As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.
It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they've never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.
Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. "I usually win" or "I only gamble what I come in with", but the latter isn't true and I've seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could "win it all back" at the roulette table.
It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.
Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.
There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!).
Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.
One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.
It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.
In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific.
I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"
The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).
Last month I went to Vegas for the first time in years. I only ever go as a way to get out into the desert - Death Valley most often, this time Zion and Bryce Canyon.
I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making.
Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table.
Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.
Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general? Gambling is a risk, so on its face it makes sense that men would gamble more on average.
It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.
> It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.
> It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.
That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.
sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends.
slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing.
slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction.
i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.
I rarely go to Casinos, but usually go in with $20, if I lose it, that's basically it for me. I can't imagine justifying throwing more money after losing it all, only in video games where gambling is allowed.
I majored in statistics undergraduate and being able to derive and prove the gamblers ruin problem is one of the requirements. At 50/50 it's your money over your plus house's money. And it gets drastically worse as soon as the house gets even a slight edge. I wasn't the casino's target anyways as I saw it was a waste of time and I loathe all the time wasted walking past the gaming area to even see music at a done here like a Hard Rock.
Gambling is an addiction. Having been there, in the moment you don't have control. I would consciously repeat to myself that I wouldn't buy weekly options and repeat in my mind all the reasons why it was just guaranteed to lose me money and how it did not benefit me. A few hours later I would get a random impulse and do it anyway almost without conscious thought. It turned out I had crippling ADHD and after starting to take vyvanse I just completely stopped gambling overnight, (along with binge eating and drinking).
There was a post yesterday on /r/smallbusiness about helping an employee who had a heroin addiction and helping one who had a gambling addiction. The overwhelming consensus was that the gambling addiction was worse, which is not what I would have expected. But the logic made sense from the financial perspective: you can only use so much heroin in a day, but you can spend an unlimited amount on gambling.
This does not sound like a real gambling addiction, it sounds like a group of friends who enjoy the occasional small thrill and doing something together. Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine, even if you personally find it morally unacceptable. A gambling problem is taking your entire paycheck to the casino, taking out a loan, selling a car… Borrowing $40 is so far from being problematic, sounds like a group of people who trusts each other to occasionally borrow and pay each other back, and for things other than gambling too. And seriously, all this over $40?
I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.
You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
> _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800.
Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free.
The women you may know may still gamble but escape notice because they're doing it differently.
Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire.
At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.
>> As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.
I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.
I spend my "political advocacy" bucks on trying to convince older generations around me just how much they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them.
And at the same time, I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile (btw, I still consider myself young). Accusations, assumptions, and name-calling start circulating quickly if you dare to ask 'the youth of reddit' as it were, if they understand compound interest, how much money they spend on food delivery, vapes, weed, and booze.
And then there's this pervasive social media messaging that it doesn't matter. Well, if you doom-scroll and ... don't believe? in compound interest, then I guess that is a hard narrative to escape.
Tbh due to social media and the current economic situation , we're creating an entire generation of lottery ticket buyers. Whats the point in saving if the average job will never let you buy a home in a decent location and the currency is depreciating at an ever increasing pace. Theres a lot of desperate people nowadays so theyre stuck chasing dreams
> and the currency is depreciating at an ever increasing pace
This seems a _little_ alarmist, no? Assuming you're in a major developed economy, inflation is falling. It's still too high, but 'ever increasing pace' is simply incorrect.
And while this high inflation is kinda shocking in modern terms, it's not actually that_ unusual historically. The current US inflation rate is lower than it was for the _entire period_, bar one year in the 80s, between 1971 and 1992, for instance.
The housing thing is much more of a legitimate point, but people are over stressing the inflation thing.
What "current economic situation"? Aside from what the doomers in news media and social media get paid to tell you, what's wrong with the economy, jobs, salaries?
This thread is mostly geared toward the west but it’s interesting to see a similar thing (albeit, much worse) happening in China. They’re going through their own version of 2008 with many overqualified graduates entering a smoldering job market. Unsurprisingly lottery participation is at an all time high. It’s bleak.
