I consider myself extremely lucky that I grew up middle class and now earn a pretty nice buck (for European standards). However, halfway there, there was a period where my wife and me had to turn around every penny. Strict budgeting, shopping at ALDI only, no takeout, etc. "I hope the kid doesn't get a growth spurt" definitely resonates.
We were nowhere near as poor as some people, and it was only for a few years, and it was self-inflicted to some extent because I was starting a startup while my wife was getting reeducated. So I don't know what it's like to be really poor. Those stories on HN from people who, 20 years past lifting themselves out of poverty, still hold on to every old sock, that's not me.
But at the same time, having been somewhat poor: damn it rocks to be rich! We became rich overnight a few years ago when my wife got a job, and every time I buy a sandwich without worrying about the cost, I get excited mentally. There's always this "Omg can we afford th- oh haha we're rich! Of course we can, woohoo!" process going on in my mind and it's super awesome. I feel so decadent, so lavish! I'm buying a sandwich!
To me, that's the definition of "rich". Buying a sandwich that someone else made, anytime I want.
If you're rich enough to be able to buy whatever at the supermarket, or get your favorite sandwich for lunch without worrying about the cost, cherish that. I don't really believe anything from here to private jets is going to make me much happier in practice, but I never want to be below that bar again.
It's fun to read stories like yours and others here. A lot of us probably have similar. I think I enjoy telling mine because each time I retell it I get a little bit of that great feeling again of suddenly being able to buy what I want at the grocery store.
About mid-way through high school the family business went bankrupt and all assumptions about how I would go to college evaporated. So instead I ended up going to an electronics trade school on a student loan.
I did not have to pay tuition until after graduation, but I did have to pay all my living expenses myself. Had a minimum wage part time job from which to make rent, bills and food. Could barely afford to eat.
Got turned onto a store called WareMart that sold mega size boxes of really cheap products. A fellow poor schoolmate showed how to buy a huge brick of fake Velveeta cheese, giant tub of margarine and a potato-sack-size bag of elbow macaroni to make super cheap mac-n-cheese. The secret was to boil the macaroni for a long time so it would absorb a lot of water and get huge, then add a scoop of margarine and slab of cheese. You could eat for weeks on one purchase.
It was disgusting. But I lived, and finished school.
Upon graduation I had three offers at weekly salaries for more money than I had ever held in my hands. When I cashed my first paycheck I went to the grocery story and filled the basket with steaks and grilled one every night. Man, what a feeling. Despite making tons more in later years I have never felt so rich as when I spent that first paycheck.
I've never been really poor, but similarly to you, there were periods in life when I at least earned some respect and appreciation for money. Going to the grocery store and buying the absolute minimum necessary, while picking the cheapest products.
There were two thresholds that I remember distinctly: the first one was crossing from "poor" to "ok", when I could go shop for groceries and buy most things (though still looking at the price tags, to avoid the expensive stuff). That was a big step up from buying the bare necessities.
The second threshold, "rich", was when I realized I don't have to worry about the prices in my local grocery store. I can just buy whatever I want.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn't "rich" by any means, but it is enough to provide immense comfort and ease of living. I think many people who have this comfort are unable to appreciate what they have.
>We were nowhere near as poor as some people, and it was only for a few years, and it was self-inflicted to some extent because I was starting a startup while my wife was getting reeducated. So I don't know what it's like to be really poor.
Not to mention that, from all I've seen and heard, European poor is also quite better off than US poor.
US poor means poor && deemed as a personal and moral failure && left socially unsupported && looked down upon in a class-aware way that's even worse than UK's traditional classism && getting into much more dangerous situations with much more crazies around, some of which will even be armed.
And as US poor, you also remain the one segment of society people can freely joke around and look down upon. They might pretend to support blacks, gays etc. in the asbstract, but could not care less if those are also dirt poor. As for the white poor, they don't even have the redeeming token minority status qualities so are open season for everybody - you could call them "white trash" with impunity.
Thanks for sharing this. I saw myself so much on your comment talking about the sandwich that I decided to share my story too.
I was born in a Latin America country, middle class family, 375 USD monthly income for a house of 6 people.
Although I never went a full day without eating at least two meals, it wasn't rare to go sleep hungry.
