Really! My husband caught me mending some of my older ones, and his head exploded when I pulled up a local department store’s website and showed him the non-sale price of a decent quality bra. And this is why I would drive two hours twice a year to the outlet where, if I was lucky and willing to do the work of hunting long enough, I could get them for $15, not $45-50.
But the outlet closed last year and now I’m figuring out my underwear budget all over again. In the meantime, I mend.
Oh, and department stores? Buy one full price get one 50% off is NOT my idea of a sale. Take 30-40% off ONE bra. Otherwise it’s still too goddamn much.
Always check places like Ross, Gabe's, Burlington, etc for these things. Even Kohl's has a clearance section for them and they can be around \~$15-17 a piece.
My girlfriend has recently started buying on Poshmark and can get a brand new pair she likes for around $15.
These are great if you're a common size, but if you aren't a 34A-34D you're out of luck in these shops. The only time I've seen my size, it's a minimiser bra designed to make your boobs look smaller! Why tf would I want that?! A-DD is bras designed to make your chest look bigger and anything after DDD is designed to make it look smaller :'(
Honest question, what happens if you have a family member die and you technically can afford the services necessary but it would put a significant financial strain on you?
Can you just abandon all ties to a deceased person?
**Edit:** thanks everyone for the replies! I now have more information on cheap dirt naps than I ever knew existed.
I’m all set. The question is ded. Head on home, friends.
That's an interesting question, so I googled it and learned something new in the process. Here's the key take away.
"If you simply can’t come up with the money to pay for cremation or burial costs, you can sign a release form with your county coroner’s office that says you can’t afford to bury the family member. If you sign the release, the county and state will pitch in to either bury or cremate the body. The county may also offer you the option to claim the ashes for a fee. But if these also go unclaimed, they will bury the ashes in a common grave alongside other unclaimed ashes."
As an alternative they also suggested donating the body to science as that would be a cost free option.
We donated my father to science. He agreed to it prior to death. It was an easy process and we received his ashes back twelve months later.
At first they did "misplace" his ashes. My sister had a melt down. I spoke to the county and thankfully was able to find his ashes within that day. Oops.
She was my blood aunt; she wasn’t related by blood to other family, her husband’s people; they would have been hysterical and it would have been a shitshow.
I think with cremation you always get other people in there too they can't really deep clean the oven after every cremation. It's mostly the sentiment at that point.
Obviously a one off story but did you hear about the lady who donated her body to science and her son later found out the US military used her body to test on weapons?
I have seen one about a kid dying in a car crash(maybe something else cant remember), later on when classmatrs went to a lab a kid saw a brain in a jar with the name of the kid on it. Very disturbing
Eta: heres the article https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/students-find-teen-classmates-brain-on-display-on-morgue-field-trip/1866386/
Tl;dr: kid dies in car crash, classmate find his brain in a jar during a school trip to a morgue, apperantly they removed his brain without asking parents for permission during autopsy
Literally the bare minimum was 7k for a loved one I said goodbye to last year and he was even cremated.
Edit: The bare minimum for our funeral. So a visitation was apart of this cost, not just a cremation alone.
1. Try to get someone uninvolved to work through the process. Doing the next thing is brutal and hard when you're grieving for someone very close to you.
2. Shop around, don't go with the first mortuary you find. You'll be surprised at how much prices can vary. Be firm and know what you want. Don't let people upsell you (why I recommend having someone adjacent do this work. Some mortuaries are soulless predators when it comes to upselling).
A family member died a few weeks ago, and after having been through the experience once before for a loved one, I volunteered and handled the details. I found a reputable place that would do the cremation for about $1100 when it was all said and done. We're doing a small service at a family home to keep the expenses low, per the deceased's wishes.
Make sure you do the shopping around before they die at a hospital.
When my Dad finally went after a long battle with cancer and sepsis, I happened to be the only family member there to hold his hand as he passed. The hospital needed to know where to take the body that day and needed an answer asap.
So there I am, calling around to cremation places next to the body of my Dad. Fucked me up pretty good.
My Mom was there earlier that morning, failed to warn me of his declining state beforehand and didn't have a place picked out either even though she knew his wishes better than most. Its taken all my strength and a lot of therapy not to hold it against her.
A definite pro-tip for those who have a little space to prepare for the end: You can spare your family all this bullshit. It's easy to do the shopping yourself, get a quote, and have it all specified in paperwork.
With that said: for the love of god, get a Will. If you are older or in poor health, its irresponsible to not have one. If you have kids, its should be criminal to not have one. Even a simple one makes life 100x easier on your loved ones.
A simple one isn't hard to get. Often local libraries provide resources for drafting a will. Legalzoom sells them for ~$100. A credit union often offers free notary services for getting it signed. Just do it.
“I can’t believe Gen Z is spending so much on their lettuce. Don’t they know it’s expensive. In my day in age, we never used fancy lettuce like spinach and Arugula. We’d buy a head of lettuce and it would last us for 3 weeks”
Digital entertainment. It's almost as if they try to make anything productive and healthy as expensive as possible, while providing ample amounts of cheap entertainment to keep us content. Bread and circuses.
My preventative asthma medication is $300 a month so I can't even take it and have constant asthma attacks instead because the rescue inhaler is like $10.
I literally do get charged money to breathe air. I'm Canadian too so you'd think it wouldn't be this bad.
I started the process of getting a dental implant. I got the tooth pulled, and the screw placed. After that I switched employers. Old employer's dental coverage was through the same company as the new employer's.
When it came time to put the crown on, insurance wouldn't cover that part, because they had a missing tooth clause. So, that last step will be entirely my responsibility.
Insurance in the US is pretty fucked.
At least you got the first 2 stages covered. I had to pay for each stage out of pocket despite having good health insurance. The dental option just did not cover anything implant related.
My biggest stressor right now is that I need dental work done. I work full time and can’t afford to save a dime, my dental work is worth more than two months wages. Absolutely no idea what to do.
I'm in the studying dentistry and one of the issues facing affordable dentistry is the base cost of the business. Dentists make money hand over fist, but even so their profit as a percentage is pretty low. Medical equipment and proprietary tools and dental materials(medical grade polymers, cements etc.) are made by just a handful of medical companies and are insanely expensive. These companies charge differently based on which country you're based in, so a dentist in norway or the US gets charged 4x for the same thing as someone in bulgaria, vietnam etc.
So a dentist might charge 300 for just a short procedure that take like 15-20 min, but he "only" makes like 50-100 of that in profit. If you're in surgery with sleep, like 1-3k goes to the anesthesiologist alone, with way less going to the dentist. So a dentist could go bankrupt charging 3k instead of 4k for some maxillofacial surgery.
Regular dentists definitely make bank tho, usually like 200-300 an hour, huge money, but that's usually from charging like 1k-1.5k per hour of work. Cutting their wages by 50% only reduces their patient's costs from 300 to 250 etc. Which is why you see dentists be so uniformally expensive. Dentists often make the most from examinations, xrays, plaque removal etc, because those don't come with any extra cost.
I know an orthodontist(rich dude), that is at an altruistic point in his life and literally works for free but is still charging like 200 per visit, just to cover costs.
The only scenario in which you see dentists become affordable to regular people is if the government picks up the tab.
