Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Two Cents" channel.

That's one of the reasons why landfill mining is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining
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You should be careful. Many megabanks have fees that apply if you don't have a high balance or a direct deposit set up. Not to mention the fact that they love fees in general and so it becomes another thing that you absolutely have to check regularly.
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Yes, it angers me that people who have been making more than I have been don't have the money for rent. They may now have less income than I did due to the $600 a week they were getting from the federal government. I get to work, take on the extra risk of being in public while the unemployed got nearly $10k that I didn't and because I'm an essential worker, I don't qualify for any help.
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@ThomasBlinuxguy Yep, they're the ones that are to blame. They gave the unemployed and corporations a huge windfall, but screwed over the folks that are keeping this dumpster fire of a country from a nuclear meltdown.
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TBH, I doubt we'll get rid of them any time soon. The reality is that people carrying cash don't necessarily mind and everybody that's likely to care the most uses plastic. The people that use cash and hate pennies are not a very large lobby and unlikely to spend money trying to influence policy. Probably the only people that really want them gone would be retailers and people that are trying to eliminate government waste.
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@cecesoclean4591 When I was younger and started to invest, you needed to have literally thousands of dollars in order to open an account without paying fees for doing so. You would then pay fees every time you wanted to trade and you'd be required to know how to set up a portfolio and what to invest in. Compare that with today where there are financial tech firms that will take as little as $10 and invest it for you in a diversified portfolio. They're willing to take as little as $5 (or less) a month and invest and balance the account as circumstances dictate without requiring much from the end user. It's super-easy, barely an inconvenience. References to other channels are tight.
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While you're at it, why don't we talk about how the Boomers pulled the ladder they used to get where they are up after them so that following generations couldn't prosper as easily.
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Not to mention that it drastically reduces the likelihood of diaper rash.
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@riffdex Not true, the standard of living has increased because of cheap credit, people put things on their credit cards and hope that they'll be able to pay it off. As far as housing goes, in those decades you had a huge number of people moving from rural areas with cheap housing to more urban areas with expensive housing. What's more, the cost of housing has relatively little to do with the actual building on the land, the land itself has gotten super expensive. The land my parents' house is built on alone is worth roughly 25x what they paid for the land and the house when they bought back in the mid 70s. Perhaps if you live in a dying city or one where there's little chance of growth in the future that may be the case, but in areas that people want to live, the cost of housing has been growing a ton. It makes that whole average housing cost pretty much meaningless. You happened to be able to get that done, but you're completely full of it if you're suggesting that it's a reasonable possibility for more than a tiny fraction of the folks in your generation. Houses are just not that cheap and jobs just don't pay that well.
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@loveflying4488 That's not really accurate, most of the individuals that served in Vietnam were volunteers. Only about a third were drafted and they themselves may not even have seen any combat as sending conscripts into war zones is asking for trouble. Most military jobs are on the logistics side ensuring that those doing the actual fighting have the supplies that they need.
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Clearly they don't, just look at how many of them wound up destitute in old age, despite the various pension programs out there, the ability to buy a house with just one income and the degree to which the stock market has grown over the decades they were working.
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I used to save the state quarters and only state quarters out of my change. Over the course of a few years they added up to several hundred dollars. Probably the best thing to do is get a little tool to wrap the coins for the bank. Policies obviously vary, but you're more likely to have them accept the coins if they're wrapped up.
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@Keith2619 Yes cars are the most expensive depreciating item that most people will ever buy. The only things more expensive that somebody is likely to buy is one of those trailers for living in at a trailer park. Even ignoring the advice in the video and keeping that new car for 17-20 years makes a substantial difference over what many people do. My parents have been doing that because of bad luck with buying used, and they still go many years without a car payment. Just regular maintenance, fuel and related costs of operation.
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I'm not planning on retiring, but I am planning on hitting the point where I can afford to work part time at something that I enjoy. Doing so greatly reduces the amount of money that I'd have to have in order to "retire." I've just seen too many people who retire and then die shortly thereafter because they couldn't cope with the lack of structure in their lives.
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I had a coworker that was working full time making $12 an hour at the time. That was a few years ago, but he was homeless by choice. I can only imagine how much money he was able to rack up by not having to pay rent except during parts of the winter when the weather was too cold to be outside. I wouldn't recommend going that route as there's a ton of issues that come with being homeless, even if you have the money to rent when you need to.
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High and low are relative, people maybe making that little, but they're likely also spending a lot less on housing and definitely a lot less on medical expenses.
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@RedLeader327 You sir, are correct. When you hear about stupid spending like that bridge to nowhere in Alaska from years back, it's usually not enough to really worry about. It usually does have a purpose and is important to some people. The big one is the military spending, if we cut that and got the compliance rate for the ultra-wealthy to where they're actually paying the taxes that they're already on the hook for, we would have more than enough money to solve homelessness in America, ~20bn a year; Medicare for All, ~100bn a year and provide free college for everybody that wants it. We'd even have savings left over to pay down the national debt so that our adversaries don't have that leverage over us.
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@CalebCalixFernandez In a way it's rather sad when the US doesn't have things that nations that our politicians claim are failed states have. We also don't have postal banks like many other nations have. If you're going to ensure banking access to everybody, a postal bank makes sense as post offices tend to be distributed through as much of a given country as possible. Few things are more widespread in a typical country than postal service.
