Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 August 28

= August 28 =

Police shooting of Michael E. Bell
Do we have an article on the shooting of Michael E. Bell by a Kenosha police officer in November 2004? It seems to remain in the news, but I did not find it mentioned on Wikipedia. I also did not spot original news items from 2004 about the fatal shooting. --Lambiam 09:21, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I looked in Google and there doesn't seem to be anything about this incident in Wikipedia. Maybe you could create it? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:58, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

If I use a grant to pay for rent, is that considered living within my means?
I’m trying to live within my means. So there’s an apartment I can’t afford on my own, but I was thinking of using a grant to pay for the first several months of rent, so that I’ll be able to afford rent on my own. Would that be considered living within my means? Yellow Sunstreaker (talk) 19:36, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Here's an article about living within your means. See if it matters what your source of income is. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:28, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Depends. Once the windfall is gone, are you going to be able to pay the rent without it? Clarityfiend (talk) 22:48, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Very useful point. More, if the grant allows you to accomplish XYZ, which generates the income you need to break even, then the grant was part of living within one’s means. DOR (HK) (talk) 00:59, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
 * So I wouldn’t be doing anything too risky if I accept the apartment and use a grant to pay rent? The apartment is $700 and 30% of my income is $550 (the general rule of thumb is that an apartment is considered affordable if the rent isn’t more than 30% of your income). Yellow Sunstreaker (talk) 03:59, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that what is an acceptable use of the grant must be up to whoever made it available to you. I would therefore suggest talking to them about it.  --184.144.99.72 (talk) 05:34, 29 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Is the grant given to you as a lump sum or in the form of a monthly amount? In any case, assuming that the conditions of the grant allow using the money for living expenses – as is typically the case for student grants – you need to consider (as mentioned above by Clarityfiend) that the grant money will not last forever, so if it is a lump sum you need to divide it by the number of months you'll rent to get a figure for a monthly income. The point of the 30% rule of thumb is to ensure that after you pay the rent, you have enough left to cover your other necessary expenses. But it is a dumb rule. If someone's monthly income is $500, $150 (30%) is an affordable rent according to the rule, but can one live on the remaining $350? And if one's monthly income is $10,000, I think one can live reasonably comfortably on $6,000 a month after paying $4,000 (40%) for rent, but according to the rule that would not be affordable. Some places are more expensive to live than others; for example, the estimated average cost of living in Prague for a single person is about $700/mo plus rent. So if you consider renting in Prague, subtract $700 from your net monthly income (after tax) to get an idea of what you can afford to pay for rent. In Tokyo, with an estimated average cost of living of about $1,200/mo plus rent, subtract $1,200 from your monthly income to see what rent you can afford there. --Lambiam 07:45, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It's a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. It assumes that your other expenses scale with your rent. In general, something akin to the 90/10 rule applies - if you spend twice the money on rent, it won't mean your living conditions will be twice as good. Likewise, if you pay twice the money for food, your food won't be twice as good. If you are in the comfortable situation that your income is significantly higher than your expenses, you can, of course, freely allocate some funds. But otherwise, you need to balance, and that's when the 30% rule (which, BTW, used to a a 25% rule at least over here 50 years ago) makes sense. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:15, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * 30% rule maker has never lived in New York where half is normal. When the cheapest non-crimey, non-subsidized apartments within city limits are over a thousand some live on 67%. Get the cheapest 0- to 2-bedroom in a hip part of Manhattan and you can live on 83%. I can't put a more exact number of bedrooms on that, as I don't follow the rent prices of those astronomical neighborhoods. Even a small apartment in Harlem is expensive as hell now. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:08, 30 August 2021 (UTC)