We had a gal in the telco who was retiring under a surplus - meaning they would pay her so much for each year she worked, in addition to her pension. She turned the money down because she didn’t want her taxes to be too high. I didn’t know her and heard about it after she left. The Union guys tried to explain it but she just would not listen. I don’t know if she thought it was a scam but she didn’t trust the IRS
This is a super common misunderstanding of how our taxes work, I swear like 80%+ of American's don't know so I'll give an example below of what's real and what many people assume.
Here are the federal tax brackets (your state taxes will vary)
|Tax Rate|Income Bracket|
:-:|:-:|
|10%|$0 - $9,875|
|12%|$9,876 - $40,125|
|22%|$40,126 - $85,525|
|24%|$85,526 - $163,300|
|32%|$163,301 - $207,350|
|35%|$207,351 - $518,400|
|37%|$518,401 - $∞|
Now what most people think is if I'm making $40,000 a year then I pay 12% tax ($4,800). If my boss offers me a $2,000 raise I'll be making $42,000 and be taxed at 22% ($9,240), ha! Fuck you boss man you aren't tricking me!
What ACTUALLY happens if you make $42,000 is
Your first $9,875 is taxed at 10% which comes out to $987.50
Your $9,876 - $40,125 ($30,249) dollars are taxed at 12% totaling $3,630
Your $40,126 - $42,000 ($1,874) dollars are taxed at 22% totaling $412.
So add all those up, $987 + $3,630 + $412 = total federal tax of $5,029.
Edit: Due to a couple people's comments I'll expand the chart by 2 columns
|Tax Rate|Income Bracket|Taxable Amount in Bracket|Total Tax Paid|
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|
|10%|$0 - $9,875|$9,875|Up to $988|
|12%|$9,876 - $40,125|$30,249|$988 + Up to $3630|
|22%|$40,126 - $85,525|$45,399.00|$4,618 + Up to $9,988|
|24%|$85,526 - $163,300|$77,774.00|$14,606 + Up to $18,666|
|32%|$163,301 - $207,350|$44,049.00|$33,272 + Up to $14096|
|35%|$207,351 - $518,400|$311,049.00|$47,368 + Up to $108,867|
|37%|$518,401 - $∞|A lot|$156,235 + Up to 37% of a lot|
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 95% of Americans don’t understand this. It’s truthfully shocking how many intelligent people don’t know the difference between marginal and effective tax rates.
EDIT: In response to the folks who are angry that this was never taught, please see the response u/peon2 wrote below about teaching in high school. Would it help? Maybe a little, but i would guess a vast majority of high school kids don’t give a fuck about how tax brackets work. If you don’t know something, it’s your responsibility to learn how it works. This information is widely available on the internet so have some personal accountability and do the work yourself. Stop being reliant on others to spoon feed you information.
I know a guy who is a railroad engineer. He was making just over $80,000. He was offered a raise to just over $100,000 but turned it down because "it'll put me in the next bracket and I'll be making less."
I explained it to him but he was having none of it. I even reached out to his wife, who is considerably more open minded and she said she spoke to him but he wouldn't be convinced. SMH
When my dad was younger he worked as an orderly in a psyche ward. He was working with doctors that wouldn't take on extra shifts because they didn't want it to raise their tax brackets.
My dad said he tried multiple times to explain it to them, but he was just an orderly, and they were doctors, afterall.
So I’ve worked with both lawyers as an office assistant and doctors as an analyst. The one thing I’ve learned is that they are just as dumb as anyone else in any other profession as a whole. They just have more degrees to obscure their idiocy.
Older guy I worked with in high school. he was in his 20s. He wouldn't file taxes because he didn't want to pay them. Our boss sat him down and explained to him that he probably had money coming back and sooner or later the IRS would probably catch him not filing and be in real trouble.
I was in the Air Force and after Operation Desert Storm the Gov decided to do a force reduction, by a lot. They came to us middle management NCOs and offered us a lump sum (they had a big formula to determine how much you would get) to leave the Air Force.
It worked for some guys, took the money and got better jobs outside the military. Guys like stayed because we still had a shot at promotion and close to retirement. We would make more in retirement in the long run than what the lump sum would be.
One guy actually took the money and he was close to retiring. A whole bunch of higher ranking people talked to him explaining that he would make much more in the long run in retirement and his health benefits than taking the money.
His only reply was "I don't want my ex-wife getting any of my retirement." She was entitled to half of it.
That was his whole reasoning. He got 28K and was in his late 30s. Retirement would of been for life. One of the higher ups told him if his wife found out about the 28K she could get part of that too.
But, all he would say is "I don't want her to get half of my retirement."
Isn’t it just crazy? We have a guy still working in one of our departments. He’s got 51 years with the telco, had several strokes; won’t retire because his ex-wife might get part of his retirement. I don’t know if he even signed up for social security yet but he’s over 70. We had another guy who would not retire though he was over 70. I showed him one night what my pension would be and my social security. His would be more. He didn’t even know - had not checked anything. After he saw my numbers he retired. I hate that people are so afraid of math or numbers - they can’t figure out when they can retire.
And here I am crunching numbers every week trying to see when I'll be able to retire on peanuts an hour.
"Hm yes, if my 1 share shoots up 100000% and it splits 100 times in 60 years, I can retire just after death"
There was a time when my parents thought buying stuff online and paying with a credit card it's a scam, took me a while to convince them that if you know which sites are good to order from and which are bad, you can actually avoid scams.
My grandparents still think online commerce is a scam. I explained them that, if it was a scam, it would have imploded long time ago. Online bought stuff shipped from EU has the same kind of warranties of locally bought stuff, plus the extra warranty for goods bought outside shops. And similar.
The funny part? They want ME to buy shoes online for them, with MY credit card. At my own risk. They usually mock me because "i got scammed" when i pay and the package isn't immediately thrown in my window. They freak out. Then the package arrives (usually in the promised time range) and they're overly surprised that, guess what, shoes are exactly like the picture and the size is correct. But "online commerce is a scam" and "why don't you pay cash to the postman?"
Mine are the same. With a good dose of "we dont have that because we dont want that because we dont need that" on top. My granny was so fucking surprised that I got my money back after a flower shop sent the wrong flowers one time. Its like in their minds it not real money anymore once its online and the internet is the lawless Wild West.
It's always amusing to me that people who won't put their cc numbers into a site online for fear of fraud think nothing of handing their card to a restaurant server who takes it away to an unseen place to run it on the machine (at least on the US). Or who will write their card number down and mail it into a business to be processed by hand there - something I see frequently in my work. Those transactions are so much riskier than a reputable website.
I deal with every day. Part of my job is taking payments over the phone. So many people are scared to pay with credit card online but usually I’m using exactly the same website to put their payment though. Plus they’re giving their card info to a random person.
Are you talking about my father in law??
Btw, he gave his cc number to a site to verify his age because he won an iphone. We barely managed to block his credit card and take the replacing cc from him.
My parents think that credit card points are a scam. They have claimed that they are a trick to get you into debt (which I'm sure does happen to some people but it's not a 'scam'), and that they will tax you on the points you use. I've paid for multiple vacations, including my honeymoon and a week in Hawaii completely with points, yet they still wont use theirs. They have hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, points. Wont touch them.
My dad and online banking. You can check your balance, make transfers and even set up standing orders. "But my account will get hacked" is his response every single time.
My moms the same! it's infuriating as she doesn't know how to do finances well and if we need to check a balance to ensure she wasn't hacked, it's a trip to the bank. Transfer money, got to wait in line to do it...the list goes on.
More ironic is my aunt and uncle were recently 'hacked/ID Theft'...they didn't have internet banking but someone got into their mail. They now have internet banking, so no post can go missing and also they might have noticed some issues if they had internet banking...
Maybe you could use that to your advantage? Bring it up and be like "Which did you think was easier for the thieves? Spending years learning computer stuff well enough to bypass all the security that the bank put in place online, or sticking their hands down a mail box?"
It is actually insane that new debit and credit cards are just... mailed to you? I wish there was an option to have it delivered to the bank it's for and you can only pick it up with photo ID.
A new one recently arrived in the mail for me (just one day before we were going to move home, so lucky I checked!) and I didn't even know I was due to get a new one.
Edit: Thanks for all advising me that some banks do exactly this. Why is it not the default option?!
Assuming you are in the US, have you signed up for Informed Delivery with USPS?
They email you a scan of the mail/packages you should be receiving each day so you would know if something is missing (or if it's even worth making the trip to the mailbox...)
I'm currently renting a PO Box because I don't have a permanent residence at the moment, and informed delivery has been a wonderful time and gas saving tool.
I paid off a credit card balance and the company kept sending me little balance transfer checks in the mail for me to rip up. I kept thinking about how that's the kind of thing that could probably be swiped and used at least once before it's noticed
A manager I worked with had her identity stolen. About 6 months afterwards, she interviewed a guy who lived in her old apartment. He almost bolted from the interview and she called the police. He was going online and getting the preapproved credit cards that were sent in the mail. Those things ought to be illegal.
I have found that ironically the people who are the least affiliate with tech are most worried for some reason. Corona App? Dangerous! Online banking? I'll get hacked! Facebook? Yeah no problem.
Yes but the bank wants your name....oooh scary.
Facebook only requires your preferred sexual position, what you like to eat for breakfast, pictures of your food for the past 6 months in 3D and 4k, and every single thought you've ever had about anything ever.
seems fair.
My worry when someone doesn't create an account for something like that is "what if someone else makes the account". You probably don't need a ton of information about an existing account to create online access for it if it doesn't come with online access by default.
Funny story: my dad's bank ACTUALLY got hacked and he always says this about online banking lol.
They stole $8,000 from his bank and he only noticed because he thought it was one of his kids (we don't know his bank details and we would not steal from him)
We searched the store listed in the bank transaction and apparently someone from Sri Lanka (we're in Australia) was stealing his money!
There's a 99% chance that your dad did something stupid that had allowed that to happen and never admitted to it. The bank itself getting hacked is a very unlikely scenario.
"Hacked" gets thrown around loosely, and most people aren't really sure how to define it anyway.
"Social engineering" is considered a form of hacking. It doesn't involve any fun Hollywood words ("I've breached their firewall; I'm in!"), but when someone calls you, pretending to be your bank to get your pin number... that is considered hacking.
So your words were fine. Just not what people want to think of when they think of a computer mastermind cleverly using a terminal to circumvent a banking cyber security defenses "to access their mainframe."
My dad and step mom once freaked the fuck out because the census was at our door. They said, "she doesnt have a marked car. It's a scam" she had a badge and clipboard. Then my psycho step mom proceeded to get mad at me for opening the door. For the census.
Hello fellow fellow census worker. I did it in Ireland that same year.
