Good Money

A few days ago I heard someone use the term “good money”, a comment that I have heard quite often over the years. “Good money”, as far as I can tell, means that that person makes a lot of money for what they do.

Obviously, “good money” is a relative term. In this case a Waffle House server said that the cook there made “good money”. She went on to say that he makes about $16/hour. Since a server there typically makes about $4/hour plus tips, I’m sure $16/ hour to her sounds pretty good.

I’m sure that you, like I, have also heard the expression “chasing good money after bad.”  This can mean a lot of different things, but the gist of it is what happens when you refuse to cut your losses, when you keep putting time and money into a losing endeavor.  This leads to a couple of economic terms: “sunk cost” and “sunk cost fallacy”. A “sunk cost” is an expense that cannot be recovered regardless of the outcome. The “sunk cost fallacy” occurs when a business refuses to give up on a project because of all the time and money that has already been invested. This phenomenon applies to individuals as well as businesses.  Let’s say that you have non-refundable tickets to a concert. However, the day of the concert you’re sick and don’t feel like going, but you go anyway so that you don’t “lose your money.” Now you’re at the concert, but you can’t enjoy it because you feel so bad. So now you’ve lost the money and your night in bed recuperating.  Another aspect of the “sunk cost fallacy” is that the more time and money you’ve put into the endeavor, the greater the temptation to keep going even though it’s not working. Could this phenomenon apply to a relationship? I think so.

The first time I heard the term “good money” was when I was a teenager working for fifty cents an hour at the Levi Theater in Enterprise, Alabama. An associate who made the same as I did referenced a truck driver he knew who made $300 a week!  And he said that he made “good money.”  If you do the math, taking into consideration that the trucker drove about twelve hours a day, six days a week, then the pay wasn’t all that good after all. But $300/week sounded a lot better to a teenager than fifty cents an hour.

Part of my compensation at the Levi Theater was that I could see as many movies as I cared to free of charge. Now, theoretically, I’m making “good money!” Unfortunately, since I lived in a staunch Southern Baptist household,  my parents didn’t let me go to very many movies. So scratch that “good money” comment. Now I’m just making “money". And not much of that.

So how much money do you have to make in 2019 for it to qualify as “good money”? Not very much. It just has to be more than someone else who’s doing about the same thing for less. For the record, I wouldn't take any amount of money to be a Waffle House cook. Would I be an air traffic controller? Maybe. But not a Waffle House cook. After about an hour, I would be "covered and smothered" regardless of how much money I made.