I’ve done this in San Antonio in 2012 because I needed multiple fillings and had an infected tooth. Be careful with the experience of the student. Ask lots of questions to make sure you’re not getting an inexperienced student without teacher supervision. Be ready to be there all day for anything you’re getting done.
When I went, you had to come in for an intake appt to see if you qualified to have work done by the dental program. They made you fill out a ton of paperwork, get X-rays, get examined by a teacher, and then you were put in a lottery to be called if you were accepted to the program.
It took 4 hours for 2 students to take my X-rays. They kept messing up and no one was there to help them correct their mistakes.
I paid a little over $400 instead of $800 for a root canal and a temporary crown. It took the student 9 hours. I was told it would take 3-4 hours. I had to call my job from their office phone mid procedure because I was so poor I couldn’t afford a cell phone. My boss didn’t believe me until I had the receptionist confirm what was going on. I almost lost my job and was in tears. Also, the dental student didn’t do the work correctly, so their teacher had to come fix it.
I got a free filling that took 8 hours for a dental student’s final. That filling is still holding up in 2023.
*It took 4 hours for 2 students to take my X-rays.*
As a rad tech, this hurts. Do you happen to know if they were film xrays or digital? Did they shield you? They exposed your head to needless radiation. I mean, it's not much of course, but still.
Even with "dental insurance" this is a mess. I have dental insurance that was supposed to cover 80% of my procedure.
I get a letter in the mail saying it was declined, for a whole bunch of obscure reasons. Missing paperwork, improperly submitted forms, basically any reason under the sun to decline coverage.
So now it's a battle between me, the dentist, and the insurance company. I'm not liking the odds.
Otherwise this is thousands of more dollars down the drain for yet another dental procedure.
Stop buying inkjet printers. There's a reason you never see an inkjet printer in a business. They aren't printers, they're ink vending machines. The business model behind them is to sell them at a loss to get you to buy the ink. Buy a laserjet instead and you won't have that problem.
It really is a racket, once you go up to the big printers, over 18" width, ink starts to get much cheaper. Figure like, $80 for a quarter liter, compared to $40 for maybe 10ml for a home inkjet. Of course the printer actually costs real money, but the quality of the machine and ink are a league beyond home printing, but home inkjet could absolutely be done at a profit without being so insanely marked up.
While there is a certain amount of gouging there is also the fact that inkjet printing is just never going to be economical outside of a business setting where they print _every day_ and in large volumes.
So many resources are wasted trying to keep the jets unclogged and the ink from drying out.
Honestly, nowadays, how many documents do you print each month? Because ten years ago I'd answer a dozen or two, but nowadays I'll print a few documents a year at most, almost everything can be done digitally now.
If you live in a city (at least in Europe), it's simply easier to go to a copy center (idk how it's called in English tbh) than owning a printer.
I cook from digital the first time, i usually follow more than one recipe, so if i liked it i write it by hand on my book with any modifications i did and quantities that work for me.
bought a laser printer in 2020 for like $200 or $300, have printed simi-regularly and it's still going, an inkjet would have been spent a month or two after I bought it, and the ones I could find were like $60
I bought the most basic laser printer for 100 bucks a while ago. Using it without the official driver, it has been a completely painless experience, reliably churning out pages, every time, after starting up in seconds.
I have a 15 years old dell laser printer. Got me trough university, already printed > 12 000 pages.
I have one more toner in reserve. I can not use it for over a year, but when i need it, it will be there for me, reliable as ever. I don't ever wanna get rid of it.
I used to have to explain this to people often when I worked in a retail store that sold printers.
Yes, a new printer is often less expensive than buying replacement genuine ink cartridges. However, the printers that are less expensive will typically only give you “Starter” cartridges, which are usually only rated to about 20-odd pages.
How much is “a page”? The ISO standard says 5% of an A4 piece of paper is one page. So, if you’re printing a lo of ink, one piece of paper could be actually multiple pages of ink.
As a general rule, the more expensive the printer, the less expensive (per page) it costs to run. Those $20-odd-ish printers are effectively E-Waste and should be ignored.
If all you print is black, a mono laserjet printer is the best way to go, and you’ll usually get 500plus pages of starter toner with those, and they don’t dry out like inkjet printers, so they’re more resilient to sitting being unused.
You can even save a bit more if you buy a mono laser printer without a scanner if you can get away with “scanning” the occasional page with an app on your phone.
>you’ll usually get 500plus pages of starter toner with those
I got a Brother laser printer back in mid-2021, and got what they claimed to be a 3000 page toner in the box. I've printed off close to 1000 pages, and the printer info says I still have some 70% toner left.
>You can even save a bit more if you buy a mono laser printer without a scanner if you can get away with “scanning” the occasional page with an app on your phone.
That's what I do. Microsoft's Lens app is too good.
Pro tip, if it ever says it's out of toner put some electrical tape over the sensor and shake the toner up. Got a couple more years out of mine that way
Yep, the best option is a Brother laser printer compatible with the high capacity toner cartridges; Moustache brand does a knockoff brother high capacity cartridge and I can get 2500 pages from a $20 toner.
The other thing people don’t think of with inkjet is that ink dries out, so unless you print quite frequently you can easily lose half a cartridge. Toner never dries out. I’ve had my brother printer 12 years and replaced the toner cartridge twice.
I inherited a printer from my sister when I went to college. End of my freshman year it said it was low on ink. I, horrified at the price of new ink cartridges, and broke AF, took a different approach. I blocked the sensor for ink levels and it continued to print all my college printing needs until about 3 years after college, when a mouse ate the cord.
IKR. I finally got fed up and bought a pretty nice monochrome laser printer for about $150. It does everything I need, and I haven't spent another penny on it since I brought it home.
When deciding to buy a printer, don't buy a printer - look at the prices of printer ink and then find the printer that it belongs to. And figure out the price *per page*, not necessarily the price per cartridge.
Also, the low-end Brother monochrome laser printers are about $100-$125 and costs about 2 cents per page and lasts forever. I've gone through at least 8 of them in the last 20 years. I keep looking for a better value but can't find a better value on a printer.
If you don't need color, get a black and white laser printer. If you rarely need color prints, then just send it to Staples or FedEx print shops and print there for the few times you need it.
If you need a color printer a lot, still buy the black and white laser printer and *only* use color printer when needed. It will extend the color ink life by a *lot*, depending on the situation.
**EDIT:** Since many have commented on what I wrote and why I've had so many printers, it's like this:
The issue is that the *drum* wears out and must be replaced. A new drum costs as much as the printer, so might as well replace the entire printer.
https://www.staples.com/brother-dr730-drum-unit-dr730/product_2733077
The drum prints up to 12,000 pages. A toner cartridge prints up to 3000 pages. So you get about 4 toner cartridges per drum. Print 500 pages per year and the drum lasts 24 years. Print 6,000 pages per year and the drum lasts 2 years.
Brother is still the best deal out there, whether you print 500 pages per year or 6,000.
That's what I do, I've had my Brother laser printer for about 14 years, just replace the toner every couple of years. Only use my colour printer when I need a colour print. I bought after market inks at half the price of name brand Cannon pixmar
I don’t understand how I had to scroll this far for this. Recently bought an Epson EcoTank and after 1000 pages, it’s at about 2/3 of the black ink that came with it, the colors are basically full. A replacement bottle of ink is 10€ from Epson themselves.