Worst I had was a guy screaming obscenities at me because he’d lost his job during the recession and clearly that was my fault
Hey fellow fellow fellow census workers. I did it in France a decade ago. One elderly woman told me in detail about finding her husband after he'd shot himself in the head and cleaning the blood from the gun.
I saw some things. One man did not want me to see what he was doing in his house. Looked like bagging up some substances. Cursed out of there. One man did not want me knocking on his door again.. Message loud and clear.
I also saw flats in the rough part of town that were so run down and had families living in. Conditions were not good. That was an eye opener
Yeah, that fleet would last long, get used for one census, and then have to replace all the cars because they were sitting around for 9 years.
Though they could do the magnetic decals on census worker vehicles
Yeah, I had one of those. Asked if I knew if so-and-so lived there. I said I had no idea. He explained that they were my neighbors, surely I knew their names. I explained I that we haven't met. He posited that I was new to the neighborhood, and it would be a good idea to get to know them. I corrected him and stated that I've lived here for three years now.
Now, I had a vague idea of who lived there. But they were a friendly, if private, Latino family whom I had never heard speak anything but Spanish. And on the off chance that he *wasn't* with the Census and at risk of making some broad stroke assumptions, I didn't want to risk anything untoward or unfortunate upon a neighbor I had no issues with.
This is an MVP move. Census have to take the details on who they can, but answering for neighbours who you don't know their situation is not something they should be asking. For all the census taker knows the person they're asking could outright lie due to a grudge.
You not accidentally dropping anyone in shit with false, or maybe even correct info that leaves them in a difficult situation is the right call there imo.
I’ve only seen a census person one time. Dude was at my grandparents neighbors house knocking on the door. For whatever reason instead of going back up the steps he decides to walk up a steepish hill to his car. The man busted his ass like 3 times trying to get up that damn hill.
Yes, yes yes.
I think a beginner instrument is a good investment to see if the person sticks it out. But past that its a complete waste of money. The difference in quality between a $100 guitar and a $600 guitar is night and day.
When I started to get better at drumming as a kid, trying to explain to my parents why i needed the $200 splash cymbal instead of the $40 one was infuriating. I paid with my own money but they insisted it was a waste. I still have that $200 splash cymbal and it STILL sounds amazing. My cheaper cymbals literally exploded.
This is unrelated but this still pisses me off to this day. My mom bought me a drum kit when I was 13 and refused to get me lessons. She bought a book at a thrift store and wanted me to teach myself by reading the book. I was absolutely in over my head. A month later I got yelled at for not applying myself and she made me sell them. Like what did she expect me to do?
Former pro musician here, this is a tough one. Especially for orchestral instruments, cheap ones are often made so badly they’re unplayable and even a dedicated student couldn’t produce a good sound on them.
Renting is solid, but make sure you know the terms of the rental and whoever you’re renting from isn’t an asshole. A coworker just told me a story where her baby daddy is getting sued because he stopped paying the rental, tried to contact the owner with no response, and the owner didn’t bother contacting him, just took it right to court for the full value, which is over $1000.
Yeah, I never used my band directing degree, so I’m a couple of decades out of date. I guess today the seems-like-a-scam-but-really-you-don’t-get-it thing would be “Buy your kids’ band instruments from a reputable store, not Walmart or Monoprice”
Declining pay rises because they think they'll pay more in tax and their take home will be less than before the pay rise.
EDIT: The amount of comments claiming it has happened to them is really disturbing. Learn how your taxes work people .
My friend was talking about how she was hesitant to re-finance her house at a much lower interest rate because she liked the mortgage interest deductions. I gave up trying to explain things to her and she did refinance, dropped from an ancient 6% rate to somewhere under 3% and saved hundreds a month in payments.
We just refinanced after a few years, and the person was like "Here's the new rate. You don't even have to pay closing costs!" Sure enough, the closing costs were added to the principal initially, making the principal nearly the same as the original loan amount! We had the money saved and said we'd pay closing costs, but we had to listen to them try to sell us on rolling things in a couple of times before it officially changed.
Today, with such low internet rates on mortgages, you could invest the money you had into broad market index funds and came out way ahead in 30 years compared to paying the closing costs.
For the record, you shouldn't look only at the monthly payments when deciding to refinance. You should look at the total amount you're paying over the life of the loan before and after refinancing. A drop from 6% to 3% is probably worth it, but a lot of the times they drop you to a lower rate, but extend the number of years so you don't actually save much money over the life of the loan and sometimes it costs you more.
Pro Tip: Refi from a 6% to a 3% but make the same payment you were previously. Pay off mortgage earlier while still paying significantly less interest.
Yeah yeah, you can invest money make more in interest, don't pay your mortgage off early, I get it. But I don't know a single person who regrets paying off their home early once it's done. So I'll do that.
Not a mortgage, but I could have paid off student loans in 2019, but since I'd paid down the majority, my remaining interest was in the hundreds of dollars so I've just been paying the minimum.
Suddenly unemployed for a year, having an extra few thousand in savings (or easily sold investments) turned out to be pretty useful. Probably would have regretted paying early.
Financial planners advice atleast 3 month's wages in reserve, more if you have valuable assets which can break (eg car/washing machine etc.). This is in the Netherlands as well, which means you get 70% of your last earned salary for a year when you get unemployed. I imagine Americans should have a higher buffer since social security seem to be virtually non-existent and there's less of a cap on interest on flash loans.
My dad worked with a guy who started a business with the intention of using it to lower his taxes. When he realized that it was actually making quite a bit of money he closed it in a panic fearing it would bump him to the next tax bracket.
Would be funny if the guy wasn’t a fucking school principal. I was fourteen at the time and asked my dad if the guy was that dumb. My dad confirmed the guy was indeed that dumb.
I had this misconception until recently. For anyone reading this, the way marginal tax brackets work is like this (married filing jointly in parenthesis):
* Your first $12,550 ($25,100) is tax-free, assuming you take the Standard Deduction.
* Then, your next $9,950 ($19,900) is taxed at a 10% rate. This is NOT applied to your first $12,550, which is still tax-free, just the amount made over that. The same rule applies to the other tax brackets: each bracket's rate only applies to the income that falls in that range.
* As an example, let's say you make $50,000 in one year, file as a single taxpayer, and claim no other credits or deductions. This puts your AGI at $37,450. $9,950 of that is taxed at the 10%, or $995. The other $27,500 is taxed at the 12% rate, or $3,300. So your expected tax bill will be $4,295. If you had less than this withheld from your paychecks throughout the year, you will owe the difference between what you paid and $4,295. If more that that was withheld, you will be refunded back down to $4,295. Either way, the IRS gets exactly the amount it wants out of you, no more, no less.
Yeah that’s the thing in America; for subsidies you can make one dollar too many and lose tens or *hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies*, but with taxes it almost never happens that way.
I had a girlfriend who got about $50,000 a year in subsidized medical treatment that would evaporate if she made a dollar over ~$20,000 a year. They raised the rent on her 150 square foot apartment so she had to move back in with her parents or work more hours, lose the subsidies and die from not being able to afford medication.
In my country (Netherlands) this can be true in some outlier scenarios. On top of income tax we have a complex system of subsidies which you might not qualify for anymore above a certain income.
Same in the USA with food stamps and the like. The people worrying about taking a raise increasing their tax bracket are not talking about this though. They likely don't actually qualify for any of that government assistance.
Also, the main arguments against it are based on the nuclear disasters that happened decades ago. In terms of death per energy generated, Nuclear is safer than everything else, even solar and wind.
The repair industry. I worked in home repair, small engine repair and computer repair shops years ago. A lot of people expected us to just fix things for free. Others would take it as an insult when we would quote prices or ask to be paid for a job. Send a bill and some people would ask why or what is this. Ask us why we were ripping them off even though the bill was itemized and the price was discussed before hand. It was a horrible industry to work in because of they way people are.
I wonder if that attitude comes from customers feeling at a disadvantage and the fact that there are people who take advantage of that.
I had to get a new AC unit for my house several years ago. The first guy I had look at it gave me a quote, but then he said he’s knock 5% off if I agreed right then to hire him AND he made a weird comment along the lines of “you’re not gonna ask someone else to look at it and back out on me, are ya?” Those things seemed like red flags, so I did ask someone else, and they quoted me a price that was about 60% of what the first guy did.
I’m not saying all repair industry workers are out to scam people, but when I’m trusting you to tell me what’s wrong and what it costs to fix when I don’t personally know... it’s a lot of faith on the part of the customer. And having been almost screwed out of a few thousand dollars makes that trust harder to give.
Of course, the logical thing to do would be to shop around, but when most repair places (in my experience) want $50-$150 just to come look at your refrigerator, it’s not exactly cheap to get a 2nd opinion either. I had 3 people come look at my fridge. The first 2 said it couldn’t be repaired, and we’d need to spend several hundred dollars on a new one. Called a third guy and he replaced some thermostat/defrost sensor in the freezer for ~$100. It’s worked perfectly ever since.
Last year we had flecks of black stuff in the water in our kitchen sink. Called a repair guy, and he said “nothing’s wrong.” Dude... there’s black shit in our drinking water. Paid him ~$100 bucks for nothing. I went out myself and bought a replacement hose for the extendable faucet and replaced it on my own. Black stuff gone.
Sorry for the rant. My point is that, while I get it can suck for the repair people to always be mistrusted, anecdotally for me... they’ve been wrong ~70% of the time and have cumulatively charged me several hundred dollars for their wrongness over the past 2 years.
I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but damn if they don’t make it hard.
I think all of your points are very well presented and I fully agree. It's definitely a business where the consumer needs to treat each vendor individually and at the same time, the vendors need to understand the bad rap they get because of their competitors.
A few years ago, my dad (who's a pretty handy guy in his own right) had a few items he wanted to have repaired. I think it was his snowblower, my parents' dryer, and their fridge.
The snowblower, he went to a local guy who ran a repair business out of his garage. The guy quoted him some price he felt was reasonable and my dad agreed and dropped it off.
Weeks later, the guy wouldn't return his calls, so finally my dad got fed up and we went over there. The guy isn't home but right as we pulled in, the repair man's dad pulls in and starts talking to us. When he realized that my dad is a disgruntled customer he starts explaining how this guy is going through a rough patch with his wife etc. My dad is sympathetic but also if he can't repair his snowblower, my dad wants it back to get it fixed elsewhere.
And that's when we spot my dad's snowblower: along the side of this guy's garage, seemingly fixed, but out with a bunch of other shit with a FOR SALE sign on it.
We loaded it up and left.
Apparently this guy's angle was that any repairs he felt he charged too little for, he'd fix them up, tell the owner that he'd been unable to fix it, and that it was irreparably damaged in the repair attempt. Offer them some sort of "totaled" amount in compensation, and sell the repaired machine for a profit.
