I heard a caller from NPR said he has a household income of $100,000 with 3 kids, and cannot even afford health insurance for his family now, which would cost him $20,000 a year.
Did the person laugh out loud when the caller said this? I carry my own health insurance for myself and my husband. It costs $4000/year with a 500 deductible/80/20 copay and maximum out of pocket of $2500/per year and we're both close to 50 years old. Take a younger couple, add in three kids and you have a similar policy that costs twice as much, 8K. Raise the deductible and you can get a lot lower than that. If someone is paying 20k a year for five people then what they are doing is what I call a dollar swap. They are paying up front for care that they may or may not get. The total cost of the care would be far less then the premiums paid out over years. I have never in the 20 years I've had my own insurance ever reached my maximum out of pocket in any given year. Out of the 20 years I've only ever reached my deductible once, my husband once as well.
A person from a family with a household income of $15,000 in $70's now has his own household income of $100,000 might think he is "Rich", but is he???
They may not be "rich" but they sure as hell aren't poor. I've never made that much (although my business has pulled down in excess many times, I net out considerably lower), the two of us together don't make that much, yet I'm quite well off even by the income and net worth percentages. I am, primarily because I've always saved and invested what I made and so has my husband and I've always lived below my means. I'm not the top 1% and I don't aspire to be. I've had a few clients that were in the top 1% and I have to tell you it's not all it's cracked up to be. Why else would you have all those lottery winners whose lives were ruined by winning so much money?
I have a client who was married to a billionaire (a real one, not one of those optionaires) and she died of a misdiagnosed lung condition. One would think that a billionaire's wife could actually afford the absolute best medical care possible and I can assure you she paid for it...but she died needlessly anyway. She wasn't any happier than I am, in fact I'd say she was less happy. She told me as much.
This is why I think it's a dumb question, most people don't realize just how miserable that much money makes people. What you want to really know is not whether people can get into the top 1%, but can they, through their own effort, move up to the middle class? There is something seriously wrong with someone who feels poor making 100k and it has nothing to do with the cost of healthcare or how many kids they have. It's in their heads and it's what they choose to do with their money. They need to make better choices, ones that improve their lives rather than trying to fill them up with a bunch of stuff.
There is tremendous mobility in this country. For someone to stay in abject poverty takes real effort or terrible luck. I had a guy who only worked part time for me, he made about 22k a year. He used to save about 5k a year and he didn't live with his parents, he had health care. No car, but he wasn't what anyone would call destitute.
I've spent a lot of time working with the terminally poor and I can tell you that they really have to make mistake after mistake to stay there. People who don't have decent food for their kids but they pay the cable company 100 bucks a month, or own a car that sells for 25k when they make that much in yearly salary. Or someone who says they can't save to buy a house but spends 100 dollars a week on cigarettes and alcohol. I had a cleaning lady who made about 60-100 dollars a day and then she'd spend 20 a day on the lottery, sometimes twice a day. Think about saving 20 dollars a day every day, apply the power of compound interest to it over twenty or thirty years and see where she'd be.
They always think they are doing everything they can, but when you examine their lives you find lots of really destructive behaviors. Amazingly enough once you convince them to get into 12 step programs a lot of their problems disappear. |