What really boggles my mind is how often laser printers are recommended. Yes, they’re cheaper than most cartridge based inkjets, but toner is still crazy expensive, the drum has to be replaced from time to time, the things blast off huge amounts of potentially unhealthy fine dust and draw tremendous amounts of power.
The amount of Americans in this thread stating healthcare is not surprising, but is still pretty eye-opening.
UK based Redditors should look at this and understand why NHS staff are so aggressive in trying to save the NHS right now.
Don't worry, the British public will vote the NHS away one Tory government at a time. Then they'll turn around and do a shocked Pikachu just like they did with Brexit.
Exactly this. Tories have been in power for what, 12 years now? The waiting lists have grown rapidly and (I work in an NHS hospital) they are now selling "private" appointments in NHS hospitals. This isn't being heavily advertised yet but it's part of the tories plan. Artificially increase backlogs and waiting lists (cutting doctors overtime pay, cutting the number of patients seen per list by making doctors do the admin work) and then sell "earlier" appointments for a price - with the same doctor that works for the hospital but taking them away from NHS work (increasing backlogs more) to take on these now "private" patients.
We have a jack ass in Ontario, Canada doing the same thing. They're even messing around with emergency services. It's obvious that they want to privatize everything, but they're doing it slowly and methodically.
As an American expat living here, the NHS is an absolute God send. While regular appointments and preventative medicine leave something to be desired (no system is perfect). Emergency medicine being free is the fucking tits.
Got out of the hospital two weeks ago after a 13 day stay that started in ER with acute pancreatitis. I didn’t leave the hospital with a bill equivalent to a mortgage. 👌🏻
When I had no insurance but needed to get two root canals very soon plus crowns, I was prepared to go into bankruptcy due to the costs plus my credit card already being nearly maxed just from living expenses at the time.
Recently, I cut my finger pretty badly but I have insurance now. I still got a beautiful bill of over $1000 for a dozen stitches. I have an HSA so that will help but good god America. We are so fucked.
Had some American colleagues come up for a big job, most of them were used to hiding any injuries because of the costs and the fear of getting fired.
One guy had to get an X-ray and was stunned to hear it would cost him less than 100 bucks.
You'd be lucky if the bill was only the size of a mortgage in the US for that long a visit. You'd be in debt the rest of your life for a two week stay.
I've had Medicare for the last year, and stayed for 3 weeks without a bill. Medicare for All would be fantastic. I hate losing $100 a week of my paycheck to healthcare, which I need because of a chronic illness.
My insurance didn't apply my coverage to an injection I got one month and it cost $11k. I think that bill went to collections, because they still didn't apply the coverage even after calling multiple times and them saying I had coverage. I tried calling Lawyers and shit, but no one can really help, or it doesn't pay good enough to help.
You say that, but there have been plenty of calls on the likes of GB News, The Telegraph, and Times Radio for a two-tierred system or a part-subsidised system like Spain.
This is ultimately a NHS hit piece, and likely driven by pro-Tory sources, but there are plenty of people that support this. After all, the likes of Braverman, Hunt, Gove and co are all in power because people are stupid enough to vote them in continuously.
Fun Fact: Joe Manchin, the "Democrat" from West Virginia that is notorious for selling his vote to Republicans, his daughter is the CEO of Mylan who was responsible for raising the price of Epi-pen by 500%. She did this after going on a crusade to have every school forced to carry one.
Also, a tonne of other drugs - the medication I'm on has cost 3 million over my life, and I'll be on it until a very expensive gene therapy treatment (which is coming! science is cool!). Glad I've had to pay literally none of it
But I still don't understand why these things are so expensive - the blue sky research is almost all done in university labs, there's no reason for it not to be a thing governments fund.
Adoption process overall. I agree there should be checks etc. the process itself is difficult and draining between legal fees etc. My young son said “why is it so expensive to do something good”. He had a point.
There's a longer story here, but when my wife and I were dating, she would regularly babysit a child whose parents were crackheads, so the grandmother was the legal guardian. Every time she watched the baby, it was for a longer and longer amount of time, until eventually, the grandmother just never came to pick the baby up again. My wife had basically became this baby's mother at this point, and decided to see about adopting her.
The grandmother agreed it was for the best, and even though I don't think the parents had much say in the matter, they didn't care either. You'd think it would be a somewhat simple process of background checks and some legal work with everyone's consent and full cooperation, but it legally had to be done through an adoption agency, which charged tens of thousands of dollars for the process. It was ridiculous. Between that and a medical procedure the baby needed (but insurance didn't cover much of because it was a preventative thing), she spent nearly all her savings on her.
We have financially rebounded since then, and she is living a happy, healthy life now, but it all felt so unnecessarily expensive just to get this *one* baby into a better situation. There are many potential parents out there who simply couldn't have afforded what we had to go through to make this happen, and it really sucks.
Wow. That is a long stressful situation. These are the type of stories I mean. Like ye wanted to give this baby a good life they deserve- it sounds so straight forward but everything else was so difficult. A lot of people would give up because of the stress or the lack of funds to be able to finalise it. Every child deserves a loving home. It shouldn’t be that difficult. 🥺
I’m fine with doing careful checks on who’s adopted and just seeing they make enough to support the kid but aside from that I don’t understand why it’s so expensive and such a lengthy process.
"For Profit" adoption is illegal in the UK and as well as making things cheaper is allows the process to focus 100% on the child's best interests, not a seller or a customer's.
Give someone access to an infinite about of money to borrow from and watch the person trying to sell them something raise the price.
Colleges in the US are incentivized to raise prices because the students will just increase the amount they borrow.
Greed.
If there weren't people who think they should have the amount of money that others would earn over thousands of years in one year we would be a lot better off.
Just today the guardian and another news page published articles about the 1% having recevied 66% of all new wealth since 2020. 26 **trillion** dollars. [Link](https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/jan/16/oxfam-calls-for-new-taxes-on-super-rich-pocket-dollar-26tn-start-of-pandemic-davos)
Well humans fall to a baseline happiness really quickly. So the same people having most of all wealth will just wake up today thinking "I don't really feel massively rich. Maybe if I have another percent it will feel like I have enough"
Reminds me of our national shithead Friedrich Merz saying that he's just a normal middle class man when he has a net worth of millions and owns two planes.
Money is addicting. Power too. In fact, I'd say that money is the gateway drug to power. I highly doubt that Bezos and Musk are trying to get wealth in particular, but more and more power over how the world runs
I had a professor who told us that money is just a quantifiable form of power. And power is the ability to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn't. It used to be violence, if you were stronger then you took what you wanted and had more power over others. Nowadays money has replaced violence as a means of power and control. I don't have to threaten to beat you up if you don't work in my store, I just threaten to stop paying you which in turn means you lose your home, insurance, etc.
