#pet insurance us

[lady-raziel]

to bother jd Vance I think we should extend obamacare to cats (and dogs)

[eats-the-stars]

hate my sister's shitty good for nothing boyfriend. can you imagine being a 30yo man with two kids who won't even scramble an egg. Not for his kids, not for his girlfriend, not for himself. literally if my sister doesn't leave out pre-made meals when he's watching the kids he will rip up bread or pour them dry cereal or open a granola bar and make himself microwave dinners. like, lowest effort possible. but if i mention this to my sis, she'll be like "no he's definitely cooked for the kids! he scrambled an egg for them once! i watched him do it!" but it's like...so he scrambled one egg in the last five years. just to like, prove he can? at your direct insistence? should we all clap? like seriously. hate this guy. had to really hold back recently because he had someone over and he was interacting with the kids more than usual for appearances, and he had to keep asking me and my sis what the 5yo was signing because he barely bothered to learn his own son's primary form of communication. i was so tempted to say "that one means 'go home' but you wouldn't know that because you don't take them anywhere." so hard to hold that in. If I had to describe this man in two words they would be these: Low Effort. Not quite bare minimum, but JUST enough to convince my sister that it would be too much hassle to get rid of him. he's stupid as fuck, but just smart enough to quickly stop shit like screaming obscenities at the kids for doing normal kid things. and he once stomped on my headphones and broke them in a fit of rage, but gave my sister money to replace them so it was "fine." Like, my sister thinks that he's just struggling with his anger issues, because he had a bad childhood, blah, blah, and oh he would never actually hurt her or the kids. and like, good for you, but i don't trust like that. genuinely hoping he gets struck by lightning and dies instantly.

[autistic-shaiapouf]

I have to actually look at cars and test them and buy one all over again

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I don't have a lot of energy these days [because of The Horrors] so I'm looking at my day and my priorities and trying to plan how I'm going to spend what energy I have, because I do need to be able to rest and relax but there are also things that need doing and that is a careful balance for me.

I managed to [mostly] clean the kitchen last night so I've kicked it out of the priority list until next weekend. Unfortunately the living room, bathroom, bedroom, and my office all need cleaning too. I think of the priorities, my office and the bedroom are the most important to me, so I'll probably push the living room and bathroom until at least Friday.

There's also the laundry. I don't have any clean clothes and as we're moving into winter I need to be more rigid about getting that done because days where the clothes can be dried on the line will be more limited. So I definitely need to wash an outfit or two and hang them up in the next hour.

That's already a really busy day, so I'll probably cut it there. But it's definitely going to still leave me a lot of work this week. Half my cleaning, at least one more round of laundry, settling dog food for the next couple of weeks, planting the fall/winter greens, doing some set up work on my computer, work on some writing projects, cleaning out the fridge, and patching some worn clothes. My work week isn't insane atm, but it is definitely limiting. Right now I have 6+4+0+4+2+5+5= 25 non work/non-survival needs (sleep, food, shower, etc) hours available each week. I need to figure out a regukar distribution of these that means everything is getting done and I still have an hour a day to myself as often as possible. I think it's probably not realistic to give myself more than an hour a day for free time/fun, which is a bit unfortunate because I've found in the past that my floor tends to be getting 2-3hrs of free time most days because of how I deal with transition and decision-making.

25-7 [1hr per day] is 18 hrs, so I just need to decide where and how to distribute those in order to keep pace with things.

Lets say the garden needs 3hrs per week, the laundry needs 4 hours (specifically 2 sets of 2 morning/early afternoon hours), the cleaning needs an hour a day to get through a maintenance clean of the house, and 3 hours once a week to work down any deep cleaning that's built up. Which is....already three more hours than I actually have each week. So I guess I'll make a plan to work in the garden for 20-40min of 4 of my free hours each week.

