What's your ideal salary to live comfortably?

<p>well i don’t think my 30k estimate is * forgetting * any big sources of expense. for me i think it would work. i don’t know, there are lots of ways to be frugal; i feel like so much of society is essentially tricked into giving up what they get in exchange for providing value to society.</p>

<p>but like i don’t expect to get health insurance for one. about the only thing its good for is surgery and pain meds in the case of accidents or rare biological problems (like have your apendix get inflamed…). </p>

<p>when i learned that over 50% of peope’s life-time health care costs come in their last year of life that made me rather jaded about the whole thing… </p>

<p>because what that means is HALF of the effort of hospitals and doctors and everything is expended on people’s last year of life, which seems totally disproportionate.</p>

<p>of course it’s not hard to understand why that is; people are willing to cost that much to society at the end of their life because they don’t wanna die yet, and don’t really see the costs of it to society (plus they might feel it’s what they deserve for paying health insurance for all those years they didn’t need health care. )</p>

<p>a lot of it too is that their is this custom of supporting people 'till the very end even if they can’t make that choice for themselves. </p>

<p>anyway i would really tempted to take whatever treatments i could to. so not getting health insurance solves that problem too (if i had a life savings when i was old i don’t think i would to drain it for a few more months of life, where as if i had health insurance i probably would take advantage whatever services i could).</p>

<p>hmm i guess that was kind of a rant…</p>

<p>It’s thoroughly proven that preventative care is the best sort of care. If you eschew modern medical care, in the case of illness you won’t catch it early enough for the best sort of treatments. Just because 50% healthcare expenses are in the last year of life doesn’t mean that you don’t need healthcare for the rest of your life. </p>

<p>I don’t know how you expect to have any savings at retirement on 10k a year spending money. That’s around $833 a month. With food, clothing, car insurance, a tiny bit of entertainment, etc. you can’t expect to save more than a few hundred. Doesn’t sound very comfortable or prudent to me, unless it is otherwise avoidable. If you get sick, treatment will cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars if you lack healthcare.</p>

<p>Some of the amounts you guys come up with are outrageous lol. My comfortable salary would be about (planning on living alone, no family lol) 60,000-70,000</p>

<p>well as it is i’m not sure we can trust modern medical care to catch things early enough (maybe in the future that will change) many cancers are still diagnosed in later stages…</p>

<p>besides catching cancers early though i’m not sure what else one can catch early - the rest of the ways people commonly die are mostly due to processes of slow degeneration i think… where optimizing diet and exercise levels are about all you can do right now.</p>

<p>anyway my food is $200 a month right now and clothes are perhaps $300/year. and yeah, i plan on getting around with public transportation for the foreseeable.</p>

<p>my guess is just that it’s probably easier to make due with less than one might suspect. </p>

<p>i do kind of care about living a long life, so i have tried optimized my diet as a preventative measure against bad things happening sooner than they have to, but i’m not convinced the returns of health care will be worth the cost to me…</p>

<p><a href=“Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes”>Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes;

<p>Good luck with that. 25% higher chance of premature death. </p>

<p>Even if you just get into a car accident if could cost thousands of dollars more than your annual 30k salary.</p>

<p>a study merely associating mortality with healthcare is probably not the best way to evaluate the merits of healthcare. you would have to control for education and and income (which are two things that are independently associated with longevity, and which those people without health insurance tend to have less of). i glanced at the study and i don’t think they did that (doing so would be more work…). </p>

<p>I would rather look at what healthcare does specifically, what the impacts the different treatments on the individuals are.</p>

<p>for example i might concede certain molecules like some antibiotics might be pretty valuable to be able to get more cheaply, which would make me value health insurance more. i don’t know enough about the incidence of life-threatening bacterial infections to do that, but do think it tends be something that is a problem much later in life (i guess the older i get the more value health insurance might have to me).</p>

<p>yeah a bad car accident would be pretty devastating without insurance… thankfully i don’t have to worry about that because i won’t be driving in the near future.</p>

<p>$60,000+ a year.
Engineering major btw…</p>

<p>Okay, so you’re going to neglect to purchase healthcare because you don’t know about the benefits of it. Clearly everyone who has healthcare is getting scammed, and your health is something to bargain with. </p>

<p>Sorry, forgot you won’t be driving. Say you go I’ve skating, slip, and break your femur. Boom, a couple thousand. Flu vaccine? Way expensive. Strep throat? Nope, no going to the doctor for you. Wait it out, miss work, lost wages. Forget cancer. First of all, you wouldn’t recognize it until too late. Secondly, you wouldn’t be able to afford chemo.</p>

<p>I’m sure that by the time you reach adulthood you will recognize the merits of healthcare.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>whats your ideal? (well i guess you don’t have to have one to identify things which aren’t your ideal)</p>