My mom still managed to buy a PC for us, and that alone changed everything: I discovered programming in my early teens through a MMO game and learned web development, and since then I never stopped.
I'm now on my mid-twenties, but because I started so early with programming, I kinda hacked my career growth: to this day I already have 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as I was still a teen on my first internships. Started a CS bachelor but dropped as it was waste of time for me.
Today I work as the principal software engineer for a US startup remotely, and make 40x of my country's minimum wage.
Living through this gave me an empathy that I believe it's really hard to develop if you were born rich (definition of rich here: >upper middle class). There are so much things people take for granted, and they aren't available for people in lower classes at all. Geography is the biggest inequality in the world by a large margin.
I never saw this feeling expressed by anyone else. Had a period in my life where I was "heating got turned off"-poor. It took me quite some time after financially recovering until I felt comfortable spending money on anything other than the most basic food/clothing/etc. But now sometimes it just clicks and I realize that I can buy whatever I want (within reason, e.g. expensive foodstuff in the supermarket). Great feeling.
So true! Your background mirrors mine almost to the letter. My personal bar was never having to think about any purchase below €50. Mind you, do purchases like that all day and you’ll be poor pretty quickly ;-) But just knowing that you don’t have to think about it. So freeing.
I used to go to the movies a lot. One day I realized I could go to the movies as much as I wanted, and it had no impact on my financial condition. It was a nice feeling.
(In college my discretionary budget was $5 a week, so going to the movies meant going without something else.)
Very recognizable. I had that thought literally yesterday while doing the shopping. It always makes me happy I can afford the animal products where they’re treated a bit better; grab the nice IPA beers if I want to; even like you say, buying any sandwich I want. It is lasting joy coming from little money to having a lot.
I learned in my 20s to save bucks on food (doing end of markets, leftover food here and there..)
Nowdays, even with a comfortable income, I still use a bike, and get very often free food at the end of markets, I try to pay whenever possible, or give back
Same. Grew up generic middle class with frugal parents.
Too rich to get free money for college, too poor for my parents to have saved me anything. I was paycheck to paycheck for 3 years undergrad, and 3 years of wife's grad school.
Paycheck to paycheck doesn't even accurately define it. I didn't buy any luxuries like fast food or alcohol. Homemade everything.
I will never waste an opportunity to share my favorite quote from my favorite fantasy series, the Discworld:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I buy cheap hotdogs for meat, and cheap cars that I drive into the ground to get my money's worth out of them, but I can't afford to pay rent. I've been almost homeless for the last year.
But, I just bought a house a few days ago. I bought it super cheap, and it needs a lot of work that I'm doing myself.
I still can't afford to pay rent, not because I couldn't, but because it's a waste of money.
I didn't think twice about buying this house because it was a fantastic deal.
5 years from now I will have spent less than someone that is still one payment away from being evicted if they miss a rent payment.
Boot longevity has nothing to do being rich (let’s say that rich means being a 5 millionaire). The rich are rich because they played the game somehow and won, or maybe their parents did. That simple.
This quote no longer applies. With buy now pay later schemes, its trivial for anyone to buy the nice boots and then pay them off over 2 years of affordable payments.
Of course in reality these schemes are traps to get poor people to overspend, but the issue is not that they are physically unable to buy long lasting items, but that the system is constantly trying to trick them in to failing.
It's not true though, not any more at least. A supermarket pair of shoes is much, much less than even resoling of quality shoes. It's definitely cheaper to just wear them for a season or two instead of buying shoes that might last you a decade or two or more but cost 8-20x more and require expensive (in terms of cheaper shoes) fixes.
Growing up I always thought poor people are poor because they are lazy. But I realised later that I was soo wrong. Life is an unpredictable mess. Sometimes even when you try your hardest due to some things that are not in your hands you can end up on the other side.
I want to quote Morgan Housel here
"Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself"
That being said, we do a disservice to our youth if we overemphasize the role of luck in being in poverty or not. There are strong correlations between poverty and lifestyle choices people typically do have control over.
- Starting your career before having children. In many cases, this implies finishing a certain amount of school and/or training.