It really doesn't leave me any wiggle room. Only about 4 hours a week that isn't explicitly allotted to something that needs doing, which means there will probably me a lot of weeks where I only get an hour or so at best across the whole thing for free time. I guess I've had a hard time accepting that at this point, having actual time for myself or a time-intensive project is only available if I've taken a day off work. I love my job, but it's ... not comfortable to realize that it's the only love in my life I actually have time for anymore.

I think that's probably why I end up here so much. It's this mindless little way of zoning out into my own head, dissociating away from the exhaustion, for a few minutes at a time. I keep thinking I want to use this space differently, make it more if the things I enjoy. But I think what I really want is just to actually have the time and energy to do things I love that take work. I keep crying a few times every day and I couldn't figure out why, but like

I dunno

Why **wouldn't** I cry a little every day? It's the closest I'm getting to actual emotional release or relaxation in my life. We'd probably all cry. Heck. A lot of us probably DO, capitalism being what it is.

I guess I'm starting to wonder why I'm doing what I'm doing. What is there left for me to sacrifice to this life? What is actually serving me about not just letting myself go up like a fireball and take my surroundings with me? What in the ever loving fuck am I fighting this hard for?

All I ever want, all I want now, is to be able to live. To really, actually live. How does wanting to live bring you this close to killing yourself, whether on accident or on purpose? What am I actually doing that is LIVING and what am I doing that is FACILITATION of living? It can't all be facilitation, or I'm not actually facilitating fuck all.

I'm 30 goddamn years old and I need to figure out what it looks like to actually love my life. I fundamentally refuse to zombify myself like this for everyone else around me forever.

[fbwzoo]

Blehhhhhh Ed is doing really well and I'm super happy about that but

We discovered over the weekend that one of the rats has something going on, Pippi. She's lost a lot of weight and was lethargic when we noticed she was off. Jack's been giving her a soft food mix we made every night since & that's definitely making a difference. She has more energy, and possibly gained a bit of weight back. But we're not sure what caused it in the first place.

She has a vet appointment on Friday, soonest we could get. But we can't afford to do bloodwork or anything. Hoping maybe it's a respiratory infection and they can hear from listening to lungs, and we can just try antibiotics to see if that helps along with the food.

But really upset at the thought that we can't do a work up on her because we've spent so much helping Ed.

[running-in-the-dark]

I just got an email from our pet insurance - they paid the bill for our cat's x-ray and tooth extraction surgery. thank god, I was worried about that... I'm so so so glad we have insurance for the cats. it was nearly 1000€ 🙃 we just have to pay 5€ for the cone lol

[supercantaloupe]

appt w my new allergist today. woo.

[aniseandspearmint]

Okay I DID IT, i just spent the morning calling basic Primary Care doctors and I found one that's actually taking patients AND will take my insurance.

They're sending me the patient packet thingy to fill out. Hopefully they're not gonna be terrible. They do have a decent amount of positive reviews online but those can be bs.

Imma just sit here and shake a while bc god i hate making phone calls.

[mangled-by-disuse]

I have such mixed feelings about the love languages thing specifically, because, like, gary chapman fucking sucks and there's no scientific validity to his work BUT

at the same time, i do think there's some value in recognising and discussing the fact that different people need different expressions of love in different amounts? Especially in relationships.

Like, I have just recently been having a discussion with my partner about how he really doesn't tend to express his affection through gifts, whereas (as someone who is mega-bad at expressing sincere feeling) I do rely heavily on giving gifts and doing things for people as a less scary way to express love. Joe doesn't like giving gifts, because he's scared he'll do it wrong, and is only so-so on receiving them. He prefers to express love through physical contact and saying nice things. I hate having nice things said to me unless I am allowed to immediately rebut them with a joke or sarcastic comment that makes them less scarily close to emotional honesty. too many words of affirmation and i will genuinely just start avoiding you because it is painfully awkward to me.

and none of that means we are fundamentally different categories of people, which is where the 5 Love Languages stuff falls into being absolute bollocks. but I have seen, and done, enough throwing the baby out with the bathwater on that to be a little defensive - I think reasonable applications of the concept are actually really quite valuable. and for me, the taxonomy Chapman suggests (words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, physical touch) while not at all exhaustive or thorough, is a useful framework to hang those conversations on. bc, like, no, the way people communicate and receive affection is not universal, and from personal experience, assuming that it is can have really significant problems for a relationship.