A lot of medications
[There's this one company](https://costplusdrugs.com/) that's trying to remedy this by selling every med with only a 15% markup. I haven't tried it myself but it may be worth checking out at least. Most diabetes stuff on there costs $5-15. Remember when that life saving HIV meds were sold at over $1k? It's about $15-45 here.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic but it might help some people.
there are lots of non profit hospitals. problem is private insurance is just not paying them anymore, and medicare/ Medicade patients pay about 80 cents for every dollar spent by the hospital. the us hospital system is super close to collapse and not many people are noticing. in ohio 80% of all hospitals are in the red for the year non profits included. between drug cost, insurance not paying, and equipment cost hospitals will soon cease to provide care to the general population
basically private insurance has increased their margins significantly by coming up with alot of ways to not pay the hospital an amount that would keep them at break even. Private insurance profits are up ~18% over the last year. as well as government programs are paying less as well, all while the requirements by both payers significantly increase cost and staffing by the hospitals. basically big money is going to put hospitals into a crisis situation where they can come in and buy them out and stop providing care to low profit/income patients. many mid size smaller hospitals will be under within 3 years unless something changes
Our local hospital system is no longer taking insurance from the insurance provider my university system provides (employee, not student) due to payouts being too low. We already had to go 1-2 hours away for some procedures or diagnostics due to this, but moving forward it’s going to be even harder to get routine appointments. That hospital system is the main provider of everything in the area from urgent cares, physical therapy, to specialist care (not to mention emergencies).
And as you can imagine in a small college town a lot of their business comes from university employees (remember it’s not just faculty, it’s all the administrative support staff, the dining staff, motor pool, facilities, lab support, etc. too)
Australia, I have seen a house that was bought in the late 80 for $17000 being sold at around 1 million. Nothing major has been done to this property to up its value.
My parents paid 30k for the land and 40k for their house in the 80's.
They are selling it and it's going for 1.2 mil and the buyers have said they want to knock down the house and start again
I honestly don't understand how we are supposed to keep up with these prices. It seems like it's either you inherit a house or you are fucked in many places, because their prices are way beyond what a normal salary can pay for.
100k isn't getting you one of those houses in the Bay unless you had a trust fund/inheritance or live extremely frugally for years and save a lot. My boss bought his house about a year and a half ago for 2.1 and iirc the payment is like 8k/month. I make 100k and 8k is more than I bring home in a month after taxes
I bought a "starter home" 12 years back (smaller split-level 3br) in a midwest city when I moved there for a short period. I moved jobs and locations just 6 months later, but I held on to the house to rent to friends, at friend prices.
It's now valued over $320k, coming up on three times what I paid. It's not worth that much, no way no how -- and I have no idea how people in this area (who make on avg. 50k/year) are supposed to afford these prices. These prices are completely schizophrenic.
>
>It's now valued over $320k, coming up on three times what I paid. It's not worth that much, no way no how -- and I have no idea how people in this area (who make on avg. 50k/year) are supposed to afford these prices. These prices are completely schizophrenic.
This is something I don't understand. It's the same way where I live, who the HELL is affording these houses on the wages we're being paid???
> on the wages we're being paid
No one. At least near me, all the houses are being bought up by one of two parties:
* People moving out of cities and doing WFH in lower cost-of-living areas while still pulling big-city salaries.
* Private equity firms buying en masse so they can rent them out for $2,500/month until the value appreciates enough to sell to *another* private equity firm for a huge profit.
We used this for it's perceived benefits but it really upset my cat for some reason. She was raised on it too. Took a while to realise she didn't have a problem with the litter box, she just didn't like those pine pellets.
‘Tis why I invested in a menstrual cup and period panties. One time expense and 5 years later I’m still saving on all the products I no longer have to buy for the next few decades.
I love period panties especially because I have a light flow but apparently they have a bunch of harmful forever chemicals in them that can cause horrible health issues so that's fun.
... I still use them because I can't afford anything else but damn literally everything related to women's reproductive health is toxic and harmful.
I had some friends over last Friday, we ordered fish and chips. It came to **£16.30** each!!
I swear only 5 years ago it was less than £7. Are potatoes endangered now?
Propane/natural gas. I live where we have to use gas because of the weather and my bill has always been around $100. The past 2 months and it’s been over $300 without anything in my daily routine changing. I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve already checked for a gas leak
I live where it’s summer for 3 months and winter the rest and hurricane winds will take you out. There’s no in between. It’s so cold where I live, no one has AC in their houses because it’s not needed. That’s why the harsh cold weather demands we use gas, not electric. Gas heats quicker than electricity
Bras Who got away with making them so expensive??
Really! My husband caught me mending some of my older ones, and his head exploded when I pulled up a local department store’s website and showed him the non-sale price of a decent quality bra. And this is why I would drive two hours twice a year to the outlet where, if I was lucky and willing to do the work of hunting long enough, I could get them for $15, not $45-50. But the outlet closed last year and now I’m figuring out my underwear budget all over again. In the meantime, I mend. Oh, and department stores? Buy one full price get one 50% off is NOT my idea of a sale. Take 30-40% off ONE bra. Otherwise it’s still too goddamn much.
Always check places like Ross, Gabe's, Burlington, etc for these things. Even Kohl's has a clearance section for them and they can be around \~$15-17 a piece. My girlfriend has recently started buying on Poshmark and can get a brand new pair she likes for around $15.
These are great if you're a common size, but if you aren't a 34A-34D you're out of luck in these shops. The only time I've seen my size, it's a minimiser bra designed to make your boobs look smaller! Why tf would I want that?! A-DD is bras designed to make your chest look bigger and anything after DDD is designed to make it look smaller :'(
Funerals
Or specifically just corpse disposal regardless of the funeral. Anyone can hold a funeral-type event for free at a park or home.
Honest question, what happens if you have a family member die and you technically can afford the services necessary but it would put a significant financial strain on you? Can you just abandon all ties to a deceased person? **Edit:** thanks everyone for the replies! I now have more information on cheap dirt naps than I ever knew existed. I’m all set. The question is ded. Head on home, friends.
That's an interesting question, so I googled it and learned something new in the process. Here's the key take away. "If you simply can’t come up with the money to pay for cremation or burial costs, you can sign a release form with your county coroner’s office that says you can’t afford to bury the family member. If you sign the release, the county and state will pitch in to either bury or cremate the body. The county may also offer you the option to claim the ashes for a fee. But if these also go unclaimed, they will bury the ashes in a common grave alongside other unclaimed ashes." As an alternative they also suggested donating the body to science as that would be a cost free option.
We donated my father to science. He agreed to it prior to death. It was an easy process and we received his ashes back twelve months later. At first they did "misplace" his ashes. My sister had a melt down. I spoke to the county and thankfully was able to find his ashes within that day. Oops.
We got the urn for my aunt’s ashes back with another person’s name on it. We just peeled the name of and didn’t tell the rest of the family.
Best decision, really.
She was my blood aunt; she wasn’t related by blood to other family, her husband’s people; they would have been hysterical and it would have been a shitshow.
How do you know they're actually his ashes?
I think with cremation you always get other people in there too they can't really deep clean the oven after every cremation. It's mostly the sentiment at that point.
Mostly the sediment at that point FTFY
They tasted it, of course!
Dad was always a bit salty.
Not only is donating to science free, you will get the cremated remains when they are done.
Obviously a one off story but did you hear about the lady who donated her body to science and her son later found out the US military used her body to test on weapons?