- Marrying a responsible person and staying married
- Avoiding substance abuse
- Planning your pregnancies [1]
- Avoiding a criminal record [2]
And then there are risk mitigation strategies to avoid catastrophe:
- Establishing an emergency fund
- Living within your means
- Getting insurance and keeping up with payments
- Avoiding high risk investments and career moves [3]
I guess I feel that people who have figured out the basics are hesitant to preach what they practice. All of the above seems like a given to people who are comfortably middle class. But if you didn't have wise parents and nobody says anything out of an overemphasis on empathy, you could make any of those mistakes easily and then get treated like a fool.
[1] Tragically, some people are raped and become pregnant against their will, which is why we shouldn't judge folks, but the mass majority of pregnancies do not happen for this reason. Considering the abortion rate for married women, it seems that accidental pregnancy is actually very common.
[2] Again, don't judge. People are falsely convicted of crimes. People have criminal family members. People make dumb choices and learn their lessons. But being violent over beefs or going for joy rides in stolen cars is just setting yourself up to struggle financially.
Some of those hit uncomfortably close to home, when I was a teenager living with a single mom and no child support from my foreign father (Bulgarian justice system of the late 1980s and early 1990s could not be assed to do anything about him and even simple replies to letters from Czechoslovak courts took years to arrive).
Especially the bad shoes. Oh my, the bad shoes, leaking and tearing themselves apart all the time. Walking around in portable puddles whenever it rained or the snow started melting. I hated that so much, but good shoes were too expensive.
On a side note, being from Eastern Europe as well, I think that, at least mentally, it was different being poor here in the 80s/90s than it was in the western world. Basically you and all of your neighbors and everyone else around you would be poor (unless you were a party member). Everybody had the same starting point when democracy arrived and there was real incentive for factories to come up with a good balance between quality and cost.
My first purchase with my first salary was a pair of Adidas shoes. I wore them in winter as well so they lasted only three seasons, but the feeling of not having to worry about every small puddle was liberating.
My family came from a war-torn country. My father grew up very poor. My mom grew up poor. Both escaped poverty by studying and getting scholarships for grad school to come to the US.
I’ve never been poor, but we were lower middle class early on and middle middle class by the time I reached high school. My parents always scrimped and saved. The cars my family owned were all one step before the junkyard. I never got Christmas presents except for 3 years that I can remember. It was disappointing but not soul crushing. We never felt poor but we never ate out ever and never went on vacation ever. Getting Kentucky Fried Chicken was a luxury.
When I graduated from college, I was unemployed for the first few months and needed to stay with friends. After I got my first job, I was the lowest paid person I knew. I also scrimped and saved like my parents, but I never felt poor. I would track all my spending to the penny, until I had saved enough such that I could forget about the change in my pocket.
I’m now a low-single digit millionaire which isn’t that much in Silicon Valley but good enough for me. At one point a few years ago my wife and I were earning over $1M/year. My wife is now C-suite and I’m essentially retired. We have two multi-week trips a year and my kids have never sat in economy. I haven’t had to think about what the price of things were in 15 years now. I just buy whatever I want, which is frankly not much besides computer equipment for myself. Most money I spend is on the kids. I drive a 10 year old Toyota but my wife drives a Porsche.
There’s the old saying that sticks with me. “My father rode a camel, I rode a Mercedes Benz, my son will ride a Lamborghini, my grandson will ride a camel.” My kids are hard workers at school and we try to keep them grounded but their privilege really shows through in ways that I never expected. They really don’t know the value of money or how much things cost. We don’t really spoil them with toys and such but if there’s something educational like a set of books or lego, I will get it for them without thinking. I need to figure out a way to get them to understand the value of money but it’s very hard. Granted they are still young but it’s an important topic that I need to know they understand because I don’t want my grandchildren to suffer because I spoiled my kids now.
Poverty is such a relative thing. There are some things on this list that, while I can understand how they are hallmarks of poverty in the US, are completely alien to what's considered to be poverty where I am from (a car? Buying cereal?)
Then again maybe we are all just horrifically poor here apart from a select few. Western indices certainly seem to think so.
I can write a lot on this and my personal experience, but I’ll just leave this one for now.
