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from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.
More than half of American millennials, the generation of people born between 1981 and 1996, believe that they will one day be millionaires; one in five think they will get there by the age of 40. These are the findings from a survey conducted in 2018 by TD Ameritrade, a financial-services company.
But a working paper by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, offers a sobering antidote to this youthful optimism. It finds that millennials are less wealthy than people of a similar age were in any year from 1989 to 2007. The economic crisis of 2008-09 hit millennials particularly hard. Median household wealth in 2016 for 20- to 35-year-olds was about 25% lower than it was for the similar-aged cohort in 2007.
[...] But all is not lost. Millennials are living longer and are the best-educated generation in history. Taken together, this could yet mean that the youngest millennials, who have been less scarred by the crisis, could contribute towards their retirement pots for longer. Then there is mum and dad: even if they don’t become millionaires, millennials will one day inherit from their parents, and that may help redress their relative poverty.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:43PM (8 children)
My wife's parents passed recently, the late stage caregivers all seemed to expect non-payment of the final items - they were prepared to take whatever Medicaid would give.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:25PM (7 children)
Yeah, I don't even know how the Hospice stays in business. She was too young for Medicaid and got fired from her job when she got sick and lost insurance. They didn't even ask about payment.
A financial worker local hospital that did some post-insurance work basically told me that they would bill but just to ignore it. I never even saw a bill from them. (this was before she moved in with me, so who knows then)
The ones that got me were drug companies. Never sent any bills, just showed up with a Sheriff and a court order to reposes my vehicles and everything in my house if I didn't pay 10k by next week. I explained that the stuff at the house belongs to me and me alone. Talked to a lawyer and he suggested it was cheaper to just pay up. Fuck drug companies and fuck our legal system.
And funeral costs, can't really escape those if you care about the person.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @04:11PM
Protips: don't personally cosign for sick parents, don't ignore court summonses, hire a decent lawyer, let the estate go bankrupt.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 23 2019, @04:45PM
Ouch, and I bet the $10K amount was calculated to be cheaper to pay than fight.
I had an expensive (like $20K billed) round of antibiotics for osteomyletis once, managed to settle everything with the office at the end of treatment, got a Paid in Full agreement signed by them. 18 months later, we had moved houses, and a bill for $5K shows up in the mailbox... apparently they had transferred their accounting to a new company, the new company was reviewing old accounts and missed that ours was Paid in Full and so, decided to re-bill us for all the bogus crap that we had straightened out over a year prior. While we were discussing it the first time on the phone, they immediately agreed to write off the most bogus $4K of the bill, but pitched another attempt to collect something like $800 unless we produced our copy of the Paid In Full... calculated to be easier to pay than fight, I suspect. We talked it through with the actual office and it went away, no Sheriff at the door yet 5 years later.
As for the wife's parents, yeah, the whole family is savvy enough, nobody co-signed or co-addressed nothin'.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:38PM (3 children)
Where I used to live, my telephone number was one digit off from the number for a local hospice. Apparently at some point a list had gone out to the local medical community with the incorrect phone number (that is, mine) for the hospice.
Every few months I'd get a late night phone call from a harried nurse, looking for a hospice bed for a terminal patient. I'd calmly explain that they had the wrong number, and give them the right number. They'd always be so apologetic, but I'd tell them it was no problem and they had far more important things to worry about than waking me up.
One time I came home from work, and found on my answering machine a heartbreaking series of increasingly desperate calls from a daughter looking for a bed for her father, and pleading with the hospice to call her back. I had to call her and explain she'd been given the wrong number, and that's why no one had called her. I spent about five minutes just listening to her; she obviously needed to vent to a non-medical person right then. I'd want someone to listen to me.
The last year I lived there I didn't get any calls like that; I guess a corrected list eventually got sent around. I'd kept the number, even though it was a little annoying, because I didn't want anyone in that situation to get some rampaging asshole on the line instead of me.
I know this is a boring post and no one will care.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:43PM
I do, people like you make the world a little better
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 24 2019, @05:57PM
Often happens to caregivers of the dying - they just need somebody to listen, whether trained or not. Thanks for being a human being about it, and if we cared more about things like this we'd be able to care less about so many other seemingly important things.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 24 2019, @05:58PM
Addendum - wish you could get +10 for this, +6 isn't enough.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 23 2019, @09:06PM
Just cheaper to pay up?!? Get another lawyer! That you were never billed sounds like a major violation of due process. And there's also a provision in the Constitution that children shall not be held liable for the crimes of their parents.
I wonder if the viral video route would have been the answer. A recording of all these officials committing robbery in the name of Big Pharma would at the least be highly embarrassing.
> And funeral costs, can't really escape those if you care about the person.
Yes, you can. You just have to put aside those social expectations that you have to pay for disposal of the body in a manner deemed respectful. Even cremation is fairly expensive. Donate your dearly departed one to science. That's free. And why should that mean you don't love them? It sure did not mean that to us! It's what we did with my father, and we are sure he would have liked that, though all he ever said on that subject was that after he's dead he won't care any more what happens to his body or possessions. He was a big admirer and follower of science, and also very frugal. The donation was a final service, that with our help, he could do towards progress. Apparently so few people go that route that they are far from overwhelmed with offers. I don't know how long that state of affairs will last. I fully expect donating to science won't be free if lots more people start doing it, and they may. But in the meantime, as long as most people feel that's disrespectful or cheap or whatever, and let the funeral industry sucker them into showing their respect and love by throwing lots of cold hard cash away on funeral arrangements, well, that's their problem. We held a memorial at his favorite restaurant, and the hell with those bandits in the mortuary biz. Paying for everyone's food at the restaurant was much less costly than merely renting space at a funeral home for an hour, their prices are so high.