Personal Finance

over 50% of a whole nation that’s in financial woes?

This is self-reported data, so there's no consistent definition of what "broke" means. It could mean anything from "I literally can't afford food" to "I'm stressed about my finances," and the causes are as diverse as the definitions of "broke." The Fed reports that 77% are at least doing "okay" financially, so that's a pretty big disconnect. On the Expenses side, 82% of people are able to pay the current month's expenses, and that's consistent across all income levels until we get to the <$25k/year level, which is 67% ($25k is $12.50/hr).

So I'm going to cite some other sources to hopefully get more information about it. Here's another survey by PennyHoarder about budgeting, and some takeaways:

• people who track spending have less credit card debt
• people who make $25-50k are less likely to keep a budget - i.e. the people who probably need to keep a budget the most
• 1 in 5 have splurged on an expense, which caused them to struggle with bills
• 1 in 4 have hidden an expense from a significant other

And here's another that discusses how Americans overspend their budgets.

When I look at this data, it seems there's a lot of people who could benefit from more transparency in their finances. I don't see a systemic issue where half of the population is drowning in debt, what I see is a large chunk of the population who need better financial education.

people’s incomes are going to go down, as everything is being automated.

That's not a given. Technological advances tend to increase wages, the main issue is churn in the labor market as people adjust to the new opportunities the new tech has created.

I see this automation as a good thing. Yes, it sucks for people in the short-term whose jobs get replaced, but if there's something the market is good at, it's adapting to changes in labor supply. Sometimes there's sustained unemployment, but that's rare and often due to protectionist policies (e.g. I blame the Great Depression on Hoover's tariffs). If we truly can't compete with bots, we can always tax capital from bots and provide something like Universal Basic Income (my preference is Negative Income Tax, which is the same thing, but with income caps for benefits).

I delivered magazines, newspapers and mowed lawns when I was a kid. Good luck telling the Gen Z that!

What are you talking about? I literally just paid a neighborhood kid to mow my lawn yesterday.

Delivering magazines and newspapers was a very uncommon job even at its heyday (my brother did it in the 90s, but that's the only kid I heard of doing it), whereas mowing laws and other small jobs are still about as common as it was in the past.

But I'm not sure why you're referencing Gen Z, Gen Z will be in their 20s already, so they wouldn't be interested in those neighborhood jobs, unless they make it a business (and two families in my neighborhood run small landscaping businesses, and I see landscaping trucks every day in my city).

If someone wants to hustle for a little more money, there are a lot of options:

• "gig" work - Uber, Doordash, etc; just be careful you're actually making enough to justify wear and tear on the car
• exploiting banking bonuses - credit cards, checking accounts, etc (can be thousands per year)
• dumping - buy a box truck and slap a sign on it for dumping services - in my area, that's usually $50/hr; or pass around flyers and rent a truck instead so you don't need to buy one
• substitute teaching - my state only requires a high school diploma, but the pay kinda sucks (like <$20/hr for single day jobs, no guarantees for jobs every day); take a day off from your other job to do substitute teaching for some extra cash

These kinds of service jobs won't be replaced by robots anytime soon, and that's extra true for the trades (e.g. plumbers, electricians, etc) where there are generally strict codes and licensing requirements. If you decide not to go to post-secondary education, you have lots of options for consistent or inconsistent work, depending on what you're looking for.

I think there should be some policy changes (i.e. I'm a fan of NIT/UBI as mentioned), but the real problem is the same problem that we've had for pretty much forever: people really like blaming others for their problems. If you want help, there are a lot of opportunities out there, they just require work to go out and get. It's a lot easier to whine and blame the issues on "capitalism" or "political party of choice," but honestly, the average person is way better off today than pretty much any point in history, yet we seem to complain way more.