In fact, now, thanks to the higher interest rates there is a great possibility to save and earn interest (and compound interest) to buy a house. In addition, thanks to the higher interest rates, it will be harder for everybody to borrow to buy a house so the house prices will not increase as much or even decrease in price. This makes it easier for savers to buy a house.
If the central banks can keep from going down to near zero interest rates of course.
And I agree with you that younger generations, probably at large due to social media, are not patient enough to get rich by saving.
I'd estimate that a single individual with zero skills in NYC could get:
1) A receptionist job for $46k/yr (includes health insurance) [1]
2) A shared $2k/mo 2BR Jersey City apartment [2]
They'd have a take-home pay of $2960 - $1000/mo (rent) - $1000/mo in other expenses (fairly high estimate IMO).
Annual savings (with a traditional IRA) would be about $13k/yr.
It's not much, but the savings rate is almost 30% of gross income, and retirement calculators say you'll retire at 65 a multimillionaire. Surprisingly, a daily Starbucks or avocado toast (or forgetting the tax-deductible IRA contribution) really does eat into the savings numbers. And forget about having kids until you get a career upgrade.
The major risk is an increase in rent without an increase in wages. Let's investigate:
From 2012-2024, rent in Queens (not sure about JC) rose 45% ('only' 3.14% APY) [3]. Over the same period, national wages grew 47% (3.3% APY) [4]. That's good, since our individual earns 3x more wages than they pay rent. Wage growth was even higher among nonmanagers, so I don't think the growth was captured by the 1%. [5]
Overall, it looks OK to me, though the margins are thin, and you need to share an apartment. Hard to make it work for a family. I'd be curious to see some others run the numbers.
Nothing has changed besides current generation having more accessibility to the stock market, casinos, and other forms of gambling.
It all comes down to biology. The dopamine hit you get when your 0DTE you bought for pennies per option skyrockets the next day for a 1,000% return. It’s a dopamine hit unlike anything before it. Forget heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine.
That hit of dopamine from just 1 successful “trade”/gamble is enough to wipe out the previous 100 failed trades. Some people in the drug addiction trade would call this “chasing the high”. Same thing for casinos.
Same reason why your grandparents might spend hours pulling the lever of a penny or nickel slot.
Also probably why insurance companies tend to rate new drivers, especially young men, as “risky”
Nobody mentions how similar options trading are to an actual casino. I am a victim, as I made a dumb options bet for $8 and ended up with $70 in one day. From there I tried to make it more and more and eventually ended up losing more money than I put in, and a friend convinced me to just disable options and keep them disabled.
I've never really gambled; I've bought two lottery tickets my entire life, I've spent less than $10 at casinos, and I don't like sports so never bothered with sports betting. I did buy some crypto during the hype in 2021, but that's basically the extent of it, and I never got into "debt" or anything with it. I do buy stock, but it's almost exclusively ETFs pegged to the S&P500 or something, not exactly a huge risk.
It's easy for me to sit here with righteous indignation, acting like I'm super smart for not blowing my money on gambling, and for a long time I did just that, but recently I've kind of realized that my cowardice towards losing money is also why I'll never be wealthy.
I gravitate towards decent-but-not-amazing-paying W2 jobs. I like them fine, I'm comfortable enough, and that's the safe, nearly-zero-risk path. It's certainly not a bad life or anything, but you also do kind of top-out fairly early. By age 27, I was a senior engineer at Apple. I didn't really have any intention of becoming a manager, so I was only like two promotions away from seemingly maxing out my career. I absolutely hated my job, and it depressed me because it felt like this was the end goal, and I was miserable; there was no more substantial path "upwards", and the top was just not a place I was happy.
If I weren't such a coward, and had a higher tolerance for risk, I almost certainly would have started a real business. Starting a business is basically a fancy gamble; most businesses don't succeed. It's kind of hard for me to condemn gamblers at that point.