...you could argue that this is parallel to BMI in terms of "tools being used in totally not the way they should be used" though, tbf.

I can't keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, "brain fully formed at 25" and shit over and over again...

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

In light of Brian Thompson being shot dead on my birthday (🎉🥳🎂) I'd like to share a personal story about UnitedHealthcare.

During the peak of COVID, my family all got sick. I couldn't be on my parents' insurance because they were both older and on Medicare. So, I had insurance through my University: UnitedHealthcare.

For some reason, rather than roll-over each year, I got a new plan each year that ended after May and didn't start until August, so I was uninsured for the summer months, but it was a weird situation that the university denied, and told us we were supposed to be insured year-round, it was messy.

Both of my parents went to the hospital, and I got sick too. I had to take care of my pets, and myself, and try to stay alive and keep my pets alive when I was so weak I could hardly move. When my parents came home, my condition got dramatically worse (I think my body knew it couldn't give out, because there was nobody to take care of me, so once my parents were okay, it completely crashed and failed.)

I started experiencing emergency symptoms. It was a bit hard to breathe, my chest hurt, and I was extremely delirious. I wanted to call my insurance to see if I was covered (this was during the summer) and I was connected to some nice person, probably making minimum wage, who told me with caution in her voice that my plan was expired. I had no active insurance, but she urged me to go to an emergency room. I remember saying something to the effect of "You just told me I don't have insurance, I can't go to the hospital, I can't afford it."

She sounded so genuinely worried and scared. I remember she said "You really don't sound good, you sound really sick, please call 9-1-1" and I think I just said "I can't afford it without insurance, don't worry, I think I'll be okay."

And she paused and said "I don't want to hang up the phone with you like this." And it sounded like she was holding back tears. And I don't remember what I said, I think that I would be okay, and I hung up.

I still think about her. I wonder if that phone call haunted her, or if she had dozens of calls like that a day. I wonder if she thinks about it at all, if she wonders if I died after she told me I didn't have insurance and therefore couldn't go to the hospital without incurring a tremendous financial burden. I wonder if she feels guilt or blame-- of course she shouldn't, it wouldn't have been her fault if anything had happened to me. Maybe it's self-centered to wonder if she thinks about it. I'm not the main character and it was just her job. But, still.

I think about how evil it was that we were put in that situation. Because offering year-long continuous coverage through the university plan would maybe cut into profits, maybe not benefit shareholders enough, maybe cut into Thompson's $10 million salary. While his minimum wage administrators have to feel afraid to hang up the phone, because on the other line someone might be dying, and they wouldn't know. While his patients hang up and decide to take their chances rather than put their family through that trauma.

This is UnitedHealthcare. This is Brian Thompson's legacy. This is why, understandably, an entire nation is jubilant that he was gunned down like the vermin he was. I don't care about his widow. I feel pity for his children, despite the fact that they will inherit millions, but I feel more pity for the children of his victims patients who are gone because they didn't want THEIR children to inherit crippling debt. Brian Thompson got what he fucking deserved. I pray that he not be the only one. I pray for continued safety, peace , and anonymity for his killer.

American healthcare is a disease.

[fagcrush]

Ok so bc of some weird speculative asks ive gotten I want to be a bit more clear, so my husband and I talked about what we CAN say publicly (also y'all need to realized how weird it is to speculate about a person's life)

We had a death in the family that is strongly affecting us both. A person's death. We did not want to say much because of jokes made by people when my aunt died of cancer in 2020 saying she killed herself due to being related to me. But we're both very sick of the weird assumptions and shit.

