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I'm realistically in the situation OP is trying to get at. I'm making over $30/hr, I've been in my career a few years. I pay $1500 towards my housing expenses each month (rent/mortgage, electricity, heat, etc). I pay something like $500 in insurance between my vehicle and home, probably a bit less... My debt repayments are well over $1000/month. I pay $100 each for my cellphone and internet....
I have a slew of other expenses I can't really enumerate. When I factor in food and gasoline, etc, I basically have no money left. I might have $200 left each month if I'm very thrifty with food.
You know what I'm doing? I'm in the process of getting my finances into a system that can help me visualize the spending and plan for my month over month budgeting. I'm trying to find where I can find costs I don't need, and cut costs where I can. My work requires me to have a car, and while my vehicle is older, it works great and is pretty good on gas; best of all, I've paid off my car. I'm trying to dig myself out of this situation I'm in, and get in the black eventually. I'm tired of worrying about debt, which I've been in for nearly 20 years, in some way, shape or form.
I use ynab (you need a budget) to try and help me out. Emphasis on try.
Solid suggestion. I'm trying to get up and running with something a bit more involved. Right now I'm standing up a firefly III system for myself; I have to stand up an add-on to import data. Still gotta figure out some particulars.
It's self hosted FOSS, which bluntly, I trust more than anything else. I'm certainly not paying what some companies think their budgeting software is worth on a subscription just to do my personal finance.
EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not knocking the price of ynab here, I'm more specifically talking about something like quicken, which is between $2-5 monthly to subscribe (depending on which product you get). IMO, it's pretty idiotic to pay monthly to manage your monthly finances. I would imagine most people would use quicken (or a similar app) to reduce their month by month spending on stuff, and the first thing you need to do to get started is to spend more money monthly to have the privilege of doing so. There are obviously benefits and value to doing that, but it doesn't make sense for me.
If you don't need a ton of data, Mint mobile has a $15 a month 5 GB per month plan. It costs me $201.51 per year. I have to pay a year at a time, but that helped me cut my phone costs by a ton
Heh. I'm Canadian, our telecom situation suckkkks
As an American, I'm terribly sorry for what we exported politically to your country.
I don't hold you, or any Americans, personally responsible. I understand that there's a certain culture in your country.... Not the primary culture, there's a mash of a few different cultures, but one specifically (you know which one), that's particularly problematic.
That culture has infected us for seemingly no good reason whatsoever. A lot of the issues that are central to that culture are not even discussed in our political circles because they're issues we've basically decided on already, that, with any luck at all, will not be changing.
Those up here that have tried to stir the pot have so far, gotten nowhere.
The most significant impact that I've directly been aware of from American politics was the mask protests. The idiot bridge that decided to have a demonstration at the capital during COVID, ironically leading to several of them getting COVID in the process....
It's not just the anti mask protests I'm taking about, it's the group that would have a protest about mask mandates. IMO, they're the most direct and significant problem to be inherited from our neighbors to the south, and bluntly, I don't consider them a representation of the nation as a whole. For the most part, like Canada, you're all just regular people living your lives trying to make it by. Not deranged activists trying to prove a point that everyone understands and thinks you're an idiot for dying on that hill.... Oh we know what their point is, we just don't care, nor agree with it.
I'm sure most of our neighbors to the south are just trying to get by without struggling too much.
I'm certain you're mostly all fine folk just trying to live.
Do you pay 500$/month on insurance? Or was that a typo?
Just about. I have pretty comprehensive insurance on my car, plus content and property insurance for my home.
All average between $100-$200 each, so $500 is a reasonable estimate.
That is crazy to me. I pay something like 500€/year for house insurance including contents and about 400€/year for the car. So that's about 75€/month. But I'm in a different country so who knows. Your other expenses weren't that different to mine, though.
I'm in Canada so our dollar is worth less than American dollars and I believe euros are with more than USD, works out to 330 euro or something.
Our rates are clearly higher still. But hopefully that puts things into a better context.
I'm around $35 CAD for my wage per hour, which is still pretty low IMO.
Inflation has hit us really hard....