So painful to watch. Folks, just put your money in a stock market index fund. I know that sounds insanely boring - but the magic of compounding is real. I have never been a big saver - but I have been a consistent one - and at 50 I am looking at retiring next year early. This also enabled me to buy a house (stock market is growing faster than housing market).
If there is one piece of advice you take, save early, save consistently, put your savings in index funds (I target my portfolio at 50% VTI, 25% VEA, and 25% VCSH).
Not just a quick flip, the old-school days of working hard and being a loyal employee are long over. When the more steady routes of gaining wealth are increasingly out of reach, gambling becomes more enticing.
It's a surprise to our leadership class who has absolutely zero idea what it's like to be a middle class high school / college graduate without premium skills and almost no savings in the 2024 global economy.
This is the demographic most likely to explore and take risks and this is the modern venue for that. Once it was hunting mammoths or gold rushes. My brother left home at 18, hitch hiked to northern Alaska and worked on oil rigs. I'm the slightly exceptional one who stayed home and can't even bring myself to buy crypto. So while the crypto market is like never before the jeopardy isn't.
A prediction - by 2030 there will be another temperance movement. This time it will be disaffected wives who don't want their husbands betting on sports. 75% confidence
A lot of people don't see a bright (financial) future for themselves, and that working hard won't get them anything meaningful. So long shots are perceived the only way that you can improve your lot in life, as otherwise The System™ is stacked against you (student loans, housing costs, etc).
It's just entertainment. Is blowing $100 on sports betting really any worse than $500 on a designer handbag?
Which isn't to say it's not an issue--both are. But despair driving people to spend increasingly on short-term endorphin hits is universal. The most meaningful metric would be the proportion of income that's saved and invested.
- Hi! We are starting the course "How to earn a million dollars in one day". Question for the audience. How much did the ticket to the course cost?
- One thousand dollars.
- And how many seats are there in this hall?
- One thousand.
- Thank you, the course is over.
There always has been and always will be a “tax” on those who cannot or will not apply math to their financial decisions. Of course the degree to which we provide opportunities to collect this tax is a societal decision and we’ve almost certainly increased the opportunities for tax collectors in the last ten to fifteen years quite dramatically. And of course, de facto the under educated folks, who also are likely to be poor, will tend to be taxed at a disproportionate rate. Yet another wealth transfer. I wonder what societal attitudes led us down this road?
My understanding is that a bunch of cognitive psychology research related to risk-taking and motivation etc is funded by casinos and gambling-related businesses, which I vaguely remember as being an obligation created by some Nevada law? I wonder if it makes sense for some consumer-facing financial services companies to have a similar obligation.
My mother, who was born in 1935, will not even buy a entry for a church fundraising raffle because that is "gambling" and she was raised by good Presbyterian teetotalers who absolutely did not approve of gambling in any form whatsoever.
A bit of that attitude leached off on me as well, but I have noticed that it is almost completely vanished from American culture.
Gambling used to be something that whole swaths of society looked upon with absolute contempt as nothing but an unmitigated vice.
On one hand she's right, and on the other she's completely off base. This really should be titled about exploitation of young men who feel they have no real opportunities.
"To make a fortune, coach young men to their benefit" -- Good market economy stuff
"To make a fortune, exploit the depression/negativity of young men to your benefit" -- What this article is actually about.
I'm often seen as the more successful and stable member of friend groups. The number of people that come to me talking about their puts, calls, crypto, and other high risk investment play is way to high. I always tell them "I invest long, so I don't know anything about that" and try to steer them towards more predictable investment options. No matter how many people I point to real estate deals they could feasibly get into, and talk about how much I've made on real estate, not one of these people have gone down that route. In the way they talk, they actually want to gamble and don't want to grow wealth. I think it might also be the marshmallow experiment, because they also don't want to discuss any play that I measure in years.
I'm seeing this in more demographics than just young male. I was looking into a business plan and talking to a trusted boomer about the business plan. They have more experience in some specific aspects, and I was looking to identify more risks. Towards the end of the conversation they told me "of course, I was never a gambler", to which I replay "neither am I, that's why I'm talking to you and doing my homework."