[samuraisharkie]

It frustrates me so deeply being so incredibly poor rn. I hate that I can’t afford to send money to every person that needs it right now. I hate that even the tiny amount that I have is more than many others. This world is absolutely fucking cruel. I will still send what I can, but it breaks my heart that I can’t send more.

[fbwzoo]

Thoughts and Prayers for my care credit card please. In the next few weeks we have:

annual exams & vaccines for Addy, Phoebe, & Shilo

6 month tooth check for Spring

Sedated exam & vaccines for Emma

Exam & tooth check for Spoon

And a rat euthanasia/cremation, though that's not scheduled yet. But Sauce's tumor is the size of an egg now :/

[ceeberoni]

EDIT: WE DID IT WERE MOVING INTO THE HOUSE YAY!!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PLEASE DONT SPREAD THIS POST ANYMORE CUZ I DONT NEED HELP. FOCUS ON OTHERS WHO NEED HELP HERE INSTEAD. THANK YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID FOR ME. THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.

hey so i need mad help at a pretty terrible time!!

TL;DR I NEED ABOUT $1900 FOR ME AND MY PARTNER TO GET INTO THIS HOUSE WE GOT WITH SOME FRIENDS. ILL BE ABLE TO PAY RENT ONCE IM IN BUT THESE ARE THE REST OF THE COSTS WE HAVE LEFT BETWEEN ME AND MY PARTNER TO PAY THE DOWN PAYMENT/FIRST MONTHS RENT/PET DEPOSIT FOR OUR SHARE.

not including moving or like, living, during this time into those costs. i already feel bad asking for this much sdklfjslkdfskldf

PAYPAL - chocolatebananapop@gmail.com

VENMO - ceeberoni

KO-FI - ceeberoni

OR IF U WANT ART

COMMISSIONS - REDBUBBLE

ive been boosting my commission post to try and Earn My Money The Noble Way but no ones buyin so i need to do real ebegging cuz im really bad off right now and of course i feel fucking RANCID having to ebeg right now especially when so many other people are in much more dire straits than me at the moment

but im finally getting a house with my childhood friend and his partner (along with my partner) and i will FINALLY be moving out of a house owned by my abusive mom! and i no longer have qualms saying this about her because every one of my friends fucking hates her even when i try to stick up for her and im pretty sure that means shes probably the bad guy and not me but im not sure yet. i will keep you posted

anyway to cut right down to it i got kicked out of my house of 6 years by her cuz my sister and her kids needed a place to live (which like, yeah that tracks, she got all the kids and herself in a studio with a basement but theyve got a roof over their head, the kids at the end of the day are who i number one want a roof over the head of so its fine) and have been house hunting since like idk. late july or early august at this point idr when it was anymore. and it has been such a fucking shitshow but FINALLY after all these months we have a place with our friends and its NOT MY MOMS PLACE and were ALMOST FUCKING THERE

and like right now im in half of a fucking garage with no running water no kitchen no bathroom paying $400/m rent with no bathroom and no ability to save to move and im also paying $200 for mine, my sisters, and my nephews phone bill, no bathroom, i got my car insurance, i got the internet i cant even fucking use anymore that i pay for out of pocket so the kids can watch shit or whatever so do you see where the situation is like fucked up here also i have to walk across the street to take a shit and shower did i mention

umm so any money help would be lit, boosting would also be lit, have a nice day,

[tf2heritageposts]

tips for runaways of abusive families

from one who did that

note: this assumes you are 18+ or will be 18+ upon escaping, and also american, sorry