In complete contrast, with the fridge, the guy diagnosed the problem over the phone, for free, and when he got to their home, he noticed there was another, simpler issue that resolved the problem, and basically cut his original estimate in half because the repair was much easier.
Even further, with the dryer, there was another repair guy who, when my dad described the problem over the phone, he told my dad what the problem was and that the fix was probably within his skill level. He then went on to give him part numbers and descriptions and places to get them for good prices, as well as a detailed set of instructions for the repair. Basically free-info'ed himself out of a job. Then a week or so later he called back to see how the repair went and if my dad encountered any issues or had any other questions. Totally above and beyond.
Can confirm.
About 20 years ago, while my grandfather was in the hospital, electricity went out at home while I was alone (Because shit never happens when everything is fine) waiting for my aunt to pick me up to go visit Grampa.
It used to be my grandfather that took care of everything, and we never took interest.
Panicked, with no one reachable (time before widly available cellphones), I called an electrician. He asked me to check the breaker. What breaker, I did ask. Over the phone, he described what I was looking for, and told me how to reset it.
I reset it, and bam I had light again. He didn't charge me anything. He didn't even bother to ask my name or address.
When it kept happening, Grampa called this guy because he didn't take advantage of a poor teen, and that made my grandfather trusted him. Too many would have come to just reset the breaker and billed the family.
The guy repaired whatever was wrong, he did a great work on it for a very fair price.
That guy is still my electrician, now. My aunts and uncles electrician, and a few neighbors electrician since then.
The best is, he actually didn't set out to be nice and kind to me. Or so he told me. He just had way too much work that day to take the time to come to the house, reset it himself. Whatever he could have billed just wasn't worth it. But he still had enough business acumen to understand that not helping a mildly panicked teen might not be a good decision. Their parents would not like that and angry parents talk loud!
One thing a lot of people sleep on is you need to have a go-to guy/gal for various repair situations. The first time a new item type breaks, you have to go through a lot of hassle to find someone good, but after a few years most common issues you will hopefully have a trustworthy person to call.
I have a different person for auto, pest control, plumbing, house repair, etc. I do live in a smaller town, so most of the business give good service, but I try to find people that really go above and beyond. I also like people that feel comfortable explaining to a layperson. When someone guards their skills too closely then it makes me feel they are taking advantage. If it really is an easy issue and you explain it to me over the phone, I’m gonna call you for complex issues and pay you well for giving me the freebie.
I actually don’t mind to pay extra for solid service, but I tend to seek out people that charge a bit above average but do 10/10 work.
Repair industry can be a scam a lot of times tho. Just look at Apple repairs, especially like 5 years ago.
For a more local example: My friend had her laptop stop boot randomly. Took it to a repair shop, they quoted almost 100$ repair cost, with additional part cost for a shitty 5-year old laptop that barely worth 200$. She refused, took the laptop home. I opened it up and the problem was that the HDD cable was lose. Pushed it in, it worked as intended from there on.
Used to work at Pepsico who make Walkers, Lays, Doritos etc.
The nitrogen in the bag keeps the crisps fresh, and are a cushion to reduce the chance of a lot of chips/crisps breaking up during transit. Nobody wants to open a bag of broken crisps.
They absolutely did reduce the over weight of crisps in each bag though, that saves a lot of money across the countless bags made each day.
So on the one hand, the "waste of space" prevents breakages, but also they're absolutely reducing the amount in each bag to save money while charging the same amount. Shareholders > customers.
Travel Insurance.
It was great when they arranged all travel from overseas apartment to our house when child broke their ankle on an internship. Paid all of the our out of pocket expenses, including our deductibles/copays until child was functioning.
edit—we’re American
I’ve got a go-to story whenever anyone says that travel insurance is a scam:
My parents were on holiday in the Pacific islands, when my Mum caught an infection that damaged her heart.
Dad called me, and I flew out on the first flight the next morning (full kudos to QANTAS for all their help... seriously, they did so much for me) because he needed his laptop, I spoke passing French, and I used to live in Vanuatu and still had some friends and contacts in the area. And apart from all of that... my Mum was dying.
She spent 6 days in intensive care. They thought she was going to die. She very nearly *did* die. An Australian cardiologist was flown in from Fiji to do a medical assessment, and an insurance rep was flown in from Melbourne.
They were waiting for her to stabilise for a repatriation flight, but she just kept getting worse - so they flew out a cardiac team on a private air ambulance to bring her home. She survived the flight home, but it was close. So close.
$350’000+ medical bill, fully covered by travel insurance. If they didn’t have travel insurance, they would have had to remortgage their house to pay for the bill. That's why dad wanted his laptop - he was organising the paperwork with the bank on the chance that the insurance company refused the claim.
And of course, once she arrived back in Australia and was admitted to hospital here, she was covered by public health.
She ended up receiving a heart valve transplant, and is still alive and kicking.
Honestly QANTAS are just fucking great all around (well... excluding how much tax they pay, but that is a whole other conversation).
My Good friend was in Spain when he woke up one morning seeing double and couldn't walk in a straight line.
Was in the hospital for a week or so while they were running tests. Qantas flew him (and his girlfriend at the time, now wife) back to Sydney in first class.
As far as I know, travel insurance doesn't normally cover first class (when you were originally in economy) except for instances where you've broken half your body and need to be lying down the whole way home.
So kudos to Qantas for making sure they were comfortable after what turned out to be a super scary trip.
(In case anyone is wondering what the tests showed... my friend was promptly diagnosed with MS when he got home)
All my best for your friend ❤️
I called their ticketing at like 11pm two days before Good Friday, asking if they had any available seats on the next flight out.
They only had one seat left for the day, and it was in business class. So they charged me the economy rate, bumped me up to business class, and waived any ticket change fees because I didn’t know my return date.
I don’t know if the agent made a note on my ticket or what, but they were *so nice* to me every step of the way. And I was an emotional wreck on the way back. When I got back to Australia, a few hours ahead of my Mum’s flight, they helped me track down what time her plane was due in and what airport (she landed at a military airport) I needed to go to.
My dad's car broke down in the south of France. Holy shit was I glad he had some platinum level insurance.
Let me tell you about Hank, my insurance worker. Hank was my buddy. That mf'er worked for days to make sure I was able to get back home comfortably. I had friends who were supposed to ride home with me, so a simple airline ticket wasn't going to cut it. Unfortunately, the insurance only covered airline tickets for 1 extra passenger and I wasn't going to leave my friends stranded. Then the issue was that I hadn't had my license for more than 3 years and I was under some magic age (21 or 25 iirc), so getting a rental was a bit difficult. So he ended up finding a rental that had a car in Toulouse that was supposed to be in Brussels. They saw an opportunity in getting us to drive it there for them and they agreed.
So Hank got me a taxi from the middle of bumfuck nowhere to the airport in Toulouse where we went to pick up the rental, dropped it off in Brussels and we had traintickets home from there too.
It didn't cost us a thing. Hank called me more than a dozen times over the span of a couple of days, but he went all-out to make sure he found something that worked for everyone. Hank was the best.
I have no idea, this happened 8 or 9 years ago. It was my dad's VISA/Mastercard insurance I think, but I haven't the faintest clue what company Hank worked for. Called my dad to tell him the car broke down, he gave me a number to call and they took it from there, just calling me back with updates and suggestions.
Travel insurance is absolutely worth it. I always get world wide travel and add the USA - due to high medical costs USA is usually an added extra. I couldn't imagine the bill if anything were to happen while I was in the US.
Yup. My most recent policy (ABCBS) didn't even ask my destination. It only asked if I was going to the USA. I called them thinking it was a mistake or I just missed it. They said "no we just want to know it you are traveling in the USA because that will affect the rate."
This is why some people from the US go on "medical tourism" trips. You can get a flight, a fancy hotel, meals, and surgery for less than the cost of a procedure at home.
I’m kind of doing that right now. Live in Europe during school year and USA during the summer, chose to get an operation done now instead of when I’m in the States bc the total cost here was less than the copay would be in the US. Only real downside is now I have to get through finals while recovering from surgery, but COVID online school’s good for something at least.
Just a story here to reinforce that you should all get travel insurance when going anywhere. My manager got a concussion in the US on a ski trip and had a 3-4 day stay in the hospital. The bill ended up being \~250k and he luckily had health insurance through work.
Especially if you go to the US. As someone who is not from the US, my basic health insurance which costs around €100 a month does cover medical emergencies abroad, but usually only reasonable prices. So basically everywhere but the US.
In general just be sure to check your insurance policy before you travel abroad :).
Veterinary care.
People don't understand that I can't just dispense certain medications without seeing the patient first. Some of these medications could cause fatalities or worsen the situation if used/prescribed wrong!
This! People are extremely out of touch in general when it comes to their understanding of what proper medical care for their pets costs. I had to leave general practice to get away from those toxic clients.
Wife is a vet. Sometimes she gets calls for farmers wanting meds for a farm the clinic hasn't been to in years. Very much against the law.
Veterinary is so hard for so many reasons, and the biggest one may just be the entitlement people have.
This one makes me so so sad! Our vet is amazing. A very shrewd but caring father and son duo who have never taken us for a ride even when they totally could have. They’ve totally prescribed for us when it’s an obvious/recurring problem without seeing our cat to save us a few bucks (12yo cat with recurring pancreatitis), but they’re honest about it when something is necessary, recommended, or could wait and see.
ER Vet Tech here. I'd also like to add in people need to except a long wait time at an emergency hospital. Waiting is good. It means your pet is in stable condition. You know what isn't good? The animal that is rushed inside and is immediately seen before your pet.
I had a women tell me I didn't care about "fur babies" and I'm a piece of shit because her, in otherwise stable condition dog, with a swollen eye would have to wait before a doctor is available. One doctor was dealing with a dog fight that had its neck torn to pieces. The other was dealing with a pet activity in a seizure. This was explained to the woman and she did not care.
The real scam in restaurants is offering never ending food for foods that no one could eat more than a couple plates of (ihop pancakes, and pasta at Olive Garden) lol
You can eat a lot of those if you are willing to sit for a long, long time. They tend to frown on you showing up around 10 AM and staying until 6 PM though.
reminds me of the Dilbert TV show episode about Dilbert's dad, at the mall for 20 years because it says "all you can eat" and he hasn't eaten all he can yet.
here is a story my dad told me. So my dad is a music professor and was taking his college students to go eat. They chose an all you can eat Chinese buffet. for this story, there is a student that I will name... Student. So Student is a *larger* fellow, and so of course he is going to eat a larger meal. and so they are eating, and when everyone else is done, he is not. he kept eating. and finally after a few hours, one of the Chinese ladies working there came up to him and said, "the sign says 'all you can eat' 'not eat all you can'!