[+] [-] jjice|1 year ago|reply
It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they've never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.
Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. "I usually win" or "I only gamble what I come in with", but the latter isn't true and I've seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could "win it all back" at the roulette table.
It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.
Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.
[+] [-] Verdex|1 year ago|reply
Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.
One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.
It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.
[+] [-] mycologos|1 year ago|reply
I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"
The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).
[+] [-] japhyr|1 year ago|reply
I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making.
Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table.
Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.
[+] [-] pc86|1 year ago|reply
It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.
[+] [-] interludead|1 year ago|reply
This what scares me the most in that trend
[+] [-] danans|1 year ago|reply
That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.
[+] [-] throw18376|1 year ago|reply
sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends.
slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing.
slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction.
i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Projectiboga|1 year ago|reply
Edit, my school is the top link when I searched for a reference, I guess they included it after the casinos went into Atlantic City. Generalized Gambler's Ruin Problem - Rutgers Math https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.p...
[+] [-] brigadier132|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|1 year ago|reply
I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.
You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
[+] [-] Archelaos|1 year ago|reply
Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-marke...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] Tiktaalik|1 year ago|reply
Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire.
At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.
[+] [-] phkahler|1 year ago|reply
I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.
[+] [-] chrsig|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] l1nuxn3wb|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] k8svet|1 year ago|reply
And at the same time, I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile (btw, I still consider myself young). Accusations, assumptions, and name-calling start circulating quickly if you dare to ask 'the youth of reddit' as it were, if they understand compound interest, how much money they spend on food delivery, vapes, weed, and booze.
And then there's this pervasive social media messaging that it doesn't matter. Well, if you doom-scroll and ... don't believe? in compound interest, then I guess that is a hard narrative to escape.
[+] [-] hmmmcurious1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|1 year ago|reply
This seems a _little_ alarmist, no? Assuming you're in a major developed economy, inflation is falling. It's still too high, but 'ever increasing pace' is simply incorrect.
And while this high inflation is kinda shocking in modern terms, it's not actually that_ unusual historically. The current US inflation rate is lower than it was for the _entire period_, bar one year in the 80s, between 1971 and 1992, for instance.
The housing thing is much more of a legitimate point, but people are over stressing the inflation thing.
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TwitBar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] flakeoil|1 year ago|reply
If the central banks can keep from going down to near zero interest rates of course.
And I agree with you that younger generations, probably at large due to social media, are not patient enough to get rich by saving.
[+] [-] cafard|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] verteu|1 year ago|reply
I'd estimate that a single individual with zero skills in NYC could get:
1) A receptionist job for $46k/yr (includes health insurance) [1]
2) A shared $2k/mo 2BR Jersey City apartment [2]
They'd have a take-home pay of $2960 - $1000/mo (rent) - $1000/mo in other expenses (fairly high estimate IMO).
Annual savings (with a traditional IRA) would be about $13k/yr.
It's not much, but the savings rate is almost 30% of gross income, and retirement calculators say you'll retire at 65 a multimillionaire. Surprisingly, a daily Starbucks or avocado toast (or forgetting the tax-deductible IRA contribution) really does eat into the savings numbers. And forget about having kids until you get a career upgrade.
The major risk is an increase in rent without an increase in wages. Let's investigate:
From 2012-2024, rent in Queens (not sure about JC) rose 45% ('only' 3.14% APY) [3]. Over the same period, national wages grew 47% (3.3% APY) [4]. That's good, since our individual earns 3x more wages than they pay rent. Wage growth was even higher among nonmanagers, so I don't think the growth was captured by the 1%. [5]
Overall, it looks OK to me, though the margins are thin, and you need to share an apartment. Hard to make it work for a family. I'd be curious to see some others run the numbers.
[1] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=receptionist+-hour+-experience...
[2] https://streeteasy.com/building/3657-kennedy-boulevard-jerse...
