Im tired of putting in the hours and not having anything to show for it. im just ranting so you can continue to scroll i just needed to say it. I cant even pay my bills half the time. Life sucks.

My wife is out of work right now with the newborn in the house, and things are tight. We're paycheck to paycheck right now, and I hate paycheck to paycheck. I feel your pain.

That's what happened to me, I have two kids in diapers and my wife lost her job a while back and hasn't been able to get another one.

I personally find that most people need to start with this advice:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/...one-blog-post/

And this is his detailed timeline of how he got to that point:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/...-in-ten-years/

The OP lives in the Lowcountry of SC, where housing prices as well as prices for cars and commodities are quite high (but nowhere as bad as here in DC). In the rest of the state one's George Washingtons have much more purchasing power.

Go work at Boeing. My old boss is in the paint shop there, bringing home about $70,000 yearly with overtime as of last year.

Yeah living here is not cheap and the only bad thing with trying to work with Boeing is that everyone and their mother is trying to work at Boeing.

Once you break out of the rat race, lower your spending to start saving hugely, and do a bit of math and realize that owning a house is actually slightly profitable in general (I've got a very complex spreadsheet to get me this result) you realize you're better off in an area which pays more, even if housing costs more.

Technically at this point, my house that I've owned for 4 years has paid me money in appreciation on the order of $6k a month, while my mortgage is a measly tiny fraction of that amount. But in general without property bubbles, your house ends up being basically free to live in when everything is factored in, including appreciation, mortgage, maintenance, taxes, and tax writeoffs.

My personal index fund investments due to my increased saving due to lowering spending have turned huge profits over the past 5 years, in general around 20% a year as the economy recovered from the dip in 2008. That's a doubling of money every 3.8 years. That's free money that required me to do 0 work. Build that up enough and you can basically retire as mrmoneymustache did.

Honestly that's how you break out of the month to month rat race, and that's why I sent that article I posted in my previous post. It works.

Thanks for posting and I actually used to read mrmoneymustache but never really took any of what he said serious until my wife lost her job. We've cut everything out we could, no cable, down to one vehicle, somehow I got to keep my 4runner, and eating out isn't even an option anymore. Hopefully soon things will pick up. I just needed to rant cause who can you talk too if you can't talk to strangers on the internet lol.

amen

Interesting so far and I was good with it all up until he said this: "Assignment: Watch a few of the great documentaries like Fast Food Nation and Food Inc., and An Inconvenient Truth.. then you might build up the appropriate level of guilty awareness to take the innocence out of shopping."

Thoughts and prayers to OP and KidVermicious, very tough situations to be in.


drewm, thanks for posting the Mr. Money Mustache links, I had never seen that before and agree with almost all that stuff.

This rat race/hamster wheel/American dream (farce)/keeping up w/ the Joneses is ridiculous - but it's what my wife wants. She won't get on board w/ the frugality/practicality/spend less than you make, etc. I don't think I'm the only one w/ that predicament, but that situation sucks too.

Don't think all your problems will go away with your bills paid.

I don't ever think about money or bills but that doesn't mean life is still always awesome.

Even when I didn't have to think about choosing which bill to pay life was rough sometimes but having no money and living pay check to pay check really puts things in perspective like what's important and what's not. When my family and I get back up on our feet I will definitely be handling my money better. Life is what you make it and it really only stresses me out when I need something for my daughters and can't get it or when I get a pile of bills and wonder how long I have till they cut out the lights. Its just an added stress that I never wanted to deal with and that I thought I would never deal with but shit happens and we learn from it. I just wish I wasn't learning the hard way.

Op - would you mind sharing your age? If it's MYOB I understand or if you'd prefer to pm it, cool. I'm just curious.

He's just wanting you to see how "evil" corporations are in terms of making the greatest amount of profit out of you by giving you a product that is very substandard. That happens in nearly every industry. That's why nearly everything made today comes out of china or some 3rd world country. Very few companies are making products for the good of the people.

Personally after being on the investment side of things for a while, you kinda start to realize that companies just see you as a sucker willing to live month to month spending all your money so they can pile billions of dollars (In Apple's case $160 billion dollars) onto their cash heap while continuing to convince you to buy products that easily have a 350% profit margin.

Being smart with your money puts the power back into your hands.