I, while living alone in a house in partial construction (missing a wall) in the Southern California mountains would get a ride from a friend or a neighbor to high school (20 minute drive into town). If I had some (about a dozen a bag, one bag a month), a single russet potato tossed in the toaster oven would be breakfast (no seasoning, grab and go). I was on free lunch at school, but I’d pocket an extra hamburger to sell at a reduced price in the lunch yard. That extra dollar would get me a can of soup that I heated on a wood burning stove for dinner.
For me, having to steal food to be able to buy different food that can store better is a being poor. I’ve got a thousand other stories growing up. But now I’m on track for an early and comfortable retirement; no complaints.
While I understand that there are food deserts in the US, I can't understand why someone poor would feed themselves with cheap ramen, mac and cheese and fast food.
Isn't buying vegetables, cheap meat cuts, flour and other basic staples much cheaper and healthier?
To put things in context: I'm European and been homeless, the core of my artistic research and career is precisely about food for the homeless.
In my neighborhood, a wealthy liberal enclave called Marin County, preparing something paletable from raw ingredients is usually more expensive than cheap salty starchy food.
There are no cheap cuts of meat at my Safeway.
Most people are horrid cooks. They might think they can cook, but usually it's just awful. (Learning how to cook is not my point though.)
Poor people have huge problems, and cooking a nutritious meal is down on the priority scale.
Plus---for many poor people, the little bit of enjoyment is eating something that tastes good. I can see why the poor gravitate towards the lousy quick food.
(My all means I am poor. I don't eat crappy food though. I was a cook in my teens though. I'm glad I learned how to cook, but understand those that didn't.)
Lots of replies here about time, and while they are true, they aren’t the full story. The fact is that vegetables are ridiculously expensive in America compared to Europe. I’ve lived in both. I’ve been dirt poor and I’m now quite well off. Buying vegetables here in the UK costs literal pennies for many meals. In the US, the same veg can cost literally 10x as much in some cases.
Prepped food on the other hand is half the price in the US than it is in the UK. These two factors combined make it a no brainer to go for the prepped stuff over the raw ingredients when you are trying to save money.
I love how this touches on perceptions of intelligence vs wealth. Our family was somewhat poor, with 5 kids growing up on 1 public school teacher's salary, but we all made good grades. I remember this one kid saying "I thought your parents were doctors or lawyers." And what he meant was, you have less than me and you do more with it - but you still have less than me.
It flies in the face of the idea that if you're educated and smart, you'll be well off.
Looking at how the lifes of my school classmates went I believe there's a positive correlation, but its influence is minor comparing to things like career choices and having connections or not.
The problem of being poor in a good country (having free education and healthcare) is not only in not being able to afford necessities or luxuries from time to time, but about not having a base of capital on which to build on, not being able to do your own projects while being forced to pay rent to rich people, to fund their businesses with taxes, to help their economies through inflation and being forced to participate in their projects.
Growing up, Dad worked 3 jobs to pay the bills. On more than 1 occasion, I was sent to go pay a utility bill after the utility was shut off. My first experience driving was at 13 to haul our garbage up to the school dumpster on Sunday nights because we didn't pay our bill.
The car was constantly breaking down. With no garage, I spent more that 1 weekend on my back in the dirt, even in January, helping Dad fix it.
Vacations? Ha!
Although I live modestly now, I have a decent paying job and suffer from none of those things. Car is 12 year old, mostly runs OK, and there is money reserved for emergencies like when a an oil line broke last month.
All bills are paid on time, automatically, each month.
I try to keep a minimum 2k reserve for emergencies. I am out of the debt spiral. Our modest condo will be paid off in 4 years.
I have no great ambition to be wealthy, just secure. Lots of people I know, and people here on HN, have more to show for their lives.
But I'm doing better than I did growing up, and to me, that is satisfying.
Being poor mean that nice guy (in mid 20s/30s) who stays in same rented basement for remainder of his life. Despite his average coding skills and gracious attitude on zoom meetings, it's concluded that he was broke and dirt poor, only after news of him taking his own life, was verified by his landlord. Depression is hell of a thing, eh.
I was thinking about the generational effects on the cases on which someone has been raised on poverty and it has been successfully overcome and the positive values and life lessons it carries over, compared to other childhood experiences that carry over negatively (abuse).