<p>people are paying for security … maybe security which is not a rational investment in terms of money, but security they can’t emotionally feelsecure without having … i’m not sure.</p>

<p>there is an economist robin hanson who thinks the reason why people feel so intensely about having health care is not because it actually works well really, but because they strongly value having a basket to offload their concerns/anxiety/fear of death into forever. having someone ‘in charge’ of your health which you feel you can trust is part of the reason (and maybe even the main reason) for people’s value of it he says.</p>

<p>I kind of think there might be something to that.</p>

<p>yeah when i get older my value of health insurance to me may very well go up, up, up :).</p>

<p>Well, possibly people get a bit worried about health care cause it’s, ya know, their life. But no, you do not merely get “security” with healthcare. They pay for most of your routine care - doctor’s visits, vaccines, medication, etc. You generally get the value of what you pay for. Health insurance is not like car insurance, where you only get money if something goes wrong. You only get one body. Once you’re diagnosed with a medical condition, it’s basically impossible to get health care. So yeah, play with the odds. But they aren’t great. It’s very possible that you may get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, some other disease, some kind of injury, etc. Your meager savings from your 10k minus living expenses will nowhere near cover expenses like that. The government is supposed to provide a safety net for those who fall upon hard times, not those who make imprudent decisions such as the one to voluntarily forego healthcare.</p>

<p>well what is imprudent or not to do will depend on the person.</p>

<p>even if i believed purchasing health care was a prudent decision for the average person, i wouldn’t say that it was prudent for everyone, or under all circumstances</p>

<p>…and the word prudent just lost some of it’s meaning to me :p.</p>

<p>Every person can get sick. Every person can get injured. Therefore, every person should have provisions for healthcare. </p>

<p>Well, I sincerely hope you never get sick or injured for your entire life. Good luck, you will need it.</p>

<p>alwaysleah, yeah i believe everyone should have health care too (that they should not die). i sincerely believe those things. but given the state of health care i’m not sure it’s worth it’s costs for everyone (in fact i’m pretty positive there are exceptions).</p>

<p>==</p>

<p>i thought about money for like 10 minutes with a friend recently… </p>

<p>our thinking was businesses ‘converged’ to one currency (or a small number of them) because it was in the best interest of all the businesses to do so (we talked about businesses specifically because those are institutions that handle lots of exchanges).</p>

<p>lol well i might suggest that money doesn’t cause greed, and instead greed (however you want to define it, maybe like the desire to accumulate things, but importantly not to have them) as it appears in humans in responsible for some of our relationship to money.</p>

<p>the regulation of paper money kind of confuses me though and how that works.</p>

<p>==</p>

<p>i feel like ‘value’ evaporates from society in all sorts of horrible ways and it’s this tragic unrecognized thing (that’s my most fierce critique of society anyway - lamentations of why are people are working so much, and of where the hell is all the value, etc :p)</p>

<p>But, as a free U.S. citizen, enfieldacademy should have every right to refuse to pay for health care.</p>

<p>Premise: No one in a free country should be forced to pay for a commercialized product (cough cough healthcare).</p>

<p>Premise: enfieldacademy does not want to have healthcare.</p>

<p>Conclusion: It is wrong to force enfieldacademy (and any U.S. citizen) to pay for healthcare.</p>

<p>alwaysleah didn’t say i had to have it, just that it was a bad decision not to buy it given my 30k salary (or, she said it would be wise to focus on making more than that so i could pay for it).</p>

<p>^ it doesn’t follow from believing everyone should have health carethat you believe everyone should be forced to have health care at a cost to them, so i’m not sure alwaysleah would agree with that…</p>

<p>i’m kind of unclear about what ReabhLoidi was trying to clarify (interesting note about the language having to be precise in order to not eliminate value-nuetral actions though…)</p>

<p>omg, i thought you were quoting her… </p>

<p>well i think people should live as long as they want to live; to most people that probably means having some form of advanced and free health care (though there are plausible alternatives), so yeah ideally humans shouldn’t have health problems if they don’t want them.</p>

<p>the way i support that is with the premise that involuntary suffering should be abolished, and that health problems are one source of involuntary suffering for some people.</p>

<p>==</p>

<p>luckily, i do not see how you failed, and i do not wish to probe the logic :). </p>

<p>it makes me feel better that you weren’t * really * using logic, since that means i only didn’t grasp messed up logic, which i’m more okay with.</p>

<p>Haha Reabhloidi, I was messing around as well. I do disagree with you on your postion, but I was excited to see some syllogism (and excellent syllogism at that). I had a pretty weak one haha.</p>

<p>those are two rather disjoint sentiments :p. </p>

<p>yeah i doubt the utility of teaching formal logic. i would probably oppose it quietly.</p>

<p>I want to live in Paris one day, so maybe around $300k would be nice.</p>