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That's a gross exageration. I've lived in a 2nd world and the US is still generally better off than that. But, there are definitely pockets that are legit 3rd world level of development like some of the poorer reservations and parts of Appalachia where running water and electricity aren't yet available.
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@zachhomolka8512 the problem with tp was that some is sold to businesses for offices and restaurants and some is sold to home users. The former had no distributor to get them to home users even as demand shifted away from businesses. Boosting production wouldn't help much as there's no distribution deals in place for those factories and gouging wouldn't change that quickly enough rather than rationing.
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This is generally good advice, but if you're getting your income from an unreliable source, like a typical side hussle, you should have at least 6 months of savings before even thinking about quitting. You don't typically get unemployment benefits if you were the owner of the company and the income can be quite a bit less stable than a typical job.
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That sounds nice. To operate a business in the US, you need city permits for every city that you do business in. Licenses from every county and state as well. And that's on top of the federal taxes that you have to have paperwork filed with. All of them have different rules and regulations about what is and isn't taxable. Some of them do it based on business property, like my county, some do it based on income like the federal government and others tax based on sales. It's a real mess and if you're just sole proprietorship, as in working by yourself for yourself, you have to hire a tax accountant or spend huge amounts of time figuring things out in most cases. The county here literally requires that you report everything that you use, even if it wasn't purchased by the business, so if you do work from home, you're technically supposed to register and pay based on everything you used, even if it's not owned by the business. So, if you take your laptop from the desk to the couch to do your work, you're technically supposed to list both, even if you're just working from home that day. They do give you $15k worth of assets before you have to pay property taxes on it, but it's ridiculous and in some cases, especially with second hand goods or ones that you owned before opening the business, you may not even know how much to declare for the purposes of taxes.
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This is good, but you should point out that credit unions will typically take anybody with only a small amount of money. The ones I belong to only require $5 to join. Which is admittedly a fee, but compared with the other options, it's a tiny fee. I recently noticed that I have only 1 bank and 1 other ATM within a long walk of me. But, all the actual banks and credit unions are clustered together several miles away.
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That's what the grocery store I work for does. The limits only apply to things that are in extremely high demand. From the does point of view, we're still selling pretty much all we want to sell, but more customers get to buy and we get some goodwill or of it.
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@seasaltisland That's probably true, but varies a lot depending upon where you are. Around here, 60k would mean that you couldn't afford rent without taking extreme measures to cut other areas of the budget out.
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First off, the IRS doesn't help get a fire truck to me, that's state and we don't even have income tax here. Secondly, I don't mind paying my taxes personally, it drives me crazy that people with far more money than I do wind up paying a significantly lower rate even as they hoard opportunities and wealth.
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I use disposable credit card numbers that are set up to not allow renewal without my expressed approval. I either limit the amount of money authorized to just more than what it costs for the next charge or set the expiration date to expire before the next payment. In virtually all cases, they'll let you update the payment when you show up after it failing. The only reason for these autorenewals is to fleece the customer, not for convenience. In many cases, they don't even give you a choice about whether or not to autorenew.
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Luís Andrade That's true, the problem tends to be that the people don't agree as to which spending is the problem. As long as there isn't a clear majority on one side or the other, it makes it really challenging to get any of it fixed.
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It's worth noting that the situation with apps and technology at credit unions varies a bit, but the ones I'm a member of have improved drastically over the last few years. It's also worth checking out all the local credit unions that you qualify for as various credit unions return money to their members in different ways. Some have higher interest rates and higher fees whereas some others have lower fees and lower interest rates on deposits.
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@Melissa-dd7ys Phlebotomist would probably be a better choice around here, it's like weekend course. Sleep lab tech is like 2 quarters and pays decently.
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There's pretty much no such thing as guaranteed income. Emergency savings is based upon spending, guaranteed money allows you to get away with closer to 3 months worth of savings. Trying to be too smart can break things when you can't afford to recover.
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@Thingsyourollup I've been a member of a few CUs over the years and it seems like the criteria for joining have been broadened at all of them over the years. All of mine used to require being an employee or family member of a given company, but all of them now accept that you just live in the region. That being said, if you don't live in the area, you probably wouldn't want to join anyways as you'd constantly be doing business with a different CU.
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@flopsinator5817 Yes and even within a region, the home owner's association may not allow it. The one I'm living in won't allow you to do any maintenance in your spot, if I want to work on a car, I have to find somewhere else to do it.
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Paying the debt is pretty easy. They could just cut the funding to Defense to pre-9/11 levels as well as reverse the tax cuts made for corporations and billionaires to 2000 levels we shouldn't require anymore work.
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This is bullshit. I work at a grocery store and we've been voluntarily rationing things like toilet paper and other essentials in order to prevent panic buying so that people have the ability to buy some. They may not get the specific type or size they want, but we've had all the essentials every day of the crisis because of it. None of the prices have been raised in order to ensure that the public can have a chance to purchase what they need. Gouging is not necessary, it's just a way of a select few that could buy up supplies getting rich and rarely increases supply. In terms of tp, the issue is getting the commercial supply to retail customers where there's no current retail distribution contracts in place.
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