My father grew up on relative poverty (post war Spain), and the value of things is something it's always present with him and how he educated me unconsciously. Fixing broken things, scavenging parts, the value of food, time and work. Seeking comfort and security, instead of luxury. Or put it differently, the luxury is having a car that works and is nice (and second hand), not a luxury car per se. Luxury is having bread every day with your food. Luxury is being able to fix your own toilet or watering your plants.
I am forever grateful for these, and kind of sorry I cannot fully comprehend what and how he did it. I earn well over the average wage, and still I buy my computers second hand.
My wife and I got married at 21. We went to college. Had a small apartment. I worked overnight at a gas station and she worked at a retailer in the mall. Our rent was $500 a month USD. And we almost never had the cash when rent was due so we always had late fees. The power got cut off consistently. We couldn’t afford cell phones. Our college was paid for entirely by student loans because we couldn’t afford it otherwise.
It was embarrassing. Dehumanizing in a lot of ways. We bought old books that many times didn’t even have the material we needed for our courses and our grades suffered. We both did poorly.
Both our families were poor and would offer help if we asked but we rarely did since they didn’t really have much either.
After we graduated we both went to grad school. It was a little bit better because we both had graduate assistant jobs. So we each had two jobs and things were a little less lean. Until the car broke down. That set us back.
After grad school my wife got a job as a university instructor. I got a job working in marketing. Things were better for a little while. Until my wife got sick. Turns out she has an autoimmune disease that is rare and difficult to manage. We didn’t know that for a while.
Nightly trips to the emergency room. Doctor visits. Specialists. MRIs. CAT scans. Blood tests. More specialists. Oncologists. “You might have brain cancer.”
That was a decade ago.
It was so hard. Every single day we were just trying to make it to the next day in one piece. We moved to a new house that didn’t smell like urine because we could afford it. Until she just couldn’t work anymore.
Our rent was $700 a month. We were trying to build savings. Our $2500 a month student loans and stacks of medical bills made it hard. We ate cheap food but we ate. Our phones only got cut off sometimes. I got a job offer in Europe. We were going to take it. Until her dad got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
We stayed. He died. She had a short term mental break down. The engine in our car blew up. $4000. The flooding started. We went to sleep every night hearing rats in our walls. Our dog died. Our cat died. We couldn’t do anything about it. We wanted to give up. Every second of every day was a struggle. Until I got a new job.
My base salary is $165,000 usd. I get 20% performance bonuses. I have amazing health insurance for both of us. I have a vibrant and rapidly growing retirement account. We moved from the south east to the north east.
My wife has good doctors now. A whole fucking medical team. She’s doing good. More good days than bad days. And the bad days aren’t as bad. And the seizures have stopped. And she doesn’t wake up screaming. We toasted fucking marshmallows on our porch last night and we go on hikes and visit antique stores and see nice things we like and sometimes we even get greedy and buy something just because we can.
We’re rich now. We buy food we like. We have savings. We have investments. We bought a new car and paid it off. The old car had to be towed away when we moved and the scrap yard guy gave us $200 for it.
Every single time we see a couch on the side of the road. Every single time we see a help wanted ad. And every single time we spend a dime. We both get anxious. Maybe not. Maybe next time. Maybe I need to call them. Maybe what if but what do we do if how why when we shouldn’t.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. And it’s not something I’d wish on anyone. And we weren’t even that poor. We never were homeless. We came close some times.
Being poor is awful. And its effects last a long time event after you think you made it out. Our credit is shit. We’re fixing it but it’s a slow process. We can barely get qualified for any type of loan. Home ownership is out of the question for a few more years. And I’m glad the car is paid off. That’s one less monthly bill.
There's also an unfortunate path, when someone grows up okay not having to worry about anything and then the family goes bankrupt (without recovery) when his life is about to start after high school.
Being poor from the start sucks, but it at least teaches you things how to navigate in life with what you have.
[+] [-] skrebbel|4 years ago|reply
We were nowhere near as poor as some people, and it was only for a few years, and it was self-inflicted to some extent because I was starting a startup while my wife was getting reeducated. So I don't know what it's like to be really poor. Those stories on HN from people who, 20 years past lifting themselves out of poverty, still hold on to every old sock, that's not me.
