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https://www.thecut.com/article/gambling-addiction-casino-world.html
I saw this article this morning, with the online headline "My $5,000 Bender in Casino World"
And my reaction was... Befuddled. $5k? That's it? I'd be modestly interested in hearing a friend tell me about losing $5k gambling. But as the subject of a whole article? Come on. With inflation the way it is, I think you have to lose at least $30,000 before it's interesting. Listing $5k might hurt a lot of people, but the real problem was their prior destitution/poor decision making, not the $5k lost gambling. Just, like, get a job?
I had a similar reaction to would-be academic Kierkegaard's changing his name and moving country to dodge a $10k judgment. Come on, what formidable person can't just pay that off? Tighten your belt for six months and you should be fine.
Maybe it's just seeing the world through privilege, but I feel weird being asked to respect these people. It's an ethos argument: if you don't have your life organized such that you can handle a minor financial setback, you're not a substantial person.
What do you think is, in 2023 first world countries, a large enough financial loss to be interesting, or to force a life change on someone, for a person you would respect?
Maybe I'm not a 'substantial person' but 5k would be a pretty painful loss for me. That said: I don't gamble, it's a mug's game.
Thinking about this has made me curious to what percentage of this forum isn't working in a high paying job/career path. I don't think of myself as stupid or even average intelligence but I've geared my life towards what I find rewarding and until I start my own business in this industry I most likely won't be hitting the big time anyone soon.
While I am not @FiveHourMarathon and he may feel differently, the part that makes someone utterly disreputable isn't that losing $5K gambling would be a disaster, it's that they would bet $5K that they can't afford to lose.
To be honest though, I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K. Yes, I know, people have various extenuating circumstances and even many of the people that don't have those circumstances are basically decent people even if they're kind of fuckups financially. I am disinclined to treat them as "substantial" if they're 40 and can't afford to buy a nice watch if they wanted to though. Being broke indicates either a lack of ability or interest in earning a decent wage or a severe inability to exercise financial discipline and planning. The latter is worse than the former; someone that makes $200K/year and lives paycheck to paycheck is much more disreputable in my eyes than a guy that just doesn't really have a marketable skill.
This seems unnecessarily condescending, but regardless, I wonder how far you define these boundaries.
I'm in my mid 30s, and while I make a pretty good salary, every dollar I have is basically accounted for and then some. I have no debt outside of my mortgage and I'm not living pay-check-to-paycheck, but the productive things that I want to spend my money on far far outstrips my income, to the point that there's plenty of things I can't 'afford' to spend money on, and a nice watch is actually on that list.
By the time I pay for my kids, their preschool school, put money away for thier future years of Catholic schooling, daily living expenses, pay my bills and mortgage, put money into my 401k and other retirement vehicles, tithe, and put money into the savings account for a smallish home expansion (since I'm priced out of ever moving), yeah I don't even have enough income to put as much into each of those buckets as I would like.
My windows need to be replaced, my roof will need to be attended to eventually, there's some other non-trivial home repair to be addressed, and so forth. I'd like be able to afford to to take my wife out on a date and pay a babysitter more often, my phone and my wife's phones are hopelessly outdated. I wish we could afford to go on the same type of vacations our middle class parents took our families on. Our hand-me-down sectional is on it's last leg. Our water heater ought to be replaced soon. There are several hobbies I'd like to invest in with my kids. None of those things make the budget without taking something out of the above list.
This is not to say I couldn't tighten up my weekly expenses. And I could certainly hand you 5k tomorrow if I needed to without blowing up my life. But, no I can't really justify paying for a $2-3k watch, even though I've been thinking about it for some time.
Am I of no substance to you or @FiveHourMarathon ?
What you just described is someone that doesn't have any trouble coming up with $5K. I don't see how it stands as an example against what I wrote above. The fact that significant amounts of resources are deposited in various savings and investment vehicles stands in stark contrast to the kind of degenerate that had only $5K to their name and spent it all at casinos.
The watch part is just an example. You don't want to because it doesn't make sense (or, at least you don't want to enough to overcome the fact that there's a tradeoff). I'm not critiquing that in any way. I like watches, but watches are a stupid purchase, an expensive toy that doesn't really do anything. My usage in that paragraph is about capacity rather than the actual choice.
No, I suppose it doesn't. You've sufficiently removed my doubt about how I was to interpret your point.
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I would re-read the question at the end of OP:
You state directly that you wouldn't need to blow up your life to afford paying $5,000 in sudden expenses. You're making enough, and spending little enough, that you could find the slack in the system. Which is exactly my point: a man of substance might be stretched thin, but he can come up with the money, it won't break him. Presumably, you'd get into a serious fight with your spouse et al if you bought yourself a Rolex out of nowhere (I would too); but you wouldn't change your name and move across the country. You might write a Wellness Wednesday post about what happened if you lost $5k on a bad bet, but it would all be rather banal for a magazine article ("We had to cut expenses for a few months, buy off-brand more, delay replacing the couch and the water heater, and then we were fine.")
Since you seem to be the perfect example of what I'm talking about, what is the financial loss that would cause you to flee? The point at which you would say, like Springsteen in Atlantic City that "I got the kind of debts that no honest man can pay?"
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Point taken, but im interested in what counts in Walterodims heuristic of 'can afford an expensive watch'. I don't think I could really call myself 'broke', as I have quite a bit in net worth and a positive cash flow. But simultaneously I can't 'afford' an expensive watch, in terms of having several thousand to spend on myself.
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