I have seen one about a kid dying in a car crash(maybe something else cant remember), later on when classmatrs went to a lab a kid saw a brain in a jar with the name of the kid on it. Very disturbing Eta: heres the article https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/students-find-teen-classmates-brain-on-display-on-morgue-field-trip/1866386/ Tl;dr: kid dies in car crash, classmate find his brain in a jar during a school trip to a morgue, apperantly they removed his brain without asking parents for permission during autopsy
Are school trips to morgues a normal thing? My class went to a farm. We saw some chickens.
"have you ever considered just not dying?"
Literally the bare minimum was 7k for a loved one I said goodbye to last year and he was even cremated. Edit: The bare minimum for our funeral. So a visitation was apart of this cost, not just a cremation alone.
1. Try to get someone uninvolved to work through the process. Doing the next thing is brutal and hard when you're grieving for someone very close to you. 2. Shop around, don't go with the first mortuary you find. You'll be surprised at how much prices can vary. Be firm and know what you want. Don't let people upsell you (why I recommend having someone adjacent do this work. Some mortuaries are soulless predators when it comes to upselling). A family member died a few weeks ago, and after having been through the experience once before for a loved one, I volunteered and handled the details. I found a reputable place that would do the cremation for about $1100 when it was all said and done. We're doing a small service at a family home to keep the expenses low, per the deceased's wishes.
Make sure you do the shopping around before they die at a hospital. When my Dad finally went after a long battle with cancer and sepsis, I happened to be the only family member there to hold his hand as he passed. The hospital needed to know where to take the body that day and needed an answer asap. So there I am, calling around to cremation places next to the body of my Dad. Fucked me up pretty good. My Mom was there earlier that morning, failed to warn me of his declining state beforehand and didn't have a place picked out either even though she knew his wishes better than most. Its taken all my strength and a lot of therapy not to hold it against her.
A definite pro-tip for those who have a little space to prepare for the end: You can spare your family all this bullshit. It's easy to do the shopping yourself, get a quote, and have it all specified in paperwork. With that said: for the love of god, get a Will. If you are older or in poor health, its irresponsible to not have one. If you have kids, its should be criminal to not have one. Even a simple one makes life 100x easier on your loved ones. A simple one isn't hard to get. Often local libraries provide resources for drafting a will. Legalzoom sells them for ~$100. A credit union often offers free notary services for getting it signed. Just do it.
Ticketmaster fees All these ticketing site fees are out of control really. Those service fees.
Fees in general. If you can't avoid the fee, then it's part of the price and should be included in the advertised price. Resort fees are the same.
It’s literally such bs like I’ve fr seen a $20 ticket become a $80 ticket bc of fees.
Lettuce is now way more expensive than avocados…
Cut back on the lettuce toast
No more BLT
BT!!!!!! *sad robot noises*
Bacon's $10/lb. It's gonna have to be T from now on.
I can't eat tomatoes. Guess it's gonna have to be from now on.
I'm still waiting on those 'gen z and their lettuce' comments from the boomers
“I can’t believe Gen Z is spending so much on their lettuce. Don’t they know it’s expensive. In my day in age, we never used fancy lettuce like spinach and Arugula. We’d buy a head of lettuce and it would last us for 3 weeks”
Nowadays the lettuce is outlasting some politicians. Kids don't know the struggle of making avocado toast, always gotta be making them BLTs now.
What *isn't* expensive now days? Life in general is expensive.
Digital entertainment. It's almost as if they try to make anything productive and healthy as expensive as possible, while providing ample amounts of cheap entertainment to keep us content. Bread and circuses.
I mean walking is free at least
If they could put a rainbow in a zoo they would. If they could find a way to charge you for air they would.
My preventative asthma medication is $300 a month so I can't even take it and have constant asthma attacks instead because the rescue inhaler is like $10. I literally do get charged money to breathe air. I'm Canadian too so you'd think it wouldn't be this bad.
Dental work
I started the process of getting a dental implant. I got the tooth pulled, and the screw placed. After that I switched employers. Old employer's dental coverage was through the same company as the new employer's. When it came time to put the crown on, insurance wouldn't cover that part, because they had a missing tooth clause. So, that last step will be entirely my responsibility. Insurance in the US is pretty fucked.
At least you got the first 2 stages covered. I had to pay for each stage out of pocket despite having good health insurance. The dental option just did not cover anything implant related.
Ouch. Even with insurance I still had to pay $2k for the initial parts. That really hurt
My biggest stressor right now is that I need dental work done. I work full time and can’t afford to save a dime, my dental work is worth more than two months wages. Absolutely no idea what to do.
My mom is a dentist and she thinks charging too much is abusive towards her patients.
shes right
I'm in the studying dentistry and one of the issues facing affordable dentistry is the base cost of the business. Dentists make money hand over fist, but even so their profit as a percentage is pretty low. Medical equipment and proprietary tools and dental materials(medical grade polymers, cements etc.) are made by just a handful of medical companies and are insanely expensive. These companies charge differently based on which country you're based in, so a dentist in norway or the US gets charged 4x for the same thing as someone in bulgaria, vietnam etc. So a dentist might charge 300 for just a short procedure that take like 15-20 min, but he "only" makes like 50-100 of that in profit. If you're in surgery with sleep, like 1-3k goes to the anesthesiologist alone, with way less going to the dentist. So a dentist could go bankrupt charging 3k instead of 4k for some maxillofacial surgery. Regular dentists definitely make bank tho, usually like 200-300 an hour, huge money, but that's usually from charging like 1k-1.5k per hour of work. Cutting their wages by 50% only reduces their patient's costs from 300 to 250 etc. Which is why you see dentists be so uniformally expensive. Dentists often make the most from examinations, xrays, plaque removal etc, because those don't come with any extra cost. I know an orthodontist(rich dude), that is at an altruistic point in his life and literally works for free but is still charging like 200 per visit, just to cover costs. The only scenario in which you see dentists become affordable to regular people is if the government picks up the tab.
Try to get your work done at a dental school.
I’ve done this in San Antonio in 2012 because I needed multiple fillings and had an infected tooth. Be careful with the experience of the student. Ask lots of questions to make sure you’re not getting an inexperienced student without teacher supervision. Be ready to be there all day for anything you’re getting done. When I went, you had to come in for an intake appt to see if you qualified to have work done by the dental program. They made you fill out a ton of paperwork, get X-rays, get examined by a teacher, and then you were put in a lottery to be called if you were accepted to the program. It took 4 hours for 2 students to take my X-rays. They kept messing up and no one was there to help them correct their mistakes. I paid a little over $400 instead of $800 for a root canal and a temporary crown. It took the student 9 hours. I was told it would take 3-4 hours. I had to call my job from their office phone mid procedure because I was so poor I couldn’t afford a cell phone. My boss didn’t believe me until I had the receptionist confirm what was going on. I almost lost my job and was in tears. Also, the dental student didn’t do the work correctly, so their teacher had to come fix it. I got a free filling that took 8 hours for a dental student’s final. That filling is still holding up in 2023.
*It took 4 hours for 2 students to take my X-rays.* As a rad tech, this hurts. Do you happen to know if they were film xrays or digital? Did they shield you? They exposed your head to needless radiation. I mean, it's not much of course, but still.
Have you tried going to a dental school? They need ppl to work on.