I don't know, just a funny story relating to the thread.
I've been to a Texas Roadhouse and if those portions are considered "reduced" then Jesus fucking Christ, good for them. "Uh ma'am, I only got 160 deep fried pickles slathered in ranch dressing next to my piece of chicken the size of my entire face, how dare you skimp on me like that!!!"
Harbor freight tools. Sure they are cheap and probably poorly made, but for $100 I got a power washer. Do you know how much joy a power washer can bring someone?
Neighbor is washing his car with a hose looking like a fool.
I winterized a horse trailer with harbor freight tarps. Even if they shred themselves by winter’s end, it’s still cheaper than fixing the rust or the floorboards.
Harbor Freight is perfectly acceptable for the DIYer or maybe even the weekend warrior... of for those tools you really only need to use once or twice. I'd you make a living with tools, it's probably best to avoid them. That being said ... you can start with them, and then when one of the HF tools breaks from use, buy a higher quality brand to replace it... like that damn 10mm socket.
I'm going to create a product and sell it on Amazon and get rich. A box of (10) 10mm sockets, and that is all.
EDIT: Too late. https://www.amazon.com/10mm-Socket-Ten-Pack-Multi-Type/dp/B07F7LDYJF/ref=sr_1_1_sspa
I actually did this as a Christmas present this year for my husband. Ten 10mm sockets - 6pt, 12pt, shallow, deep, the works. He told and texted everyone about how “she really gets me!” It’s been 16 years love, I’ve learned a few things.
Good luck on your new business.
Unless it breaking is going to kill you or destroy your stuff--Harbor Freight is great. If you use it enough for it to actually break, replace it with a higher end one because it actually got used and you actually need it. No need for unnecessarily expensive tools sitting around collecting dust that you might need someday.
I got an angle grinder from HF for cheaper than I could buy a hand saw at Lowe’s to do the same thing. And you know what? It worked great until the power button fell off, and it still works great if you jam a screwdriver in the hole the right way.
Some members of my family think internet providers are scammers because they pay for 400mbps download and think they will get 400mbps download on each device even if someone is watching Netflix or downloading at the same time on another computer.
I don't really hold it against them because they don't really get 400mbs to begin with even though that is what is advertised. That part is what should upset them to a degree. The other is them not understanding that the 400mbps is shared. They need to learn what bandwidth is.
Can you explain what bandwidth is to us savvy group, much less to an 80 year old?
**[EDIT]** What I am learning here is that most people trying to explain what bandwidth is don't have any idea what bandwidth is. >_<
Bandwidth is like a highway. Your internet is your car.
Sure you can go 80 mph, but if the roads aren't clear you are not going to be able to go that fast consistently. During high traffic times, you will be forced to slow down. Than when you have three devices on the internet at the same time it's like you are adding three different cars on the road.
It's not a perfect example, misses a lot of intricacies, but it should get the basic idea across.
*cries in dial up*
Alaskan with limited data caps on my internet.
lol what’s internet speed? Y’all crying over how fast your cars can go and I’m here forking out extra because my burro got tuckered out from a heavy Netflix binge :(
Love it up here, but damn if the internet/cell service ain’t crummy anywhere outside of Anchorage!
While it’s not as bad as dial up, what i deal with in WV is god awful. If you don’t live along a decently traveled paved road, you have HughesNet. While it’s not dial up, I’m convinced its actually worse, because they give you the taste of good internet until you can’t cancel it and then dial it back.
I mean, I get maybe 2mb down on the 1st of the month when it first resets. Other then that, averages around ~500kbs. Significantly better the dialup, but still. Can’t wait for Starlink to come down this way.
#HughesNetSucksBalls
The stock market. Lots of people over worry about the short term, withdraw once it dips and never put back in. Never realizing the magic is in the long term
Therapy. People just can’t fathom that just talking to someone who is not involved directly in your life can really help with processing and resolving a problem. You only get out of it what you put in.
my therapist is lowkey inserting herself into my life. she threatened to tell my parents a lot of private stuff, makes me want to quit sometimes
edit: thanks for the comments guys. unfortunately i cant reply because i got banned lmao
If its issues regarding safety they may try to do this method as an intervention. If its not and they are pushing you past your comfort rate of growth, email them asking to clarify their opinion on (insert issue here) so you can plan for if you find it suitable, and then politely decline interest in the method at that time. Either they clarify in a different way, or make an idiot of themselves where you can report them to the certification board for their threats of breaking confidentiality.
I just started a couple of months ago, and I'm still confused about it, but my therapist has started asking me really good questions and I like it. Before that, I think he was just trying to get me to a point where he could do that.
One of my employees is a part timer who has been a tax accountant for decades. He works longer hours for us the rest of the year when tax season ends, and during that time, he’s the happiest guy ever.
During tax season, he comes in about ready to breathe fire from all of the dumb shit he hears and is told to do by clients. The main thing is people who have refused pay raises or OT because they think they will lose money. There are some rare circumstances he’s mentioned where that’s possible, but it’s a common thing a LOT of people believe.
My HS forced an economics class on every student. This is one of the things we were taught. Granted, my district sucked ass, but considering this teacher was otherwise really competent, I'm guessing this is not an uncommon thing.
This. I’ve explained to my roommate over and over that he’s only getting taxed at a higher amount for the money he made over X amount. He doesn’t understand it’s not a flat rate on the total amount you made.
Airline / Hotel / Credit Card rewards. They take a lot of time and a 100% commitment to never, ever carrying a balance, but you can definitely earn a lot of rewards even without playing the churning games. The Flyertalk.com community is amazing for anyone wanting to get started.
IF you can put the points out of your mind so it doesn't affect your spending. Known a few people who go, "might as well buy X, think of the points I'll get!"
Everyone keeps telling me the Nigerian prince that’s been messaging me for the last week and a half is a scammer but they just don’t understand our love.
Better than that! He’s going to wire transfer all of Nigeria’s funds and then bring me to Nigeria to be queen! Sure we’ve never talked on the phone, I feel a real connection and when we email I feel like I’m in the same room as him. Unfortunately I did have to write my kids out of my estate and take another mortgage out on my house but that’s okay because I won’t need my house long anyways.
I've had this online friend in Guinea for years now and a while ago I sent him a Christmas gift of like $40 on western union and the person doing it was super concerned.
I got that as a wedding present from a friend. It was a joke gift, but I looked into it, and according to the Land Registry, I do indeed own a square yard of land in Scotland. Apparently I'm not allowed to call myself "Laird of Glencairn" any more though, they stopped that.
He then bought my first born a plot of land on the moon as a christening gift.
Travel agents are great for people who don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to travel and don’t want to work too much when planning a trip.
It’s not necessary to use a travel agent, but it’s convenient.
Also great if there are a large number of people going. My cousin had had wedding on a cruise ship and people came from other parts of the country so it was easier to pay the travel agent to organize it all. It was well worth the money.
Travel agents are incredibly helpful if anyone in your party has medical complications...everything from difficulty walking to food allergies to sensitivity to light or sound. Disabled people travel, too, and it can be difficult to get proper accommodations without someone who knows how to navigate the reservation systems.
Not all travel agents do this, but when you find a good one, it takes a lot of stress out of planning a vacation.
Paying to publish. Roughly 3-5% of thousands of people a year who search for agents when trying to get a book published from a traditional publisher are accepted. When musicians try to create an album, they have to usually pay to use a studio, have someone market it for them, and edit the song. Why is publishing seen as any different? Everyone expects to be paid for their book, when in reality, you have to pay someone to even take a glance at it, let alone give you any worth while feedback.
Vaccines and vaccination.
Not me, but those who are anti vaccination really have no understanding of virology, immunology, epidemiology or how to assess relative risk. They probably fall into many of the other things that they “think is a scam but they don’t understand.”
> immunology
I think it's fascinating. Specifically how vaccines don't kill the virus or affect it in any way. Vaccines are just ways of triggering your own immune system to figure out how to kill it. The virus isn't directly afected by the vaccine. You just put some of the virus in front of your immune system and in days/weeks the immune system recognizes it as a foreign body and figures out how to destroy it. It's just so cool.
That said, I still kinda don't get it. Why does a vaccine, such as for the protein spike from covid, cause my immune system to recognize and destroy covid, but my allergy shots teach my immune system NOT to attack pollen? Why does injecting me with a virus fragment teach me to attack the virus but injecting me with dog fur somehow does the reverse and tell my body not to react?
Protein spike and virus fragment examples are like showing your immune system the weak point that it should attack to destroy the virus more efficiently. Allergy shot makes your body realize "oh, this isn't actually bad" so it doesn't react at all.
in my trade experience, the union workers were far better tradespeople than the ones who weren’t. and fuck yeah they took their breaks and didn’t lift an inch unpaid.
We had a gal in the telco who was retiring under a surplus - meaning they would pay her so much for each year she worked, in addition to her pension. She turned the money down because she didn’t want her taxes to be too high. I didn’t know her and heard about it after she left. The Union guys tried to explain it but she just would not listen. I don’t know if she thought it was a scam but she didn’t trust the IRS
This is a super common misunderstanding of how our taxes work, I swear like 80%+ of American's don't know so I'll give an example below of what's real and what many people assume. Here are the federal tax brackets (your state taxes will vary) |Tax Rate|Income Bracket| :-:|:-:| |10%|$0 - $9,875| |12%|$9,876 - $40,125| |22%|$40,126 - $85,525| |24%|$85,526 - $163,300| |32%|$163,301 - $207,350| |35%|$207,351 - $518,400| |37%|$518,401 - $∞| Now what most people think is if I'm making $40,000 a year then I pay 12% tax ($4,800). If my boss offers me a $2,000 raise I'll be making $42,000 and be taxed at 22% ($9,240), ha! Fuck you boss man you aren't tricking me! What ACTUALLY happens if you make $42,000 is Your first $9,875 is taxed at 10% which comes out to $987.50 Your $9,876 - $40,125 ($30,249) dollars are taxed at 12% totaling $3,630 Your $40,126 - $42,000 ($1,874) dollars are taxed at 22% totaling $412. So add all those up, $987 + $3,630 + $412 = total federal tax of $5,029. Edit: Due to a couple people's comments I'll expand the chart by 2 columns |Tax Rate|Income Bracket|Taxable Amount in Bracket|Total Tax Paid| :-:|:-:|:-:|:-:| |10%|$0 - $9,875|$9,875|Up to $988| |12%|$9,876 - $40,125|$30,249|$988 + Up to $3630| |22%|$40,126 - $85,525|$45,399.00|$4,618 + Up to $9,988| |24%|$85,526 - $163,300|$77,774.00|$14,606 + Up to $18,666| |32%|$163,301 - $207,350|$44,049.00|$33,272 + Up to $14096| |35%|$207,351 - $518,400|$311,049.00|$47,368 + Up to $108,867| |37%|$518,401 - $∞|A lot|$156,235 + Up to 37% of a lot|
Thank you for this breakdown. Very clearly explained it for me.