But at the same time, having been somewhat poor: damn it rocks to be rich! We became rich overnight a few years ago when my wife got a job, and every time I buy a sandwich without worrying about the cost, I get excited mentally. There's always this "Omg can we afford th- oh haha we're rich! Of course we can, woohoo!" process going on in my mind and it's super awesome. I feel so decadent, so lavish! I'm buying a sandwich!
To me, that's the definition of "rich". Buying a sandwich that someone else made, anytime I want.
If you're rich enough to be able to buy whatever at the supermarket, or get your favorite sandwich for lunch without worrying about the cost, cherish that. I don't really believe anything from here to private jets is going to make me much happier in practice, but I never want to be below that bar again.
[+] [-] geomark|4 years ago|reply
About mid-way through high school the family business went bankrupt and all assumptions about how I would go to college evaporated. So instead I ended up going to an electronics trade school on a student loan.
I did not have to pay tuition until after graduation, but I did have to pay all my living expenses myself. Had a minimum wage part time job from which to make rent, bills and food. Could barely afford to eat.
Got turned onto a store called WareMart that sold mega size boxes of really cheap products. A fellow poor schoolmate showed how to buy a huge brick of fake Velveeta cheese, giant tub of margarine and a potato-sack-size bag of elbow macaroni to make super cheap mac-n-cheese. The secret was to boil the macaroni for a long time so it would absorb a lot of water and get huge, then add a scoop of margarine and slab of cheese. You could eat for weeks on one purchase.
It was disgusting. But I lived, and finished school.
Upon graduation I had three offers at weekly salaries for more money than I had ever held in my hands. When I cashed my first paycheck I went to the grocery story and filled the basket with steaks and grilled one every night. Man, what a feeling. Despite making tons more in later years I have never felt so rich as when I spent that first paycheck.
[+] [-] jwr|4 years ago|reply
There were two thresholds that I remember distinctly: the first one was crossing from "poor" to "ok", when I could go shop for groceries and buy most things (though still looking at the price tags, to avoid the expensive stuff). That was a big step up from buying the bare necessities.
The second threshold, "rich", was when I realized I don't have to worry about the prices in my local grocery store. I can just buy whatever I want.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn't "rich" by any means, but it is enough to provide immense comfort and ease of living. I think many people who have this comfort are unable to appreciate what they have.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
Not to mention that, from all I've seen and heard, European poor is also quite better off than US poor.
US poor means poor && deemed as a personal and moral failure && left socially unsupported && looked down upon in a class-aware way that's even worse than UK's traditional classism && getting into much more dangerous situations with much more crazies around, some of which will even be armed.
And as US poor, you also remain the one segment of society people can freely joke around and look down upon. They might pretend to support blacks, gays etc. in the asbstract, but could not care less if those are also dirt poor. As for the white poor, they don't even have the redeeming token minority status qualities so are open season for everybody - you could call them "white trash" with impunity.
[+] [-] optiomal_isgood|4 years ago|reply
I was born in a Latin America country, middle class family, 375 USD monthly income for a house of 6 people.
Although I never went a full day without eating at least two meals, it wasn't rare to go sleep hungry.
My mom still managed to buy a PC for us, and that alone changed everything: I discovered programming in my early teens through a MMO game and learned web development, and since then I never stopped.
I'm now on my mid-twenties, but because I started so early with programming, I kinda hacked my career growth: to this day I already have 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as I was still a teen on my first internships. Started a CS bachelor but dropped as it was waste of time for me.
Today I work as the principal software engineer for a US startup remotely, and make 40x of my country's minimum wage.
Living through this gave me an empathy that I believe it's really hard to develop if you were born rich (definition of rich here: >upper middle class). There are so much things people take for granted, and they aren't available for people in lower classes at all. Geography is the biggest inequality in the world by a large margin.
[+] [-] dEnigma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstick|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for sharing!
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
(In college my discretionary budget was $5 a week, so going to the movies meant going without something else.)
[+] [-] davedx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11235813213455|4 years ago|reply
Nowdays, even with a comfortable income, I still use a bike, and get very often free food at the end of markets, I try to pay whenever possible, or give back
[+] [-] nly|4 years ago|reply
How would you fare if she lost that job though?
