Nah, I'm doing just fine. I have a steady job, frugal lifestyle and quite substantial savings/investments for someone my age. I could live for years without income.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
38 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
41245 readers
838 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
what field are you in, if you don't mind me asking?
Pretty much, yep. The only people I know who aren't are old, and even they're feeling the pinch.
I'm not struggling but damnit i want some fucking slack.
Not everybody.
All of the worst people you know of or can imagine are doing GREAT.
I'm doing great.
if I claim I'm doing awful, does that make me a good person all the sudden?
!A -> B != !B -> A
It’s just basic logic.
I heard one of their private rape islands got shut down. That had to be inconvenient.
I am.
I'm so god damn hungry.
We live pretty frugally in comparison to our peers. Less than $30 a month in subscriptions, our utility bills are low, we eat out maybe once a month and every other meal is made at home. We thrift and get just about everything we can second hand from yard sales or friends. It used to be that we were putting aside money, now there's less extra. We're getting ready for worse, and planting fruit trees, learning gardening and canning, and reaching out to our neighbors.
Feels like it. I'm getting the most pay in my life and 5 years ago it would have been comfortable. Now with the cost of everything I'm just eeking buy. Hell I drive a 30 year old car still as I can't afford a new one or even a newer used one
Motorcycles are much cheaper, easier to maintain, and convenient if you don't live in a place with snow. If I ever go back to America, I am selling my 20 year old toyota and buying a sensible Honda Motorcycle.
I would totally ride a motorcycle if I wasn't surrounded by people on their cell phones not staying in their lane.
The bigger danger is people not looking or their brain not working and pulling out directly infront of you.
Unless you live in America, then the biggest dangers by far, accounting for >3/4 accidents are drinking and riding or going into a turn too fast for conditions and eating shit.
Here in vietnam, its probably people with a phone in their hand riding into the back of stuff, then alcohol.
I've been bumped by people doing the no-look-lane change once hard enough to deform my foot peg, as long as you have grip, there is a lot of force trying to keep a moving bike upright.
you can't afford a 25K civic or similar?
issue i see with people is they seem to want 50K cars. at least going by the average price of new car purchases, but most car buyers buy like 2x the car they actually need.
Something like 65% of people can't afford a $1k emergency. NO thry can't afford a payment on a 25k civic. We are all people scraping couch cusions to get a used car lot $4500 Toyota.
Yeah, shits tight and every institution is in decay. On the other hand it's only gonna get worse until it gets better, so theres that.
...and it's probably going to get a LOT worse.
To put things in perspective, imagine it being way, way worse in 5 years and the point you are at right now is the least struggling you've been through that you can remember. You might look fondly at these days, before shit hit the fan.
Try to save whatever you can.
Yeah that's why I think its important to be a part of a community, if you can.
3428 people are doing quite well and the rest of us are allowing it.
Everyone around me claims they are struggling, but they objectively are not.
FWIW, the income of people I'm talking about typically around 150-300K a year. They are simple angry their money doesn't go as far as it did and they can't take multiple vacations per year anymore. or they aren't getting the massive returns on their stock portfolios they were a few years ago.
I make the low end of that, but I live a low-cost lifestyle and I don't have expensive 'needs' like travel, luxury items, etc. what baffles me is I often meet people make less than I do... spending way more and basically loading up on debt and being angry about it.
It's pretty standard to have to choose between paying rent and eating, now. My electric bill is three months overdue. I'd not even be online if I wasn't pointing a cantenna at the store down the hill. I think the only bills I'm current on are my email, which I'm not sure I'll be able to swing $50 a year when it is due, but for now it's current... And my VPN.
Struggling a bit more financially but I prepared for this tbh. I expected shit to get bad, and still think it will get worse.
To put things in perspective I'm learning stuff in case the next depression happens soon, like planting potatoes, food preservation...
Save whatever money you can now. This might be the least you struggle financially for years.
As lower income households struggle to afford Walmart, Walmart is growing in popularity with higher income households seeking out sales.
"Walmart posts worst comparable sales performance in six years"
Yep. They're boiling frogs.
We’ll be the ones eating the pets.
I'm incredibly fortunate to not be
I overdrew my account less than 24 hours before my paycheck cleared.
I've sometimes seen credit card debt used as a proxy for financial difficulties. For the US:
https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/credit-card-debt-study/24400
So...there are some things that aren't ideal about that graph. For one, it's not inflation-adjusted; a dollar in 2000 is just under $2 in 2026. So it's got an upwards-trending line, but a very substantial portion of that is actually just the result of inflation. And I'd kinda prefer to have a median value, though since I'm just comparing relative numbers rather than getting an absolute value, it's probably not a huge deal.
But based on that, credit card debt has increased. And for most age groups, it's higher in inflation-adjusted terms than it was 25 years ago. The 18-29 group is about the same, in inflation-adjusted terms
they had an average of about $500 25 years back, and about $1000 today. That's an increase of about 2x in nominal terms, so no movement in real terms.
But people in their 40s have about 3x the amount of credit card debt in nominal terms as did the same age group in 2000. So that's a real increase; it's about 1.5x in real terms. Ditto for people in their 50s.
People in their 70s have something like 6x as much in nominal terms, or about 3x in real terms, as the people who were in their 70s in 2000, which is a pretty meaningful increase. For them, it's not a COVID-19 surge, but just a long, sustained drift.
Note that if you're asking about, say, just the last few months, OP, this only runs to late 2025.