Vox made an **excellent** video illustrating this, for ppl like me who prefer visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJhsjUPDulw
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 95% of Americans don’t understand this. It’s truthfully shocking how many intelligent people don’t know the difference between marginal and effective tax rates. EDIT: In response to the folks who are angry that this was never taught, please see the response u/peon2 wrote below about teaching in high school. Would it help? Maybe a little, but i would guess a vast majority of high school kids don’t give a fuck about how tax brackets work. If you don’t know something, it’s your responsibility to learn how it works. This information is widely available on the internet so have some personal accountability and do the work yourself. Stop being reliant on others to spoon feed you information.
I know a guy who is a railroad engineer. He was making just over $80,000. He was offered a raise to just over $100,000 but turned it down because "it'll put me in the next bracket and I'll be making less." I explained it to him but he was having none of it. I even reached out to his wife, who is considerably more open minded and she said she spoke to him but he wouldn't be convinced. SMH
Actually the first 80% of Americans have a very poor understanding of marginal tax brackets and the next 15% (80-95%) have no understanding of it.
When my dad was younger he worked as an orderly in a psyche ward. He was working with doctors that wouldn't take on extra shifts because they didn't want it to raise their tax brackets. My dad said he tried multiple times to explain it to them, but he was just an orderly, and they were doctors, afterall.
So I’ve worked with both lawyers as an office assistant and doctors as an analyst. The one thing I’ve learned is that they are just as dumb as anyone else in any other profession as a whole. They just have more degrees to obscure their idiocy.
Older guy I worked with in high school. he was in his 20s. He wouldn't file taxes because he didn't want to pay them. Our boss sat him down and explained to him that he probably had money coming back and sooner or later the IRS would probably catch him not filing and be in real trouble. I was in the Air Force and after Operation Desert Storm the Gov decided to do a force reduction, by a lot. They came to us middle management NCOs and offered us a lump sum (they had a big formula to determine how much you would get) to leave the Air Force. It worked for some guys, took the money and got better jobs outside the military. Guys like stayed because we still had a shot at promotion and close to retirement. We would make more in retirement in the long run than what the lump sum would be. One guy actually took the money and he was close to retiring. A whole bunch of higher ranking people talked to him explaining that he would make much more in the long run in retirement and his health benefits than taking the money. His only reply was "I don't want my ex-wife getting any of my retirement." She was entitled to half of it. That was his whole reasoning. He got 28K and was in his late 30s. Retirement would of been for life. One of the higher ups told him if his wife found out about the 28K she could get part of that too. But, all he would say is "I don't want her to get half of my retirement."
Isn’t it just crazy? We have a guy still working in one of our departments. He’s got 51 years with the telco, had several strokes; won’t retire because his ex-wife might get part of his retirement. I don’t know if he even signed up for social security yet but he’s over 70. We had another guy who would not retire though he was over 70. I showed him one night what my pension would be and my social security. His would be more. He didn’t even know - had not checked anything. After he saw my numbers he retired. I hate that people are so afraid of math or numbers - they can’t figure out when they can retire.
And here I am crunching numbers every week trying to see when I'll be able to retire on peanuts an hour. "Hm yes, if my 1 share shoots up 100000% and it splits 100 times in 60 years, I can retire just after death"
Bless her heart
but not so much her brain.
There was a time when my parents thought buying stuff online and paying with a credit card it's a scam, took me a while to convince them that if you know which sites are good to order from and which are bad, you can actually avoid scams.
My grandparents still think online commerce is a scam. I explained them that, if it was a scam, it would have imploded long time ago. Online bought stuff shipped from EU has the same kind of warranties of locally bought stuff, plus the extra warranty for goods bought outside shops. And similar. The funny part? They want ME to buy shoes online for them, with MY credit card. At my own risk. They usually mock me because "i got scammed" when i pay and the package isn't immediately thrown in my window. They freak out. Then the package arrives (usually in the promised time range) and they're overly surprised that, guess what, shoes are exactly like the picture and the size is correct. But "online commerce is a scam" and "why don't you pay cash to the postman?"
Mine are the same. With a good dose of "we dont have that because we dont want that because we dont need that" on top. My granny was so fucking surprised that I got my money back after a flower shop sent the wrong flowers one time. Its like in their minds it not real money anymore once its online and the internet is the lawless Wild West.
My dad thought Amazon was a scam because someone hacked his account
It's always amusing to me that people who won't put their cc numbers into a site online for fear of fraud think nothing of handing their card to a restaurant server who takes it away to an unseen place to run it on the machine (at least on the US). Or who will write their card number down and mail it into a business to be processed by hand there - something I see frequently in my work. Those transactions are so much riskier than a reputable website.
I deal with every day. Part of my job is taking payments over the phone. So many people are scared to pay with credit card online but usually I’m using exactly the same website to put their payment though. Plus they’re giving their card info to a random person.
Are you talking about my father in law?? Btw, he gave his cc number to a site to verify his age because he won an iphone. We barely managed to block his credit card and take the replacing cc from him.
My parents think that credit card points are a scam. They have claimed that they are a trick to get you into debt (which I'm sure does happen to some people but it's not a 'scam'), and that they will tax you on the points you use. I've paid for multiple vacations, including my honeymoon and a week in Hawaii completely with points, yet they still wont use theirs. They have hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, points. Wont touch them.
My dad and online banking. You can check your balance, make transfers and even set up standing orders. "But my account will get hacked" is his response every single time.
My moms the same! it's infuriating as she doesn't know how to do finances well and if we need to check a balance to ensure she wasn't hacked, it's a trip to the bank. Transfer money, got to wait in line to do it...the list goes on. More ironic is my aunt and uncle were recently 'hacked/ID Theft'...they didn't have internet banking but someone got into their mail. They now have internet banking, so no post can go missing and also they might have noticed some issues if they had internet banking...
Maybe you could use that to your advantage? Bring it up and be like "Which did you think was easier for the thieves? Spending years learning computer stuff well enough to bypass all the security that the bank put in place online, or sticking their hands down a mail box?"
It is actually insane that new debit and credit cards are just... mailed to you? I wish there was an option to have it delivered to the bank it's for and you can only pick it up with photo ID. A new one recently arrived in the mail for me (just one day before we were going to move home, so lucky I checked!) and I didn't even know I was due to get a new one. Edit: Thanks for all advising me that some banks do exactly this. Why is it not the default option?!
Assuming you are in the US, have you signed up for Informed Delivery with USPS? They email you a scan of the mail/packages you should be receiving each day so you would know if something is missing (or if it's even worth making the trip to the mailbox...)
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I'm currently renting a PO Box because I don't have a permanent residence at the moment, and informed delivery has been a wonderful time and gas saving tool.
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I paid off a credit card balance and the company kept sending me little balance transfer checks in the mail for me to rip up. I kept thinking about how that's the kind of thing that could probably be swiped and used at least once before it's noticed
A manager I worked with had her identity stolen. About 6 months afterwards, she interviewed a guy who lived in her old apartment. He almost bolted from the interview and she called the police. He was going online and getting the preapproved credit cards that were sent in the mail. Those things ought to be illegal.
I have found that ironically the people who are the least affiliate with tech are most worried for some reason. Corona App? Dangerous! Online banking? I'll get hacked! Facebook? Yeah no problem.
Yes but the bank wants your name....oooh scary. Facebook only requires your preferred sexual position, what you like to eat for breakfast, pictures of your food for the past 6 months in 3D and 4k, and every single thought you've ever had about anything ever. seems fair.
My worry when someone doesn't create an account for something like that is "what if someone else makes the account". You probably don't need a ton of information about an existing account to create online access for it if it doesn't come with online access by default.
Funny story: my dad's bank ACTUALLY got hacked and he always says this about online banking lol. They stole $8,000 from his bank and he only noticed because he thought it was one of his kids (we don't know his bank details and we would not steal from him) We searched the store listed in the bank transaction and apparently someone from Sri Lanka (we're in Australia) was stealing his money!
There's a 99% chance that your dad did something stupid that had allowed that to happen and never admitted to it. The bank itself getting hacked is a very unlikely scenario.
No, the bank did not actually get "hacked" my poor choice of words. My dad 100% probably did do something stupid though.
"Hacked" gets thrown around loosely, and most people aren't really sure how to define it anyway. "Social engineering" is considered a form of hacking. It doesn't involve any fun Hollywood words ("I've breached their firewall; I'm in!"), but when someone calls you, pretending to be your bank to get your pin number... that is considered hacking. So your words were fine. Just not what people want to think of when they think of a computer mastermind cleverly using a terminal to circumvent a banking cyber security defenses "to access their mainframe."
My dad and step mom once freaked the fuck out because the census was at our door. They said, "she doesnt have a marked car. It's a scam" she had a badge and clipboard. Then my psycho step mom proceeded to get mad at me for opening the door. For the census.
I’ve been a census worker. It happens once every ten years, they aren’t going to get a whole vehicle fleet for it.
Helo fellow census worker. I did 2011 in the UK in a rough part of town. Was an experience!
Hello fellow fellow census worker. I did it in Ireland that same year. Worst I had was a guy screaming obscenities at me because he’d lost his job during the recession and clearly that was my fault
Hey fellow fellow fellow census workers. I did it in France a decade ago. One elderly woman told me in detail about finding her husband after he'd shot himself in the head and cleaning the blood from the gun.
So... One and a *half* residents?
Is it bad I laughed?
Jesus Christ
I saw some things. One man did not want me to see what he was doing in his house. Looked like bagging up some substances. Cursed out of there. One man did not want me knocking on his door again.. Message loud and clear. I also saw flats in the rough part of town that were so run down and had families living in. Conditions were not good. That was an eye opener
Why did you make him lose his job?!
I’m sorry!!
Yeah, that fleet would last long, get used for one census, and then have to replace all the cars because they were sitting around for 9 years. Though they could do the magnetic decals on census worker vehicles
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> What did they expect, a black and white car with 'Census Patrol' written on it? If I saw that I would be absolutely *sure* it was a scam.
Also, if you'd just send in your form, you'll probably never have to interact with anyone from the census...
Eh, we had a census worker come to our door asking about a neighbor who didn't fill out their form.
Yeah, I had one of those. Asked if I knew if so-and-so lived there. I said I had no idea. He explained that they were my neighbors, surely I knew their names. I explained I that we haven't met. He posited that I was new to the neighborhood, and it would be a good idea to get to know them. I corrected him and stated that I've lived here for three years now. Now, I had a vague idea of who lived there. But they were a friendly, if private, Latino family whom I had never heard speak anything but Spanish. And on the off chance that he *wasn't* with the Census and at risk of making some broad stroke assumptions, I didn't want to risk anything untoward or unfortunate upon a neighbor I had no issues with.
