taken.  The fear of being wiped out by an unexpected high expense keeps you deeply afraid to spend.  Money is life threatening to you.

Friends, Family? You either don’t have them, or they aren’t wealthy enough to help you anyway.

You are probably in debt, which means that you never feel like you have earned, or have ever possessed, money that is your own.  You never forget it is owed to a debtor.  This affects your sense of security, as you fear defaulting on your debt, and on friendships, because it’s hard to justify money spent on yourself, happiness, gifts, friendships, or anything at all really, when it needs to be paid to a debtor.

The rich mindset:

You have a stable income. You have a stable job. Your manager may dictate your work life, but you have the expendable income to manage some amount of your free time.  You probably can afford memberships or healthcare, meaning you benefit from both the lower price associated with membership (paying less and getting more value) and from the peace of mind of knowing that your expenses will have a known maximum stated within the contract.

Because you don’t spend a-la-carte, your mental and emotional health is not fatigued by repetitive decisions of spend or not spend: the automatic monthly bill makes that decision for you.  Furthermore, while you might stress about not having enough money to do what you want, you have less worry about not having enough money to live at all.  Money is not life threatening to you.

Friends, Family–you might have them, and they may be able to help you in times of trouble.

 

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

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