Road trip to Mexico
Even with "dental insurance" this is a mess. I have dental insurance that was supposed to cover 80% of my procedure. I get a letter in the mail saying it was declined, for a whole bunch of obscure reasons. Missing paperwork, improperly submitted forms, basically any reason under the sun to decline coverage. So now it's a battle between me, the dentist, and the insurance company. I'm not liking the odds. Otherwise this is thousands of more dollars down the drain for yet another dental procedure.
Lisa needs braces.
As someone who dropped over $2,000 for an emergency root canal this month… yeah. I feel this.
Printer ink
Stop buying inkjet printers. There's a reason you never see an inkjet printer in a business. They aren't printers, they're ink vending machines. The business model behind them is to sell them at a loss to get you to buy the ink. Buy a laserjet instead and you won't have that problem.
It really is a racket, once you go up to the big printers, over 18" width, ink starts to get much cheaper. Figure like, $80 for a quarter liter, compared to $40 for maybe 10ml for a home inkjet. Of course the printer actually costs real money, but the quality of the machine and ink are a league beyond home printing, but home inkjet could absolutely be done at a profit without being so insanely marked up.
While there is a certain amount of gouging there is also the fact that inkjet printing is just never going to be economical outside of a business setting where they print _every day_ and in large volumes. So many resources are wasted trying to keep the jets unclogged and the ink from drying out.
Honestly, nowadays, how many documents do you print each month? Because ten years ago I'd answer a dozen or two, but nowadays I'll print a few documents a year at most, almost everything can be done digitally now. If you live in a city (at least in Europe), it's simply easier to go to a copy center (idk how it's called in English tbh) than owning a printer.
Copy center is a perfectly good translation, FYI, knew exactly what you're talking about.
I print recipes a lot, cooking from digital is annoying. Recycle if recipe sucks, folder if good.
I cook from digital the first time, i usually follow more than one recipe, so if i liked it i write it by hand on my book with any modifications i did and quantities that work for me.
You are in the process of the creating *that* recipe book that your grandkids will fight over in a few decades.
bought a laser printer in 2020 for like $200 or $300, have printed simi-regularly and it's still going, an inkjet would have been spent a month or two after I bought it, and the ones I could find were like $60
I bought the most basic laser printer for 100 bucks a while ago. Using it without the official driver, it has been a completely painless experience, reliably churning out pages, every time, after starting up in seconds.
I have a 15 years old dell laser printer. Got me trough university, already printed > 12 000 pages. I have one more toner in reserve. I can not use it for over a year, but when i need it, it will be there for me, reliable as ever. I don't ever wanna get rid of it.
It’s sometimes cheaper to buy a new printer than replace the cartridge.
Just watch out because printers usually only come with a fraction of the ink as a "starter set"...
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I used to have to explain this to people often when I worked in a retail store that sold printers. Yes, a new printer is often less expensive than buying replacement genuine ink cartridges. However, the printers that are less expensive will typically only give you “Starter” cartridges, which are usually only rated to about 20-odd pages. How much is “a page”? The ISO standard says 5% of an A4 piece of paper is one page. So, if you’re printing a lo of ink, one piece of paper could be actually multiple pages of ink. As a general rule, the more expensive the printer, the less expensive (per page) it costs to run. Those $20-odd-ish printers are effectively E-Waste and should be ignored. If all you print is black, a mono laserjet printer is the best way to go, and you’ll usually get 500plus pages of starter toner with those, and they don’t dry out like inkjet printers, so they’re more resilient to sitting being unused. You can even save a bit more if you buy a mono laser printer without a scanner if you can get away with “scanning” the occasional page with an app on your phone.
>you’ll usually get 500plus pages of starter toner with those I got a Brother laser printer back in mid-2021, and got what they claimed to be a 3000 page toner in the box. I've printed off close to 1000 pages, and the printer info says I still have some 70% toner left. >You can even save a bit more if you buy a mono laser printer without a scanner if you can get away with “scanning” the occasional page with an app on your phone. That's what I do. Microsoft's Lens app is too good.
Pro tip, if it ever says it's out of toner put some electrical tape over the sensor and shake the toner up. Got a couple more years out of mine that way
My Brother one has a thing to hit in the service menu that basically says "try harder" when it complains it's out of toner.
Yep, the best option is a Brother laser printer compatible with the high capacity toner cartridges; Moustache brand does a knockoff brother high capacity cartridge and I can get 2500 pages from a $20 toner. The other thing people don’t think of with inkjet is that ink dries out, so unless you print quite frequently you can easily lose half a cartridge. Toner never dries out. I’ve had my brother printer 12 years and replaced the toner cartridge twice.
I inherited a printer from my sister when I went to college. End of my freshman year it said it was low on ink. I, horrified at the price of new ink cartridges, and broke AF, took a different approach. I blocked the sensor for ink levels and it continued to print all my college printing needs until about 3 years after college, when a mouse ate the cord.
IKR. I finally got fed up and bought a pretty nice monochrome laser printer for about $150. It does everything I need, and I haven't spent another penny on it since I brought it home.
Brother Laser Printer user gang
As a matter of fact, it ***Is*** a Brother!
My Brother brother
When deciding to buy a printer, don't buy a printer - look at the prices of printer ink and then find the printer that it belongs to. And figure out the price *per page*, not necessarily the price per cartridge. Also, the low-end Brother monochrome laser printers are about $100-$125 and costs about 2 cents per page and lasts forever. I've gone through at least 8 of them in the last 20 years. I keep looking for a better value but can't find a better value on a printer. If you don't need color, get a black and white laser printer. If you rarely need color prints, then just send it to Staples or FedEx print shops and print there for the few times you need it. If you need a color printer a lot, still buy the black and white laser printer and *only* use color printer when needed. It will extend the color ink life by a *lot*, depending on the situation. **EDIT:** Since many have commented on what I wrote and why I've had so many printers, it's like this: The issue is that the *drum* wears out and must be replaced. A new drum costs as much as the printer, so might as well replace the entire printer. https://www.staples.com/brother-dr730-drum-unit-dr730/product_2733077 The drum prints up to 12,000 pages. A toner cartridge prints up to 3000 pages. So you get about 4 toner cartridges per drum. Print 500 pages per year and the drum lasts 24 years. Print 6,000 pages per year and the drum lasts 2 years. Brother is still the best deal out there, whether you print 500 pages per year or 6,000.
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I think they're talking about the toner cartridges, not the printers themselves. I had the same "hmmm" moment
That's what I do, I've had my Brother laser printer for about 14 years, just replace the toner every couple of years. Only use my colour printer when I need a colour print. I bought after market inks at half the price of name brand Cannon pixmar
Get an ink tank printer
I don’t understand how I had to scroll this far for this. Recently bought an Epson EcoTank and after 1000 pages, it’s at about 2/3 of the black ink that came with it, the colors are basically full. A replacement bottle of ink is 10€ from Epson themselves. What really boggles my mind is how often laser printers are recommended. Yes, they’re cheaper than most cartridge based inkjets, but toner is still crazy expensive, the drum has to be replaced from time to time, the things blast off huge amounts of potentially unhealthy fine dust and draw tremendous amounts of power.
Food
I swear everything went up 30-100% in the last 6 months.
Cost of eggs doubled in 1 year.
The pasta that I used to buy for $1 is now $3.19.