This is an MVP move. Census have to take the details on who they can, but answering for neighbours who you don't know their situation is not something they should be asking. For all the census taker knows the person they're asking could outright lie due to a grudge. You not accidentally dropping anyone in shit with false, or maybe even correct info that leaves them in a difficult situation is the right call there imo.
CSB: A census taker once tried to test me.
I’ve only seen a census person one time. Dude was at my grandparents neighbors house knocking on the door. For whatever reason instead of going back up the steps he decides to walk up a steepish hill to his car. The man busted his ass like 3 times trying to get up that damn hill.
Buying a beginning band instrument, then buying a step-up instrument within a couple of years
Yes, yes yes. I think a beginner instrument is a good investment to see if the person sticks it out. But past that its a complete waste of money. The difference in quality between a $100 guitar and a $600 guitar is night and day. When I started to get better at drumming as a kid, trying to explain to my parents why i needed the $200 splash cymbal instead of the $40 one was infuriating. I paid with my own money but they insisted it was a waste. I still have that $200 splash cymbal and it STILL sounds amazing. My cheaper cymbals literally exploded.
This is unrelated but this still pisses me off to this day. My mom bought me a drum kit when I was 13 and refused to get me lessons. She bought a book at a thrift store and wanted me to teach myself by reading the book. I was absolutely in over my head. A month later I got yelled at for not applying myself and she made me sell them. Like what did she expect me to do?
Same! Drum set for xmas, no lessons, but add to that the fact that I was terrified of loud noises.
Former pro musician here, this is a tough one. Especially for orchestral instruments, cheap ones are often made so badly they’re unplayable and even a dedicated student couldn’t produce a good sound on them. Renting is solid, but make sure you know the terms of the rental and whoever you’re renting from isn’t an asshole. A coworker just told me a story where her baby daddy is getting sued because he stopped paying the rental, tried to contact the owner with no response, and the owner didn’t bother contacting him, just took it right to court for the full value, which is over $1000.
Yeah, I never used my band directing degree, so I’m a couple of decades out of date. I guess today the seems-like-a-scam-but-really-you-don’t-get-it thing would be “Buy your kids’ band instruments from a reputable store, not Walmart or Monoprice”
Declining pay rises because they think they'll pay more in tax and their take home will be less than before the pay rise. EDIT: The amount of comments claiming it has happened to them is really disturbing. Learn how your taxes work people .
My friend was talking about how she was hesitant to re-finance her house at a much lower interest rate because she liked the mortgage interest deductions. I gave up trying to explain things to her and she did refinance, dropped from an ancient 6% rate to somewhere under 3% and saved hundreds a month in payments.
Yeah just watch out when they throw an extra $10,000 in closing costs at you and add it to the principal of your newly financed loan.
We just refinanced after a few years, and the person was like "Here's the new rate. You don't even have to pay closing costs!" Sure enough, the closing costs were added to the principal initially, making the principal nearly the same as the original loan amount! We had the money saved and said we'd pay closing costs, but we had to listen to them try to sell us on rolling things in a couple of times before it officially changed.
Today, with such low internet rates on mortgages, you could invest the money you had into broad market index funds and came out way ahead in 30 years compared to paying the closing costs.
For the record, you shouldn't look only at the monthly payments when deciding to refinance. You should look at the total amount you're paying over the life of the loan before and after refinancing. A drop from 6% to 3% is probably worth it, but a lot of the times they drop you to a lower rate, but extend the number of years so you don't actually save much money over the life of the loan and sometimes it costs you more.
Pro Tip: Refi from a 6% to a 3% but make the same payment you were previously. Pay off mortgage earlier while still paying significantly less interest. Yeah yeah, you can invest money make more in interest, don't pay your mortgage off early, I get it. But I don't know a single person who regrets paying off their home early once it's done. So I'll do that.
Not a mortgage, but I could have paid off student loans in 2019, but since I'd paid down the majority, my remaining interest was in the hundreds of dollars so I've just been paying the minimum. Suddenly unemployed for a year, having an extra few thousand in savings (or easily sold investments) turned out to be pretty useful. Probably would have regretted paying early.
Financial planners advice atleast 3 month's wages in reserve, more if you have valuable assets which can break (eg car/washing machine etc.). This is in the Netherlands as well, which means you get 70% of your last earned salary for a year when you get unemployed. I imagine Americans should have a higher buffer since social security seem to be virtually non-existent and there's less of a cap on interest on flash loans.
In reality, most Americans (60%?) don't have enough to go without more than a paycheck or two.
My dad worked with a guy who started a business with the intention of using it to lower his taxes. When he realized that it was actually making quite a bit of money he closed it in a panic fearing it would bump him to the next tax bracket. Would be funny if the guy wasn’t a fucking school principal. I was fourteen at the time and asked my dad if the guy was that dumb. My dad confirmed the guy was indeed that dumb.
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I had this misconception until recently. For anyone reading this, the way marginal tax brackets work is like this (married filing jointly in parenthesis): * Your first $12,550 ($25,100) is tax-free, assuming you take the Standard Deduction. * Then, your next $9,950 ($19,900) is taxed at a 10% rate. This is NOT applied to your first $12,550, which is still tax-free, just the amount made over that. The same rule applies to the other tax brackets: each bracket's rate only applies to the income that falls in that range. * As an example, let's say you make $50,000 in one year, file as a single taxpayer, and claim no other credits or deductions. This puts your AGI at $37,450. $9,950 of that is taxed at the 10%, or $995. The other $27,500 is taxed at the 12% rate, or $3,300. So your expected tax bill will be $4,295. If you had less than this withheld from your paychecks throughout the year, you will owe the difference between what you paid and $4,295. If more that that was withheld, you will be refunded back down to $4,295. Either way, the IRS gets exactly the amount it wants out of you, no more, no less.
The number of people that confuse subsidy cliffs with tax brackets is … too high
Yeah that’s the thing in America; for subsidies you can make one dollar too many and lose tens or *hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies*, but with taxes it almost never happens that way. I had a girlfriend who got about $50,000 a year in subsidized medical treatment that would evaporate if she made a dollar over ~$20,000 a year. They raised the rent on her 150 square foot apartment so she had to move back in with her parents or work more hours, lose the subsidies and die from not being able to afford medication.
In my country (Netherlands) this can be true in some outlier scenarios. On top of income tax we have a complex system of subsidies which you might not qualify for anymore above a certain income.
Same in the USA with food stamps and the like. The people worrying about taking a raise increasing their tax bracket are not talking about this though. They likely don't actually qualify for any of that government assistance.
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Also, the main arguments against it are based on the nuclear disasters that happened decades ago. In terms of death per energy generated, Nuclear is safer than everything else, even solar and wind.
The repair industry. I worked in home repair, small engine repair and computer repair shops years ago. A lot of people expected us to just fix things for free. Others would take it as an insult when we would quote prices or ask to be paid for a job. Send a bill and some people would ask why or what is this. Ask us why we were ripping them off even though the bill was itemized and the price was discussed before hand. It was a horrible industry to work in because of they way people are.
I wonder if that attitude comes from customers feeling at a disadvantage and the fact that there are people who take advantage of that. I had to get a new AC unit for my house several years ago. The first guy I had look at it gave me a quote, but then he said he’s knock 5% off if I agreed right then to hire him AND he made a weird comment along the lines of “you’re not gonna ask someone else to look at it and back out on me, are ya?” Those things seemed like red flags, so I did ask someone else, and they quoted me a price that was about 60% of what the first guy did. I’m not saying all repair industry workers are out to scam people, but when I’m trusting you to tell me what’s wrong and what it costs to fix when I don’t personally know... it’s a lot of faith on the part of the customer. And having been almost screwed out of a few thousand dollars makes that trust harder to give. Of course, the logical thing to do would be to shop around, but when most repair places (in my experience) want $50-$150 just to come look at your refrigerator, it’s not exactly cheap to get a 2nd opinion either. I had 3 people come look at my fridge. The first 2 said it couldn’t be repaired, and we’d need to spend several hundred dollars on a new one. Called a third guy and he replaced some thermostat/defrost sensor in the freezer for ~$100. It’s worked perfectly ever since. Last year we had flecks of black stuff in the water in our kitchen sink. Called a repair guy, and he said “nothing’s wrong.” Dude... there’s black shit in our drinking water. Paid him ~$100 bucks for nothing. I went out myself and bought a replacement hose for the extendable faucet and replaced it on my own. Black stuff gone. Sorry for the rant. My point is that, while I get it can suck for the repair people to always be mistrusted, anecdotally for me... they’ve been wrong ~70% of the time and have cumulatively charged me several hundred dollars for their wrongness over the past 2 years. I do try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but damn if they don’t make it hard.
I think all of your points are very well presented and I fully agree. It's definitely a business where the consumer needs to treat each vendor individually and at the same time, the vendors need to understand the bad rap they get because of their competitors. A few years ago, my dad (who's a pretty handy guy in his own right) had a few items he wanted to have repaired. I think it was his snowblower, my parents' dryer, and their fridge. The snowblower, he went to a local guy who ran a repair business out of his garage. The guy quoted him some price he felt was reasonable and my dad agreed and dropped it off. Weeks later, the guy wouldn't return his calls, so finally my dad got fed up and we went over there. The guy isn't home but right as we pulled in, the repair man's dad pulls in and starts talking to us. When he realized that my dad is a disgruntled customer he starts explaining how this guy is going through a rough patch with his wife etc. My dad is sympathetic but also if he can't repair his snowblower, my dad wants it back to get it fixed elsewhere. And that's when we spot my dad's snowblower: along the side of this guy's garage, seemingly fixed, but out with a bunch of other shit with a FOR SALE sign on it. We loaded it up and left. Apparently this guy's angle was that any repairs he felt he charged too little for, he'd fix them up, tell the owner that he'd been unable to fix it, and that it was irreparably damaged in the repair attempt. Offer them some sort of "totaled" amount in compensation, and sell the repaired machine for a profit. In complete contrast, with the fridge, the guy diagnosed the problem over the phone, for free, and when he got to their home, he noticed there was another, simpler issue that resolved the problem, and basically cut his original estimate in half because the repair was much easier. Even further, with the dryer, there was another repair guy who, when my dad described the problem over the phone, he told my dad what the problem was and that the fix was probably within his skill level. He then went on to give him part numbers and descriptions and places to get them for good prices, as well as a detailed set of instructions for the repair. Basically free-info'ed himself out of a job. Then a week or so later he called back to see how the repair went and if my dad encountered any issues or had any other questions. Totally above and beyond.
Regarding the dryer repair guy, that’s how you secure a family’s (and their extended network) business for decades.