[3] StreetEasy Rent Index: https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard , chose Queens as it was most comparable in price to JC
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CEU0500000003
[5] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI
[+] [-] cqqxo4zV46cp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
It all comes down to biology. The dopamine hit you get when your 0DTE you bought for pennies per option skyrockets the next day for a 1,000% return. It’s a dopamine hit unlike anything before it. Forget heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine.
That hit of dopamine from just 1 successful “trade”/gamble is enough to wipe out the previous 100 failed trades. Some people in the drug addiction trade would call this “chasing the high”. Same thing for casinos.
Same reason why your grandparents might spend hours pulling the lever of a penny or nickel slot.
Also probably why insurance companies tend to rate new drivers, especially young men, as “risky”
[+] [-] PokestarFan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
It's easy for me to sit here with righteous indignation, acting like I'm super smart for not blowing my money on gambling, and for a long time I did just that, but recently I've kind of realized that my cowardice towards losing money is also why I'll never be wealthy.
I gravitate towards decent-but-not-amazing-paying W2 jobs. I like them fine, I'm comfortable enough, and that's the safe, nearly-zero-risk path. It's certainly not a bad life or anything, but you also do kind of top-out fairly early. By age 27, I was a senior engineer at Apple. I didn't really have any intention of becoming a manager, so I was only like two promotions away from seemingly maxing out my career. I absolutely hated my job, and it depressed me because it felt like this was the end goal, and I was miserable; there was no more substantial path "upwards", and the top was just not a place I was happy.
If I weren't such a coward, and had a higher tolerance for risk, I almost certainly would have started a real business. Starting a business is basically a fancy gamble; most businesses don't succeed. It's kind of hard for me to condemn gamblers at that point.
[+] [-] LUmBULtERA|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|1 year ago|reply
If there is one piece of advice you take, save early, save consistently, put your savings in index funds (I target my portfolio at 50% VTI, 25% VEA, and 25% VCSH).
[+] [-] bix6|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nytesky|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] delichon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jimberlage|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101b|1 year ago|reply
* https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism
A lot of people don't see a bright (financial) future for themselves, and that working hard won't get them anything meaningful. So long shots are perceived the only way that you can improve your lot in life, as otherwise The System™ is stacked against you (student loans, housing costs, etc).
[+] [-] scarmig|1 year ago|reply
Which isn't to say it's not an issue--both are. But despair driving people to spend increasingly on short-term endorphin hits is universal. The most meaningful metric would be the proportion of income that's saved and invested.
[+] [-] luckyou|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] semanticjudo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pseudolus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abeppu|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31691069/
[+] [-] jononomo|1 year ago|reply
A bit of that attitude leached off on me as well, but I have noticed that it is almost completely vanished from American culture.
Gambling used to be something that whole swaths of society looked upon with absolute contempt as nothing but an unmitigated vice.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|1 year ago|reply
"To make a fortune, coach young men to their benefit" -- Good market economy stuff
"To make a fortune, exploit the depression/negativity of young men to your benefit" -- What this article is actually about.
[+] [-] gamepsys|1 year ago|reply
I'm often seen as the more successful and stable member of friend groups. The number of people that come to me talking about their puts, calls, crypto, and other high risk investment play is way to high. I always tell them "I invest long, so I don't know anything about that" and try to steer them towards more predictable investment options. No matter how many people I point to real estate deals they could feasibly get into, and talk about how much I've made on real estate, not one of these people have gone down that route. In the way they talk, they actually want to gamble and don't want to grow wealth. I think it might also be the marshmallow experiment, because they also don't want to discuss any play that I measure in years.
I'm seeing this in more demographics than just young male. I was looking into a business plan and talking to a trusted boomer about the business plan. They have more experience in some specific aspects, and I was looking to identify more risks. Towards the end of the conversation they told me "of course, I was never a gambler", to which I replay "neither am I, that's why I'm talking to you and doing my homework."
[+] [-] bni|1 year ago|reply
What happened?