Ahh so if i make 400 week, get laid off, then I get the unemployment on that 400/wk plus the 600.
Gotcha.
Seems kinda weird to get bent out of shape to have people not having to work in a pandemic.
No. For regular UE, the benefit is always a lot less than what you were making. If you’re low income, you get less then $400/wk in UE. The $600 brings some people up to or past what they were making.
Especially for those who were making more than the state maximum when laid off.
For instance, max unemployment in California is roughly 400 a week. Even with the extra 600 in fed money, someone who was making 80K before the pandemic is now making 28K less a year. Without the fed money, they are making 60K less a year. At 400 a week max, the absolute top end unemployment for Californians is 20K a year, and in about 95% of places in CA that’s unlivable
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Let’s say pre-COVID you make $8/hr as a cook, that’s $320/wk. You lose your job in March. State unemployment might get you $175/wk. But the $600/wk brings it up to $775/wk.
Now let’s say your brother works as a cashier at Walmart. He makes $8/hr. He’s still making $320/wk and at risk while you sit home and get 2x what he’s getting.
It’s fucked up. Everyone should have gotten UBI but nah, that makes too much sense.
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For me in Georgia it’s capped at 365/week which is $18,980, or 10% of what I was making.
Yea it seems like the middle class is going to get absolutely crushed in the next few months. Even harder than the lower class. Poor people are used to not having money. But for someone making $75K a year with a car and house payment, they are screwed.
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The scariest part to me is it doesn’t even really seem like they are feverishly working on anything.
Neither side gives a shit about extending the benefits because they both think cutting them off will help their electoral chances.
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Right. These are the people where the bulk of the evictions will be coming from. If you have a family of 4 with one employee making 80-120k, no longer working, with a 2000+ rent or mortgage, those people are turbo fucked
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Over half the country has zero savings. Many of these people already have maxed out credit cards. There is no cushion.
As a bankruptcy attorney I have seen literally thousands of family budgets of all shapes and sizes. Now there is some obvious selection bias to the types of people who walk through my door but it has been eye opening seeing how close to the edge a ton of people live. I can’t count how many times I had some family of 4 making 60k combined with two $600 car payments along with all the other normal stuff people have to spend money on. None of them have savings and in many cases it takes them months to make payments on relatively small amount of attorney/filing fees to get their cases even filed.
I also see a TON of 50+ year olds with literally zero retirement savings and zero appreciable assets. The majority of these people work hard and make middle class type money. I agree with all of you who say we are headed for disaster here. I don’t see how it is going to be possible to withstand probably 18-24 months of unemployment at 10%+ and probably massive downward pressure on wages with how leveraged your average middle class family is. As Riverman said there already was no margin for error prior to this.
As this moves forward we are going to see the economic damage from this spread. It will move into real estate and eat into corporate profits at every level. The average amount of disposable income and ability to obtain credit for a huge part of the country is going to decrease dramatically. It really doesn’t help our economy was basically a giant sham prior to Covid-19 either. This is just speeding up what was probably inevitable which is a complete collapse of USA #1s economy.
I hope I am wrong about that but absent massive government intervention I don’t see how we don’t have a cascading effect throughout the economy over the next year or two.
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Oh sorry I was unclear about that but I knew that. Thanks for clarifying!
And I hate to say it, but a lot of those people with no savings could have made better choices. I can’t tell you how many times people told me I was stupid for having an emergency fund when all I needed was a HELOC and credit cards.
But there are of course many with no savings because they barely scrape by paycheck-to-paycheck, and I feel really badly for them.
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Of course.
However, it is not possible for pandemic response legislation to be targeted at actual victims over people who suck at managing money. Tying the aid to employment is stupid because it inevitably pits people who should be aligned against each other. The person forced back to work looks at the guy on the couch and is understandably pissed off. Some guys on the couch would love to work but instead of being forced to work, they got fired and their jobs are gone forever. And still more people are on the couch, love being on the couch, and will stay there unless they have no other choice.
The solution is to (gasp) just give EVERYONE THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY. No strings attached, no criteria, none of that. Add this to the list of why Democrats suck and fundamentally don’t get it.
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On the topic of budgeting, I highly recommend using a budgeting program to help you manage your finances. I’ve been using YNAB (YouNeedABudget) for 4 or 5 years and it makes it so much simpler to stay ahead of potential money issues.
Agree
Ynab is a great tool.
If you are looking for something free, (though I hate to recommend any products from this douche), the Dave Ramsey owned Everydollar does the job well and has a phone app
My best friend and his wife make a combined $150K a year. They live paycheck to paycheck and have zero kids. They don’t even have college debt (both are HS graduates) They spend money on ridiculous shit. Like my buddy will spend $200 on Johnny Walker Blue and mix it with Coke. His wife is 10x worse.
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The best tool for personal finance is Bogleheads. The posters are mostly assholes but the info is good.
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HOW
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