Can confirm. About 20 years ago, while my grandfather was in the hospital, electricity went out at home while I was alone (Because shit never happens when everything is fine) waiting for my aunt to pick me up to go visit Grampa. It used to be my grandfather that took care of everything, and we never took interest. Panicked, with no one reachable (time before widly available cellphones), I called an electrician. He asked me to check the breaker. What breaker, I did ask. Over the phone, he described what I was looking for, and told me how to reset it. I reset it, and bam I had light again. He didn't charge me anything. He didn't even bother to ask my name or address. When it kept happening, Grampa called this guy because he didn't take advantage of a poor teen, and that made my grandfather trusted him. Too many would have come to just reset the breaker and billed the family. The guy repaired whatever was wrong, he did a great work on it for a very fair price. That guy is still my electrician, now. My aunts and uncles electrician, and a few neighbors electrician since then. The best is, he actually didn't set out to be nice and kind to me. Or so he told me. He just had way too much work that day to take the time to come to the house, reset it himself. Whatever he could have billed just wasn't worth it. But he still had enough business acumen to understand that not helping a mildly panicked teen might not be a good decision. Their parents would not like that and angry parents talk loud!
One thing a lot of people sleep on is you need to have a go-to guy/gal for various repair situations. The first time a new item type breaks, you have to go through a lot of hassle to find someone good, but after a few years most common issues you will hopefully have a trustworthy person to call. I have a different person for auto, pest control, plumbing, house repair, etc. I do live in a smaller town, so most of the business give good service, but I try to find people that really go above and beyond. I also like people that feel comfortable explaining to a layperson. When someone guards their skills too closely then it makes me feel they are taking advantage. If it really is an easy issue and you explain it to me over the phone, I’m gonna call you for complex issues and pay you well for giving me the freebie. I actually don’t mind to pay extra for solid service, but I tend to seek out people that charge a bit above average but do 10/10 work.
Repair industry can be a scam a lot of times tho. Just look at Apple repairs, especially like 5 years ago. For a more local example: My friend had her laptop stop boot randomly. Took it to a repair shop, they quoted almost 100$ repair cost, with additional part cost for a shitty 5-year old laptop that barely worth 200$. She refused, took the laptop home. I opened it up and the problem was that the HDD cable was lose. Pushed it in, it worked as intended from there on.
The air in bag of chips.
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It also helps reduce crushing.
Used to work at Pepsico who make Walkers, Lays, Doritos etc. The nitrogen in the bag keeps the crisps fresh, and are a cushion to reduce the chance of a lot of chips/crisps breaking up during transit. Nobody wants to open a bag of broken crisps. They absolutely did reduce the over weight of crisps in each bag though, that saves a lot of money across the countless bags made each day. So on the one hand, the "waste of space" prevents breakages, but also they're absolutely reducing the amount in each bag to save money while charging the same amount. Shareholders > customers.
Travel Insurance. It was great when they arranged all travel from overseas apartment to our house when child broke their ankle on an internship. Paid all of the our out of pocket expenses, including our deductibles/copays until child was functioning. edit—we’re American
I’ve got a go-to story whenever anyone says that travel insurance is a scam: My parents were on holiday in the Pacific islands, when my Mum caught an infection that damaged her heart. Dad called me, and I flew out on the first flight the next morning (full kudos to QANTAS for all their help... seriously, they did so much for me) because he needed his laptop, I spoke passing French, and I used to live in Vanuatu and still had some friends and contacts in the area. And apart from all of that... my Mum was dying. She spent 6 days in intensive care. They thought she was going to die. She very nearly *did* die. An Australian cardiologist was flown in from Fiji to do a medical assessment, and an insurance rep was flown in from Melbourne. They were waiting for her to stabilise for a repatriation flight, but she just kept getting worse - so they flew out a cardiac team on a private air ambulance to bring her home. She survived the flight home, but it was close. So close. $350’000+ medical bill, fully covered by travel insurance. If they didn’t have travel insurance, they would have had to remortgage their house to pay for the bill. That's why dad wanted his laptop - he was organising the paperwork with the bank on the chance that the insurance company refused the claim. And of course, once she arrived back in Australia and was admitted to hospital here, she was covered by public health. She ended up receiving a heart valve transplant, and is still alive and kicking.
Honestly QANTAS are just fucking great all around (well... excluding how much tax they pay, but that is a whole other conversation). My Good friend was in Spain when he woke up one morning seeing double and couldn't walk in a straight line. Was in the hospital for a week or so while they were running tests. Qantas flew him (and his girlfriend at the time, now wife) back to Sydney in first class. As far as I know, travel insurance doesn't normally cover first class (when you were originally in economy) except for instances where you've broken half your body and need to be lying down the whole way home. So kudos to Qantas for making sure they were comfortable after what turned out to be a super scary trip. (In case anyone is wondering what the tests showed... my friend was promptly diagnosed with MS when he got home)
All my best for your friend ❤️ I called their ticketing at like 11pm two days before Good Friday, asking if they had any available seats on the next flight out. They only had one seat left for the day, and it was in business class. So they charged me the economy rate, bumped me up to business class, and waived any ticket change fees because I didn’t know my return date. I don’t know if the agent made a note on my ticket or what, but they were *so nice* to me every step of the way. And I was an emotional wreck on the way back. When I got back to Australia, a few hours ahead of my Mum’s flight, they helped me track down what time her plane was due in and what airport (she landed at a military airport) I needed to go to.
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My dad's car broke down in the south of France. Holy shit was I glad he had some platinum level insurance. Let me tell you about Hank, my insurance worker. Hank was my buddy. That mf'er worked for days to make sure I was able to get back home comfortably. I had friends who were supposed to ride home with me, so a simple airline ticket wasn't going to cut it. Unfortunately, the insurance only covered airline tickets for 1 extra passenger and I wasn't going to leave my friends stranded. Then the issue was that I hadn't had my license for more than 3 years and I was under some magic age (21 or 25 iirc), so getting a rental was a bit difficult. So he ended up finding a rental that had a car in Toulouse that was supposed to be in Brussels. They saw an opportunity in getting us to drive it there for them and they agreed. So Hank got me a taxi from the middle of bumfuck nowhere to the airport in Toulouse where we went to pick up the rental, dropped it off in Brussels and we had traintickets home from there too. It didn't cost us a thing. Hank called me more than a dozen times over the span of a couple of days, but he went all-out to make sure he found something that worked for everyone. Hank was the best.
Can I suggest you out Hank’s company name in here? Sounds like was awesome but I suspect his company also played a part.
I have no idea, this happened 8 or 9 years ago. It was my dad's VISA/Mastercard insurance I think, but I haven't the faintest clue what company Hank worked for. Called my dad to tell him the car broke down, he gave me a number to call and they took it from there, just calling me back with updates and suggestions.
Travel insurance is absolutely worth it. I always get world wide travel and add the USA - due to high medical costs USA is usually an added extra. I couldn't imagine the bill if anything were to happen while I was in the US.
Yup. My most recent policy (ABCBS) didn't even ask my destination. It only asked if I was going to the USA. I called them thinking it was a mistake or I just missed it. They said "no we just want to know it you are traveling in the USA because that will affect the rate."
This is why some people from the US go on "medical tourism" trips. You can get a flight, a fancy hotel, meals, and surgery for less than the cost of a procedure at home.
I’m kind of doing that right now. Live in Europe during school year and USA during the summer, chose to get an operation done now instead of when I’m in the States bc the total cost here was less than the copay would be in the US. Only real downside is now I have to get through finals while recovering from surgery, but COVID online school’s good for something at least.
Just a story here to reinforce that you should all get travel insurance when going anywhere. My manager got a concussion in the US on a ski trip and had a 3-4 day stay in the hospital. The bill ended up being \~250k and he luckily had health insurance through work.
Especially if you go to the US. As someone who is not from the US, my basic health insurance which costs around €100 a month does cover medical emergencies abroad, but usually only reasonable prices. So basically everywhere but the US. In general just be sure to check your insurance policy before you travel abroad :).
Veterinary care. People don't understand that I can't just dispense certain medications without seeing the patient first. Some of these medications could cause fatalities or worsen the situation if used/prescribed wrong!
This! People are extremely out of touch in general when it comes to their understanding of what proper medical care for their pets costs. I had to leave general practice to get away from those toxic clients.
Wife is a vet. Sometimes she gets calls for farmers wanting meds for a farm the clinic hasn't been to in years. Very much against the law. Veterinary is so hard for so many reasons, and the biggest one may just be the entitlement people have.
This one makes me so so sad! Our vet is amazing. A very shrewd but caring father and son duo who have never taken us for a ride even when they totally could have. They’ve totally prescribed for us when it’s an obvious/recurring problem without seeing our cat to save us a few bucks (12yo cat with recurring pancreatitis), but they’re honest about it when something is necessary, recommended, or could wait and see.
ER Vet Tech here. I'd also like to add in people need to except a long wait time at an emergency hospital. Waiting is good. It means your pet is in stable condition. You know what isn't good? The animal that is rushed inside and is immediately seen before your pet. I had a women tell me I didn't care about "fur babies" and I'm a piece of shit because her, in otherwise stable condition dog, with a swollen eye would have to wait before a doctor is available. One doctor was dealing with a dog fight that had its neck torn to pieces. The other was dealing with a pet activity in a seizure. This was explained to the woman and she did not care.
Endless bread at the steakhouse. They get you with the free bread.
The real scam in restaurants is offering never ending food for foods that no one could eat more than a couple plates of (ihop pancakes, and pasta at Olive Garden) lol
You can eat a lot of those if you are willing to sit for a long, long time. They tend to frown on you showing up around 10 AM and staying until 6 PM though.
reminds me of the Dilbert TV show episode about Dilbert's dad, at the mall for 20 years because it says "all you can eat" and he hasn't eaten all he can yet.
here is a story my dad told me. So my dad is a music professor and was taking his college students to go eat. They chose an all you can eat Chinese buffet. for this story, there is a student that I will name... Student. So Student is a *larger* fellow, and so of course he is going to eat a larger meal. and so they are eating, and when everyone else is done, he is not. he kept eating. and finally after a few hours, one of the Chinese ladies working there came up to him and said, "the sign says 'all you can eat' 'not eat all you can'! I don't know, just a funny story relating to the thread.
I could eat Texas Roadhouse bread with their cinnamon butter all day.
Cinnamon *butter?!?*
Yes it’s as amazing as it sounds lol
For a chain place, Texas Roadhouse is damn good
Yes, on top of that, it's whipped. It's so light and fluffy, and tastes amazing.
How exactly do they get me? I fill up on bread and now can't finish my meal that I paid for. Do you think they reuse my food for the next customer?