BEFORE YOU LEAVE:

get your insurance information, ESPECIALLY YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE. you can use it until you're 26

have your ssn memorized

make sure you have a decent amount of money saved up, dependent on your situation

have your method of transportation figured out beforehand. are you leaving the city? state? general area? country? get it planned out

if you are planning on taking your pet with you, make sure you have food stocked up with you and bottles of water. i would also reccomend bringing a 1ml kids syringe if you have the type of pet that will stop eating/drinking in stress situations. also bring a form of cover like an extra shirt or towel if it is an easily stressed pet. also make sure you have a carrier, and if you're going on a plane, make sure it is up to the standard of your plane, as well as making s ure your type of pet is allowed on the plane, especially if its an "exotic" pet, aka anything thats not a cat or dog

i also may recommend stocking up some food but depending on your situation this may not be needed

stock up on any medications you may have/need

don't give your family any form of information they could use to track you down in the future, especially if theyre the crazier types

make sure to change your passwords on any technology you may be leaving form and log out completely on them. make sure you have no files they could use to find you

DURING:

leave at a time where you're 100% sure nobody will catch you. if you have a family member that comes home late from work, know when they'll be back and asleep

turn off ANY location services you have after you're already away from the house, even if it alarms them. you don't want them to figire out where you are

wear a jacket with pockets, especially deep ones

make sure you have your wallet, forms of id, etc

get ready to run as fast as you can

if you're leaving the state, especially via plane, DO NOT IMMEDIATLY GO TO THE AIRPORT, THEY WILL CHECK THERE FIRST! go to a hotel and spend 1-3 days there while they exhaust their time and figure you already left. THEN you can go

stay calm while you're in the process of leaving. the moment you hit the air, they legally can't do anything

keep any critter you have calm, especially if they can suffer health problems from stress

have your hotels booked in advance

AFTER:

dont give your family your address if they try to talk to you

if you can really, cut them off entirely. chances are theyre not gonna change

get an air mattress as soon as you can, we used doordash for one

figure out how you will be paying finances. if you're living with someone, great, if not, you may have to post donation posts on social media until you can get a job

be happy you escaped, good job! most people won't be able to do this so im proud you were

[ms-demeanor]

On insurance: I still live with my parents and don't know a lot yet about the sorts of things adults usually have to spend money on. I've always been skeptical of things like insurance and credit cards because it seems to me they wouldn't be selling that if they didn't expect to make money from it. I talked to my cousin a while ago about credit cards and basically came to the conclusion that they do that because they're betting on the customer getting sloppy and letting their debts stack up, and the way you beat that and get money from credit card companies is just by being careful.

I'm a little more confused about insurance though because it seems much more straightforwardly like a gamble they will simply not take if it won't pay off for them. Like, you don't go to a casino because every game they play at a casino is one they've done the math on and have determined that statistically most people will lose money on most of the time. Is insurance not kinda the same? Where they estimate the risk and then charge you an amount calculated to make sure it probably won't be worth it for you?

I know if you have a car you legally need car insurance so everyone knows you can pay for another car if you crash into someone, and I gather that here in the US at least health insurance companies have some kinda deal with hospitals so that the prices go down or something, and there's a reason I don't fully understand why not having health insurance is Really Bad. But we get to pet insurance, or like when I buy a concert ticket and it offers ticket insurance in case I can't make it to the show, and surely if they thought they were gonna lose money on that they just wouldn't sell it, right? Or they'd raise the price of it until it became worth the risk that something bad actually will happen? Wouldn't it only be worth it to buy insurance if you know something the insurance company doesn't?

So the deal is that most people don't use their insurance much, and often insurance companies will incentivize doing things that will make you use your insurance less.

So, for example, you can get a discount on car insurance if you have multiple cars because people who insure multiple cars are more likely to be responsible drivers (the ability to pay for multiple cars stands in as a representation of responsibility here). The longer you go without an accident, the lower your premiums get because that means that you are not costing your insurance company anything but you are paying into the system. The car insurance company's goal is to have the most responsible, safest drivers who never get into car accidents because they can predict (roughly) how much they're going to have to pay out to their customers and they want the number they pay out to be lower than what's paid in. So they try to discourage irresponsible drivers by raising their rates and encourage responsible drivers by giving them discounts.

