• Cypher@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The number of people on lemmy who are apparently dirt poor and don’t comprehend money or the economy is ridiculous.

    Anything short of declaring yourself a homeless disabled pensioner eating rats to survive will get hostile responses around here, and even then someone would claim rats are a luxury.

    • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      No, the downvotes are for being tone-deaf and contributing nothing of value to the conversation. Lots of us here are perfectly able to save that much and more, but that doesn’t change the fact that far too many cannot.

      • gon [he]@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        I’m a young man and I make about the average income in my country. I saved that much very easily in only 5 months. That’s some value to the conversation, I’d say. Not to take away from the discussion of course, and I do apologize for being tone-deaf. I really just meant it as a throwaway comment, I don’t know, didn’t think much about it.

      • Cypher@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Their comment responds directly to the claim in the OP.

        That you lack the reading comprehension to understand this is horrifying.

          • Cypher@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            56% of Americans have more than $5000 in savings excluding retirement funds such as 401k.

                • howrar@lemmy.ca
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                  4 days ago

                  if you simply take the average across the available generations (which is what I did)

                  Bruh

                  1−(.54+.52+.42+.29)/4 = 56%

                  This assumes that there’s the exact same number of people in each generation. There are not. If the above is what you did, then what you’ve calculated is the percentage of generations that have over 5k. Squid is talking about the percentage of people who have over 5k. Those are two different numbers.

                • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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                  4 days ago

                  Thanks for providing a source, but I’m very skeptical of anybody using averages to represent this rather than the median. If you put 99 destitute and homeless people in a room along with Elon Musk the average net worth in that room is over 4 billion dollars, which to put it mildly does not reflect the reality of most people in the room.

                  • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                    4 days ago

                    Doing this by savings brackets actually avoids this problem but I would agree in another scenario.

                    If we exclude the top two savings brackets we arrive at 46% of Americans having over $5,000 and under $250,000 in savings outside a 401k.

                    Im certain that is a higher percentage of Americans with $5,000 savings than in 1946!

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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                  4 days ago

                  Yes. Averages do paint different pictures than actual hard numbers. And yet the actual hard numbers show the reality of the situation, and that reality is that a lot less than 56% Americans have more than $5000 in savings because that has nothing to do with an average.

    • gon [he]@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      I don’t know about all that…

      I just meant for it to be a factoid I guess, didn’t think much about when I posted. When I saw all the notifications I was actually expecting to see people were as excited about potatoes as I am — I made a post about it last night.

      Lots of people do struggle, I think it’s fair to point out how hard it is to save for some.