'cost of living is too high'
Discussion
t, im stupid for saving money!Thought this blog post might be relevant to this thread:
"Norm wonders why so many well-off people don’t realize they are rich.
I’m not convinced by his answer - that folk don’t want the stigma of being thought rich.
Another possible explanation lies in the salience effect. The very rich get a disproportionate amount of attention. There are far more newspaper reports about, say, Wayne Rooney’s salary than there are about the reality of (relative?) poverty. This leads people to think the rich are more numerous than they are, and the poor less numerous. This effect is magnified by conspicuous consumption: when we see fancy cars and big houses, we infer that their owners are rich, when in fact they might only be saddled with humungous debt. It’s also magnified by occupational segregation. Very many middlingly rich people don’t associate with those significantly poorer than themselves*.
It’s also possible that the lower rich are burdened with high expectations. If you think a “middle class” lifestyle means taking two holidays a year or sending your kids to private school, then your outgoings will be as high as your income, and you’ll not feel rich. This process might be compounded by a lack of self-control and bad budgeting.
There is, though, another possibility - that the middlingly rich are not that rich. Take a man on £100,000 a year - an income which, with a non-working wife and two kids puts him in the top 6% of incomes. In one sense, he’s in a similar position to those far further down the income scale. He faces much the same fear of losing its job as those on much lower incomes; the probability of job loss might be lower, but the cost, should it materialize, is higher.
He’s poor, in the important sense that he cannot afford freedom**. Objectively, he is working class.
This vindicates one of Marx’s predictions - that the relative numbers of the working class would increase over time, as the middlingly bourgeois became proletarianized.
And herein lies a paradox. Although the “poor rich” don’t feel rich, they don’t feel truly working class either, in the sense that they don’t much identify with people on, say, £15,000 a year and don’t have the (organized?) hostility towards the capitalist class which Marx thought they would eventually get.
Instead, we have the worst of both worlds - people with a sense of resentment and entitlement without class solidarity. And this has some unpleasant effects."
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_...
"Norm wonders why so many well-off people don’t realize they are rich.
I’m not convinced by his answer - that folk don’t want the stigma of being thought rich.
Another possible explanation lies in the salience effect. The very rich get a disproportionate amount of attention. There are far more newspaper reports about, say, Wayne Rooney’s salary than there are about the reality of (relative?) poverty. This leads people to think the rich are more numerous than they are, and the poor less numerous. This effect is magnified by conspicuous consumption: when we see fancy cars and big houses, we infer that their owners are rich, when in fact they might only be saddled with humungous debt. It’s also magnified by occupational segregation. Very many middlingly rich people don’t associate with those significantly poorer than themselves*.
It’s also possible that the lower rich are burdened with high expectations. If you think a “middle class” lifestyle means taking two holidays a year or sending your kids to private school, then your outgoings will be as high as your income, and you’ll not feel rich. This process might be compounded by a lack of self-control and bad budgeting.
There is, though, another possibility - that the middlingly rich are not that rich. Take a man on £100,000 a year - an income which, with a non-working wife and two kids puts him in the top 6% of incomes. In one sense, he’s in a similar position to those far further down the income scale. He faces much the same fear of losing its job as those on much lower incomes; the probability of job loss might be lower, but the cost, should it materialize, is higher.
He’s poor, in the important sense that he cannot afford freedom**. Objectively, he is working class.
This vindicates one of Marx’s predictions - that the relative numbers of the working class would increase over time, as the middlingly bourgeois became proletarianized.
And herein lies a paradox. Although the “poor rich” don’t feel rich, they don’t feel truly working class either, in the sense that they don’t much identify with people on, say, £15,000 a year and don’t have the (organized?) hostility towards the capitalist class which Marx thought they would eventually get.
Instead, we have the worst of both worlds - people with a sense of resentment and entitlement without class solidarity. And this has some unpleasant effects."
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_...
A lex said:
To be fair I wasnt as explanatory as I could have been in my 1st post. As Tonker suggested this was a very, very good deal and unless Alfas were suddenly going to kick their usual curve of depreciation it was almost a certainty that the lease costs would be less than the depreciation, and indeed thats the way it turned out to be 
Ive got no idea why Alfa ran that deal, it was direct from the manufacturer with their own in-house finance co. and i've yet to see another deal like it.
FYI, it was a:
(3+35 @ 360pcm on a newly released model that retailed at 34k GBP). It beat the depreciation by a good 7-8k GBP.
But if it was a deliberate and calculated play against the financiers' estimate of depreciation versus your researched estimate then that makes it more of a case of using debt against a calculated upside potential, which would take that particular deal out of the general pool. So long as it was contrasted against a feasible cash purchase.Ive got no idea why Alfa ran that deal, it was direct from the manufacturer with their own in-house finance co. and i've yet to see another deal like it.
FYI, it was a:
(3+35 @ 360pcm on a newly released model that retailed at 34k GBP). It beat the depreciation by a good 7-8k GBP.
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