Health insurance companies often do the same thing: I recently got a gift card from my health insurance company because I had a visit from a nurse who interviewed me about my overall health and made sure I had stable blood pressure and access to medications. It is literally cheaper for my insurance company to give me a $100 giftcard and hire a nurse to visit me than it is for me to go to my doctor's office a couple of times, so they try to make sure that their customers are getting preventative care and are seeing inexpensive medical professionals regularly so that they don't have to suddenly see very expensive professionals after a long time without care.

Insurance in the US has many, many, many problems and should be replaced with socialized healthcare for a huge number of reasons but right now, because it is an insurance-based system, you need to have insurance.

We're going to use Large Bastard as an example.

Large Bastard had insurance when he had his heart attack and when he needed multiple organs transplanted. He didn't *want* to be paying for insurance, because he thought he was healthy enough to get by, but I insisted. His premium is four hundred dollars a month, and his out of pocket maximum is eight thousand dollars a year. That means that every year, he pays about $5000 whether he uses his insurance or not, and if he DOES need to use the insurance, he pays the first $8k worth of care, so every year his insurance has the possibility of costing him thirteen thousand dollars.

The bill for his bypass surgery was a quarter million dollars.

The bill for his transplant was over one and a half million dollars.

His medication each month is around six hundred dollars. He needs to have multiple biopsies - which are surgeries - each year, and each one costs about twenty thousand dollars.

Without health insurance, he would very likely be dead, or we would be *even more* incapable of paying for his healthcare than we are right now. He almost ditched his insurance because he was a healthy-seeming 40-year-old and he didn't think he'd get sick. And then he proceeded to be the sickest human being I've ever known personally who did not actually die.

Health insurance costs a lot of money. It costs less money for people who are young and who are expected to be healthy. But the thing is, everybody pays into health insurance, and very, very few people end up using as much money for their medical expenses as Large Bastard did. There are a few thousand transplants in the US ever year, but there are hundreds of millions of people paying for insurance.

This ends up balancing out (sort of) so that people who pay for insurance get a much lower cost on care if they need it, hospitals get paid for the care they provide, and the insurance company makes enough money to continue to exist. Part of the reason that people don't like this scheme is because "insurance company" could feasibly be replaced by "government" and it would cost less and provide a better standard of care, but again, with things as they are now, you need to have insurance. Insurance companies are large entities that are able to negotiate down costs with the providers they work with, you are not. If you get hit by a car you may be able to get your medical bills significantly reduced through a number of means, but you're very unlikely to get your bills lower than the cost of insurance and a copay.

Because of the Affordable Care Act, which is flawed but which did a LOT of good, medical insurance companies cannot refuse to treat you because of preexisting conditions and also cannot jack up your premiums to intolerable rates - since Large Bastard got sick, he has had the standard price increases you'd expect from aging, but nothing like the gouging you might expect from an insurance company deciding you're not worth it.

Pet insurance works on the same model. Millions of people pay for the insurance, thousands of people end up needing it, a few hundred end up needing a LOT of it, and the insurance companies are able to make more money than they hand out, so they continue to exist. This is part of why it's less expensive to get pet insurance for younger animals - people who sign up puppies and kittens are likely to be paying for a very long time and are likely to provide a lot of preventative care for their animals, so they're a good bet for the insurer. Animals signed up when they are older are more likely to have health problems (and pet insurance CAN turn animals away for preexisting conditions) and are going to cost the insurance companies more, so they cost more to enroll (and animals over a certain age or with certain conditions may be denied entirely).

This weighing risk/reward is called actuarial science, and the insurance industry is built on it.