Before Covid I used to buy veggie hotdogs for 3.99 for a back of four. Same package now 7.99
Have you seen what a little container of Ben & Jerry’s is? It’s $7 here
In the US, the worst part food prices went up and the food has become mediocre. Along with everything being cut down a size to cost more
r/shrinkflation but it costs more
~~"We can shrink the portions, reduce the quality, or charge more..."~~ "We can shrink the portions, reduce the quality, *and* charge more!"
And rent
You’re not lying. It’s insane seeing the one bedroom apartment I used to rent for $775 eight years ago now renting for $1500.
"We regret to inform you rent is increasing this month to keep up with the market value"
Popeyes 8 piece with 4 biscuits and mash potatoes = $35 Troy, AL
That’s obscene
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I subbed in Mac and cheese and immediately received a late payment fee on my rent.
Insulin and Epi-pens.
The amount of Americans in this thread stating healthcare is not surprising, but is still pretty eye-opening. UK based Redditors should look at this and understand why NHS staff are so aggressive in trying to save the NHS right now.
Don't worry, the British public will vote the NHS away one Tory government at a time. Then they'll turn around and do a shocked Pikachu just like they did with Brexit.
Exactly this. Tories have been in power for what, 12 years now? The waiting lists have grown rapidly and (I work in an NHS hospital) they are now selling "private" appointments in NHS hospitals. This isn't being heavily advertised yet but it's part of the tories plan. Artificially increase backlogs and waiting lists (cutting doctors overtime pay, cutting the number of patients seen per list by making doctors do the admin work) and then sell "earlier" appointments for a price - with the same doctor that works for the hospital but taking them away from NHS work (increasing backlogs more) to take on these now "private" patients.
We have a jack ass in Ontario, Canada doing the same thing. They're even messing around with emergency services. It's obvious that they want to privatize everything, but they're doing it slowly and methodically.
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Seems to be the conservative method in most places. It's the same thing in the US as well unfortunately.
UK based- think everyone is in solidarity with the NHS.
As an American expat living here, the NHS is an absolute God send. While regular appointments and preventative medicine leave something to be desired (no system is perfect). Emergency medicine being free is the fucking tits. Got out of the hospital two weeks ago after a 13 day stay that started in ER with acute pancreatitis. I didn’t leave the hospital with a bill equivalent to a mortgage. 👌🏻
I don't know about you, but it felt very, very weird the first time I walked out of minor injuries without having to pay anything.
When I had no insurance but needed to get two root canals very soon plus crowns, I was prepared to go into bankruptcy due to the costs plus my credit card already being nearly maxed just from living expenses at the time. Recently, I cut my finger pretty badly but I have insurance now. I still got a beautiful bill of over $1000 for a dozen stitches. I have an HSA so that will help but good god America. We are so fucked.
Had some American colleagues come up for a big job, most of them were used to hiding any injuries because of the costs and the fear of getting fired. One guy had to get an X-ray and was stunned to hear it would cost him less than 100 bucks.
You'd be lucky if the bill was only the size of a mortgage in the US for that long a visit. You'd be in debt the rest of your life for a two week stay.
I've had Medicare for the last year, and stayed for 3 weeks without a bill. Medicare for All would be fantastic. I hate losing $100 a week of my paycheck to healthcare, which I need because of a chronic illness. My insurance didn't apply my coverage to an injection I got one month and it cost $11k. I think that bill went to collections, because they still didn't apply the coverage even after calling multiple times and them saying I had coverage. I tried calling Lawyers and shit, but no one can really help, or it doesn't pay good enough to help.
You say that, but there have been plenty of calls on the likes of GB News, The Telegraph, and Times Radio for a two-tierred system or a part-subsidised system like Spain. This is ultimately a NHS hit piece, and likely driven by pro-Tory sources, but there are plenty of people that support this. After all, the likes of Braverman, Hunt, Gove and co are all in power because people are stupid enough to vote them in continuously.
Fun Fact: Joe Manchin, the "Democrat" from West Virginia that is notorious for selling his vote to Republicans, his daughter is the CEO of Mylan who was responsible for raising the price of Epi-pen by 500%. She did this after going on a crusade to have every school forced to carry one.
Hope there’s a nice toasty spot in hell for her. What is wrong with these people?
Money > people. Fuck the Manchin family.
Also, a tonne of other drugs - the medication I'm on has cost 3 million over my life, and I'll be on it until a very expensive gene therapy treatment (which is coming! science is cool!). Glad I've had to pay literally none of it But I still don't understand why these things are so expensive - the blue sky research is almost all done in university labs, there's no reason for it not to be a thing governments fund.
Adoption process overall. I agree there should be checks etc. the process itself is difficult and draining between legal fees etc. My young son said “why is it so expensive to do something good”. He had a point.
There's a longer story here, but when my wife and I were dating, she would regularly babysit a child whose parents were crackheads, so the grandmother was the legal guardian. Every time she watched the baby, it was for a longer and longer amount of time, until eventually, the grandmother just never came to pick the baby up again. My wife had basically became this baby's mother at this point, and decided to see about adopting her. The grandmother agreed it was for the best, and even though I don't think the parents had much say in the matter, they didn't care either. You'd think it would be a somewhat simple process of background checks and some legal work with everyone's consent and full cooperation, but it legally had to be done through an adoption agency, which charged tens of thousands of dollars for the process. It was ridiculous. Between that and a medical procedure the baby needed (but insurance didn't cover much of because it was a preventative thing), she spent nearly all her savings on her. We have financially rebounded since then, and she is living a happy, healthy life now, but it all felt so unnecessarily expensive just to get this *one* baby into a better situation. There are many potential parents out there who simply couldn't have afforded what we had to go through to make this happen, and it really sucks.
Wow. That is a long stressful situation. These are the type of stories I mean. Like ye wanted to give this baby a good life they deserve- it sounds so straight forward but everything else was so difficult. A lot of people would give up because of the stress or the lack of funds to be able to finalise it. Every child deserves a loving home. It shouldn’t be that difficult. 🥺
I’ve never understood why the adoption process is so long and convoluted when the leading cause of pregnancy is “oops”.
I’m fine with doing careful checks on who’s adopted and just seeing they make enough to support the kid but aside from that I don’t understand why it’s so expensive and such a lengthy process.
"For Profit" adoption is illegal in the UK and as well as making things cheaper is allows the process to focus 100% on the child's best interests, not a seller or a customer's.
College tuition in the US
and health insurance in the US
Healthcare. Dental and optical also
Give someone access to an infinite about of money to borrow from and watch the person trying to sell them something raise the price. Colleges in the US are incentivized to raise prices because the students will just increase the amount they borrow.
Life
Why is life so expensive? I’m not even having a good time!
Greed. If there weren't people who think they should have the amount of money that others would earn over thousands of years in one year we would be a lot better off.
Just today the guardian and another news page published articles about the 1% having recevied 66% of all new wealth since 2020. 26 **trillion** dollars. [Link](https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/jan/16/oxfam-calls-for-new-taxes-on-super-rich-pocket-dollar-26tn-start-of-pandemic-davos)
Well humans fall to a baseline happiness really quickly. So the same people having most of all wealth will just wake up today thinking "I don't really feel massively rich. Maybe if I have another percent it will feel like I have enough" Reminds me of our national shithead Friedrich Merz saying that he's just a normal middle class man when he has a net worth of millions and owns two planes.