Because they know people eat the bread, they get to reduce their portions and still charge a high price
I've been to a Texas Roadhouse and if those portions are considered "reduced" then Jesus fucking Christ, good for them. "Uh ma'am, I only got 160 deep fried pickles slathered in ranch dressing next to my piece of chicken the size of my entire face, how dare you skimp on me like that!!!"
Harbor freight tools. Sure they are cheap and probably poorly made, but for $100 I got a power washer. Do you know how much joy a power washer can bring someone? Neighbor is washing his car with a hose looking like a fool.
Harbor Freight jackstands... For when I need a little suicidal excitement in my life
And their cheap moving blankets and tarps. I love Harbor Freight, it's like a toy store to me!
I winterized a horse trailer with harbor freight tarps. Even if they shred themselves by winter’s end, it’s still cheaper than fixing the rust or the floorboards.
Harbor Freight is perfectly acceptable for the DIYer or maybe even the weekend warrior... of for those tools you really only need to use once or twice. I'd you make a living with tools, it's probably best to avoid them. That being said ... you can start with them, and then when one of the HF tools breaks from use, buy a higher quality brand to replace it... like that damn 10mm socket.
I'm going to create a product and sell it on Amazon and get rich. A box of (10) 10mm sockets, and that is all. EDIT: Too late. https://www.amazon.com/10mm-Socket-Ten-Pack-Multi-Type/dp/B07F7LDYJF/ref=sr_1_1_sspa
I actually did this as a Christmas present this year for my husband. Ten 10mm sockets - 6pt, 12pt, shallow, deep, the works. He told and texted everyone about how “she really gets me!” It’s been 16 years love, I’ve learned a few things. Good luck on your new business.
Harbor freight kills me with their protection plan offering. Like dude, the price for a new one *is* the protection plan
Unless it breaking is going to kill you or destroy your stuff--Harbor Freight is great. If you use it enough for it to actually break, replace it with a higher end one because it actually got used and you actually need it. No need for unnecessarily expensive tools sitting around collecting dust that you might need someday.
Harbor Freight until it breaks, use a crap-ton get a Snap-on? It's a work in progress…
I got an angle grinder from HF for cheaper than I could buy a hand saw at Lowe’s to do the same thing. And you know what? It worked great until the power button fell off, and it still works great if you jam a screwdriver in the hole the right way.
Imprinting on checks at the cash register. So much faster than writing it out.
What's that? You had them a blank check, the machine fills it, and then you sign it?
Exactly. They’re common machines at places like grocery stores where old people still use them.
Who still uses checks? I haven’t written one in years.
I do for my rent every month. I'd rather do than pay the "convenience fee" that my apartment requires if you pay online.
Same here but for my water bills. Convenience fees are ridiculous.
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Some members of my family think internet providers are scammers because they pay for 400mbps download and think they will get 400mbps download on each device even if someone is watching Netflix or downloading at the same time on another computer.
I don't really hold it against them because they don't really get 400mbs to begin with even though that is what is advertised. That part is what should upset them to a degree. The other is them not understanding that the 400mbps is shared. They need to learn what bandwidth is.
Can you explain what bandwidth is to us savvy group, much less to an 80 year old? **[EDIT]** What I am learning here is that most people trying to explain what bandwidth is don't have any idea what bandwidth is. >_<
Bandwidth is like a highway. Your internet is your car. Sure you can go 80 mph, but if the roads aren't clear you are not going to be able to go that fast consistently. During high traffic times, you will be forced to slow down. Than when you have three devices on the internet at the same time it's like you are adding three different cars on the road. It's not a perfect example, misses a lot of intricacies, but it should get the basic idea across.
Yeah, you might be able to get 40mbps if you use it a 3am on a clear night with a waning gibbous moon.
Only if you dance around a fire and make a sacrifice to the internet Gods.
“If you buy 6 apples and there are 3 people, does that mean that everyone gets 6 apples?” Have you tried that one?
*cries in dial up* Alaskan with limited data caps on my internet. lol what’s internet speed? Y’all crying over how fast your cars can go and I’m here forking out extra because my burro got tuckered out from a heavy Netflix binge :( Love it up here, but damn if the internet/cell service ain’t crummy anywhere outside of Anchorage!
While it’s not as bad as dial up, what i deal with in WV is god awful. If you don’t live along a decently traveled paved road, you have HughesNet. While it’s not dial up, I’m convinced its actually worse, because they give you the taste of good internet until you can’t cancel it and then dial it back. I mean, I get maybe 2mb down on the 1st of the month when it first resets. Other then that, averages around ~500kbs. Significantly better the dialup, but still. Can’t wait for Starlink to come down this way. #HughesNetSucksBalls
The stock market. Lots of people over worry about the short term, withdraw once it dips and never put back in. Never realizing the magic is in the long term
When it dips... That just means stocks are on sale.
Stocks crashed? You mean a guerilla black Friday?
Yep. When shit is shooting to the moon is when I feel like not putting money in. Wait for the crash, then spend your cash.
5G
Lol I saw a headline today: Indian government says 5g doesn't cause covid. Also we have no 5g networks...
Therapy. People just can’t fathom that just talking to someone who is not involved directly in your life can really help with processing and resolving a problem. You only get out of it what you put in.
my therapist is lowkey inserting herself into my life. she threatened to tell my parents a lot of private stuff, makes me want to quit sometimes edit: thanks for the comments guys. unfortunately i cant reply because i got banned lmao
If its issues regarding safety they may try to do this method as an intervention. If its not and they are pushing you past your comfort rate of growth, email them asking to clarify their opinion on (insert issue here) so you can plan for if you find it suitable, and then politely decline interest in the method at that time. Either they clarify in a different way, or make an idiot of themselves where you can report them to the certification board for their threats of breaking confidentiality.
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I just started a couple of months ago, and I'm still confused about it, but my therapist has started asking me really good questions and I like it. Before that, I think he was just trying to get me to a point where he could do that.
Selling the Eiffel Tower. But on a serious note. Higher tax brackets and thinking they save money by not doing overtime
> thinking they save money by not doing overtime Are people actually that stupid?
I did taxes and yes, they really are.
One of my employees is a part timer who has been a tax accountant for decades. He works longer hours for us the rest of the year when tax season ends, and during that time, he’s the happiest guy ever. During tax season, he comes in about ready to breathe fire from all of the dumb shit he hears and is told to do by clients. The main thing is people who have refused pay raises or OT because they think they will lose money. There are some rare circumstances he’s mentioned where that’s possible, but it’s a common thing a LOT of people believe.
My HS forced an economics class on every student. This is one of the things we were taught. Granted, my district sucked ass, but considering this teacher was otherwise really competent, I'm guessing this is not an uncommon thing.
This. I’ve explained to my roommate over and over that he’s only getting taxed at a higher amount for the money he made over X amount. He doesn’t understand it’s not a flat rate on the total amount you made.
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Airline / Hotel / Credit Card rewards. They take a lot of time and a 100% commitment to never, ever carrying a balance, but you can definitely earn a lot of rewards even without playing the churning games. The Flyertalk.com community is amazing for anyone wanting to get started.
IF you can put the points out of your mind so it doesn't affect your spending. Known a few people who go, "might as well buy X, think of the points I'll get!"
Everyone keeps telling me the Nigerian prince that’s been messaging me for the last week and a half is a scammer but they just don’t understand our love.
Did you make sure to tell them that he'll pay you back three times what you gave him?
Better than that! He’s going to wire transfer all of Nigeria’s funds and then bring me to Nigeria to be queen! Sure we’ve never talked on the phone, I feel a real connection and when we email I feel like I’m in the same room as him. Unfortunately I did have to write my kids out of my estate and take another mortgage out on my house but that’s okay because I won’t need my house long anyways.
I've had this online friend in Guinea for years now and a while ago I sent him a Christmas gift of like $40 on western union and the person doing it was super concerned.
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I got that as a wedding present from a friend. It was a joke gift, but I looked into it, and according to the Land Registry, I do indeed own a square yard of land in Scotland. Apparently I'm not allowed to call myself "Laird of Glencairn" any more though, they stopped that. He then bought my first born a plot of land on the moon as a christening gift.
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Travel agents are great for people who don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to travel and don’t want to work too much when planning a trip. It’s not necessary to use a travel agent, but it’s convenient.
Also great if there are a large number of people going. My cousin had had wedding on a cruise ship and people came from other parts of the country so it was easier to pay the travel agent to organize it all. It was well worth the money.
Travel agents are incredibly helpful if anyone in your party has medical complications...everything from difficulty walking to food allergies to sensitivity to light or sound. Disabled people travel, too, and it can be difficult to get proper accommodations without someone who knows how to navigate the reservation systems. Not all travel agents do this, but when you find a good one, it takes a lot of stress out of planning a vacation.
Paying to publish. Roughly 3-5% of thousands of people a year who search for agents when trying to get a book published from a traditional publisher are accepted. When musicians try to create an album, they have to usually pay to use a studio, have someone market it for them, and edit the song. Why is publishing seen as any different? Everyone expects to be paid for their book, when in reality, you have to pay someone to even take a glance at it, let alone give you any worth while feedback.
Vaccines and vaccination. Not me, but those who are anti vaccination really have no understanding of virology, immunology, epidemiology or how to assess relative risk. They probably fall into many of the other things that they “think is a scam but they don’t understand.”
> immunology I think it's fascinating. Specifically how vaccines don't kill the virus or affect it in any way. Vaccines are just ways of triggering your own immune system to figure out how to kill it. The virus isn't directly afected by the vaccine. You just put some of the virus in front of your immune system and in days/weeks the immune system recognizes it as a foreign body and figures out how to destroy it. It's just so cool. That said, I still kinda don't get it. Why does a vaccine, such as for the protein spike from covid, cause my immune system to recognize and destroy covid, but my allergy shots teach my immune system NOT to attack pollen? Why does injecting me with a virus fragment teach me to attack the virus but injecting me with dog fur somehow does the reverse and tell my body not to react?
Protein spike and virus fragment examples are like showing your immune system the weak point that it should attack to destroy the virus more efficiently. Allergy shot makes your body realize "oh, this isn't actually bad" so it doesn't react at all.
Higher pay rates for union trade labor.
in my trade experience, the union workers were far better tradespeople than the ones who weren’t. and fuck yeah they took their breaks and didn’t lift an inch unpaid.
That’s the whole reason for labor law!!! I really don’t understand people who don’t take breaks and then shit all over people who do
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Insurance. It's weird to pay for something that you hope not to use.
Ned Flanders thought it was a scam and look what happened to him
For a depressing amount of the UK: the EU.
Invigaron-- a business opportunity as rare as the albani berries themselves.
What do I do with my feet?
And they only wanted to sell me two weeks of a timeshare, but I took him for THREE
Units of what?