But yeah it's kind of betting. The insurance company says "I'll insure ten thousand dogs and I'm going to bet that only a hundred of them will need surgery at some point in the next year" and if they're correct, they make money and the dogs who need surgery get their surgery paid for out of the premiums from the nine thousand nine hundred dogs who didn't need surgery.

Your assessment of credit is correct: credit card companies expect that you will end up carrying a balance, and that balance will accrue interest, and the interest is how they make the money.

And it is EASY to fuck up financially as an adult. REALLY EASY. But you are still likely to need a good credit score so you will need a credit history. That means that the correct way to use a credit card is to have a card, but not carry a balance.

To do this, never buy anything on the card that you can't afford. In order to avoid needing the card for emergencies, start an emergency fund that is at least 3 months of your total pay *before* you get a credit card. That seems like a *lot* of savings to have, but from the perspective of someone who has had plenty of mess-ups, it's a lot easier to build up a $10k emergency fund than it is to pay off a $10k credit card debt.

If you don't understand how interest works on credit cards, or why a 10k savings is different than a 10k debt, here are some examples working with $10k of debt, 23% interest (an average-ish rate for people with average credit), and various payments.

With that debt and that interest, here's how much it costs and how long it would take to pay off with $200 as the monthly payment:

Fourteen years, and it would cost you about twenty four thousand dollars in interest, for a total amount paid of about thirty four thousand dollars.

To save $10k at $200 a month would take four years and two months.

Here's the same debt at $300 a month:

4.5 Years and it costs about six grand (again, just in interest - sixteen thousand dollars total). Saving ten thousand dollars at three hundred dollars a month would take just under three years.

Here's the same debt at $400 a month:

3 years, about $4000 dollars (fourteen thousand dollars total). Saving ten thousand dollars at $400 a month takes just over two years.

The thing is, with all of these models you're going to end up paying one way or another. Insurance vs out of pocket is you weighing the risk of losing a fair amount of money by signing up but not using the system, or potentially losing a catastrophic amount of money by not signing up.

For credit cards they really only work if you know you're never going to need them for an emergency, because an emergency is what you're not going to be able to pay off right away. I didn't have an emergency fund when Large Bastard had his heart attack and needed surgery, or when we moved between states suddenly, or when we moved between states suddenly AGAIN and needed to pay storage costs, or when Large Bastard needed a transplant, or when Tiny Bastard got in a fight with my MiL's dog, and the fact that I didn't have an emergency fund is still costing me a lot of money.

So, young folks out there: what's the takeaway?

Get insurance. Get the best deal possible, which usually ends up being the one you sign up for early. You may think you can let it ride without insurance, but man in the six months between when I graduate college (and lost my school insurance) and when care kicked in after 90 days at my job I got electrocuted and needed to go to the ER. If that hadn't been a worker's comp payout I would have had thousands of dollars in bills. Something could happen. You could break your leg, you could get hit by a car, you could suddenly find out that you actually have heart disease at twenty, you could develop cancer. Have insurance, you need insurance. You legally need car insurance in the US, and you financially need health insurance. If you have a pet, I think it's a good idea for them to have pet insurance.

Credit cards are not for emergencies, they are not for fun, they are not for buying things that are just ever so slightly out of your budget, they are for taking advantage of the credit card company and managing to get by in a system that demands you have a credit score. ONLY put purchases on your credit card that you already have cash for. Before you get a credit card, build up an emergency savings so that you aren't tempted to put emergency charges on your card.

If you DO end up with an interest-bearing debt, pay it off as fast as possible because letting it linger costs you a LOT of money in the long run.

Stay the fuck away from tobacco and nicotine products they are fucking terrible for you, they are fucking expensive, and they are not worth it put the vapes down put the zyns down put the cigarettes down I will begin manifesting in your house physically i swear to fuck. Knock that shit off and put the cash that you'd be spending on nicotine into a savings account.

Take care, sorry everything sucks, I promise that in some ways it actually sucks less than it did before and we're working on trying to make it suck even less but it's taking a while.