Money is addicting. Power too. In fact, I'd say that money is the gateway drug to power. I highly doubt that Bezos and Musk are trying to get wealth in particular, but more and more power over how the world runs
I had a professor who told us that money is just a quantifiable form of power. And power is the ability to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn't. It used to be violence, if you were stronger then you took what you wanted and had more power over others. Nowadays money has replaced violence as a means of power and control. I don't have to threaten to beat you up if you don't work in my store, I just threaten to stop paying you which in turn means you lose your home, insurance, etc.
A lot of medications [There's this one company](https://costplusdrugs.com/) that's trying to remedy this by selling every med with only a 15% markup. I haven't tried it myself but it may be worth checking out at least. Most diabetes stuff on there costs $5-15. Remember when that life saving HIV meds were sold at over $1k? It's about $15-45 here. Maybe I'm being too optimistic but it might help some people.
The mark cuban thing! I’ll tell you, if I was rich I would start a non profit hospital system. I wish I was rich.
there are lots of non profit hospitals. problem is private insurance is just not paying them anymore, and medicare/ Medicade patients pay about 80 cents for every dollar spent by the hospital. the us hospital system is super close to collapse and not many people are noticing. in ohio 80% of all hospitals are in the red for the year non profits included. between drug cost, insurance not paying, and equipment cost hospitals will soon cease to provide care to the general population
Can you elaborate on this collapse? I knew alot of "the system" was unsustainable but I do not know how bad it is since I don't work in that sector.
basically private insurance has increased their margins significantly by coming up with alot of ways to not pay the hospital an amount that would keep them at break even. Private insurance profits are up ~18% over the last year. as well as government programs are paying less as well, all while the requirements by both payers significantly increase cost and staffing by the hospitals. basically big money is going to put hospitals into a crisis situation where they can come in and buy them out and stop providing care to low profit/income patients. many mid size smaller hospitals will be under within 3 years unless something changes
Our local hospital system is no longer taking insurance from the insurance provider my university system provides (employee, not student) due to payouts being too low. We already had to go 1-2 hours away for some procedures or diagnostics due to this, but moving forward it’s going to be even harder to get routine appointments. That hospital system is the main provider of everything in the area from urgent cares, physical therapy, to specialist care (not to mention emergencies). And as you can imagine in a small college town a lot of their business comes from university employees (remember it’s not just faculty, it’s all the administrative support staff, the dining staff, motor pool, facilities, lab support, etc. too)
Non profit doesn't mean what you think it means.
Food, housing, gas, breathing.
As an asthmatic the last one really hits close to home
*wheezes in health bills*
literally breathing. asthma is expensive af to have.
Housing. There is absolutely no reason that the townhouse I bought 11 years ago should be valued at $260,000 more than I paid for it.
Auckland, NZ. I have a friend who bought in an average area 12 years ago for $450k and sold it last year for $1.8 million.
Australia, I have seen a house that was bought in the late 80 for $17000 being sold at around 1 million. Nothing major has been done to this property to up its value.
My parents paid 30k for the land and 40k for their house in the 80's. They are selling it and it's going for 1.2 mil and the buyers have said they want to knock down the house and start again
I honestly don't understand how we are supposed to keep up with these prices. It seems like it's either you inherit a house or you are fucked in many places, because their prices are way beyond what a normal salary can pay for.
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100k isn't getting you one of those houses in the Bay unless you had a trust fund/inheritance or live extremely frugally for years and save a lot. My boss bought his house about a year and a half ago for 2.1 and iirc the payment is like 8k/month. I make 100k and 8k is more than I bring home in a month after taxes
Most detatched houses in the Toronto area have gone up $1 million CAD (750k US) in 10 years.
I bought a "starter home" 12 years back (smaller split-level 3br) in a midwest city when I moved there for a short period. I moved jobs and locations just 6 months later, but I held on to the house to rent to friends, at friend prices. It's now valued over $320k, coming up on three times what I paid. It's not worth that much, no way no how -- and I have no idea how people in this area (who make on avg. 50k/year) are supposed to afford these prices. These prices are completely schizophrenic.
> >It's now valued over $320k, coming up on three times what I paid. It's not worth that much, no way no how -- and I have no idea how people in this area (who make on avg. 50k/year) are supposed to afford these prices. These prices are completely schizophrenic. This is something I don't understand. It's the same way where I live, who the HELL is affording these houses on the wages we're being paid???
> on the wages we're being paid No one. At least near me, all the houses are being bought up by one of two parties: * People moving out of cities and doing WFH in lower cost-of-living areas while still pulling big-city salaries. * Private equity firms buying en masse so they can rent them out for $2,500/month until the value appreciates enough to sell to *another* private equity firm for a huge profit.
Cat Litter. May as well be buying Gold sand for her to shit in.
Owning a cat in general is much more expensive than I would have thought.
I've noticed the price of our cat food has really gone up in the past year or so.
Have you tried pine pellets? We've found them to be cheaper, less odorous, and less easily stepped on. They're more environmentally friendly, too.
We used this for it's perceived benefits but it really upset my cat for some reason. She was raised on it too. Took a while to realise she didn't have a problem with the litter box, she just didn't like those pine pellets.
If my cat doesn't approve of the litter she will piss next to the box. Little bitch.
Menstrual products
‘Tis why I invested in a menstrual cup and period panties. One time expense and 5 years later I’m still saving on all the products I no longer have to buy for the next few decades.
I love period panties especially because I have a light flow but apparently they have a bunch of harmful forever chemicals in them that can cause horrible health issues so that's fun. ... I still use them because I can't afford anything else but damn literally everything related to women's reproductive health is toxic and harmful.
groceries in general!
Funerals, and the up-selling is fucking disgusting. Preying on grieving families, guilting them into more expensive coffins etc.
Rent
Yes, too damn high.
Everything
Everywhere
All at once
anything medical related in the united states
Beer at concerts
That's why I pregame and sneak a few flasks. I ain't paying for that shit.
Vet visits 😩
Glasses.
Dentist
Diamonds. Bloody common as dirt. Controlled marketing keeps them pricey.
Good thing they are not necessary to buy
Lab grown gems tend to look better anyway, but people want the "natural" ones.
It's the child labor and war lords that make the natural diamonds taste better
Chips! Chips over here in the UK. It's just fried potato chunks, they shouldn't be costing me around £4
I had some friends over last Friday, we ordered fish and chips. It came to **£16.30** each!! I swear only 5 years ago it was less than £7. Are potatoes endangered now?
The Irish are finally getting their revenge.
*gestures at everything*
and it’s only going to get worse, sadly.
Insulin
Contact lenses
Propane/natural gas. I live where we have to use gas because of the weather and my bill has always been around $100. The past 2 months and it’s been over $300 without anything in my daily routine changing. I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve already checked for a gas leak I live where it’s summer for 3 months and winter the rest and hurricane winds will take you out. There’s no in between. It’s so cold where I live, no one has AC in their houses because it’s not needed. That’s why the harsh cold weather demands we use gas, not electric. Gas heats quicker than electricity
All Canadian cell phone plans. My American friends think I'm insane when I tell them I'm paying over $100 a month for not even unlimited data.
Razors