• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Okay but they can easily invest 2/3rds of that for a decade and then live off the dividends. That’s not middle class or working class.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      For that amount of money, they’d be lucky to get a couple hundred in dividends each month. I used to work for a company that gave dividends, and their reasoning for laying people off instead of touching the dividend was that a lot of people relied on the dividend to make ends meet.

      A coworker of mine did the math, and you’d need to have millions invested in the stock to get a dividend you could actually live on. The fact of the matter is that working class goes up to over 1 million. You have to be born rich or be an immoral businessman like Gates or Bezos to live off just investments.

      Even a lot of celebrities don’t qualify! You had John Boyega protesting with people because even most actors aren’t that rich. It’s why Hollywood tends liberal instead of conservative.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Then your coworker fucked up the math. Once you get about 1.8M in stocks you can get around 80k in dividends. 200,000 a year (2/3rds a 300,000 take home) would reach 1.8M in about 9 years.

        This is how people retire in their late 30’s (or earlier if they got handed that kind of pay via nepotism/networking)

        Getting a million dollars a year and calling yourself working class is fucking ridiculous. At that point you have so much access to assets that if you don’t create a self sustaining income it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Our company has a 3.88% dividend rate, and when things were okay and stock price was like $60. That’s $2.328 annually from one stock when things are mediocre, and at the time, it was worse than mediocre. For that annual dividend, you’d need to own roughly 34.4k stock, or $2M worth, to make $80k a year.

          Your math on take home pay doesn’t check out. Someone making $300k is looking at like $60k in income tax, plus $60k in housing if they follow the 20%ish rule there. If they’re making $300k they’re probably in a high cost of living area, so food and gas and electricity are going to add up too, not to mention insurance. If they’re lucky, they’ll put away $100k, tops, but only after their savings cover 3 months of expenses. Long story short, they might have enough for $80k a year after 20 years of intense saving from a $300k a year job. They’ll probably need closer to $150k, frankly

          My coworkers and I were upper middle class at $100k or so a year, and I lived significantly below my means. I was able to put away roughly 40k a year at best. It would’ve taken me 50 years to buy enough stock.

          If you’re making $300k a year single, you’re almost definitely not able to put $200k away into investments each year unless you have significant expenses covered through other means.