It's your business, so a rhetorical question really, but a "few years" at a high income rarely produces any lasting fortune.
[+] [-] fdroidmstrrce|4 years ago|reply
Too rich to get free money for college, too poor for my parents to have saved me anything. I was paycheck to paycheck for 3 years undergrad, and 3 years of wife's grad school.
Paycheck to paycheck doesn't even accurately define it. I didn't buy any luxuries like fast food or alcohol. Homemade everything.
[+] [-] dstick|4 years ago|reply
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
[+] [-] kstenerud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pontifier|4 years ago|reply
I buy cheap hotdogs for meat, and cheap cars that I drive into the ground to get my money's worth out of them, but I can't afford to pay rent. I've been almost homeless for the last year.
But, I just bought a house a few days ago. I bought it super cheap, and it needs a lot of work that I'm doing myself.
I still can't afford to pay rent, not because I couldn't, but because it's a waste of money.
I didn't think twice about buying this house because it was a fantastic deal.
5 years from now I will have spent less than someone that is still one payment away from being evicted if they miss a rent payment.
[+] [-] projectileboy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoomHotel|4 years ago|reply
But cars are optional if you live somewhere with working mass transportation.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobar33333|4 years ago|reply
Of course in reality these schemes are traps to get poor people to overspend, but the issue is not that they are physically unable to buy long lasting items, but that the system is constantly trying to trick them in to failing.
[+] [-] blfr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvsukale3|4 years ago|reply
I want to quote Morgan Housel here
"Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself"
[+] [-] humanrebar|4 years ago|reply
That being said, we do a disservice to our youth if we overemphasize the role of luck in being in poverty or not. There are strong correlations between poverty and lifestyle choices people typically do have control over.
- Starting your career before having children. In many cases, this implies finishing a certain amount of school and/or training.
- Marrying a responsible person and staying married
- Avoiding substance abuse
- Planning your pregnancies [1]
- Avoiding a criminal record [2]
And then there are risk mitigation strategies to avoid catastrophe:
- Establishing an emergency fund
- Living within your means
- Getting insurance and keeping up with payments
- Avoiding high risk investments and career moves [3]
I guess I feel that people who have figured out the basics are hesitant to preach what they practice. All of the above seems like a given to people who are comfortably middle class. But if you didn't have wise parents and nobody says anything out of an overemphasis on empathy, you could make any of those mistakes easily and then get treated like a fool.
[1] Tragically, some people are raped and become pregnant against their will, which is why we shouldn't judge folks, but the mass majority of pregnancies do not happen for this reason. Considering the abortion rate for married women, it seems that accidental pregnancy is actually very common.
[2] Again, don't judge. People are falsely convicted of crimes. People have criminal family members. People make dumb choices and learn their lessons. But being violent over beefs or going for joy rides in stolen cars is just setting yourself up to struggle financially.
[3] If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
This is a message that the American media tries to get us to internalize through selective storytelling:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-true-story-behind-the-...
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
Especially the bad shoes. Oh my, the bad shoes, leaking and tearing themselves apart all the time. Walking around in portable puddles whenever it rained or the snow started melting. I hated that so much, but good shoes were too expensive.
[+] [-] nomorewords|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plank_time|4 years ago|reply
I’ve never been poor, but we were lower middle class early on and middle middle class by the time I reached high school. My parents always scrimped and saved. The cars my family owned were all one step before the junkyard. I never got Christmas presents except for 3 years that I can remember. It was disappointing but not soul crushing. We never felt poor but we never ate out ever and never went on vacation ever. Getting Kentucky Fried Chicken was a luxury.
When I graduated from college, I was unemployed for the first few months and needed to stay with friends. After I got my first job, I was the lowest paid person I knew. I also scrimped and saved like my parents, but I never felt poor. I would track all my spending to the penny, until I had saved enough such that I could forget about the change in my pocket.
I’m now a low-single digit millionaire which isn’t that much in Silicon Valley but good enough for me. At one point a few years ago my wife and I were earning over $1M/year. My wife is now C-suite and I’m essentially retired. We have two multi-week trips a year and my kids have never sat in economy. I haven’t had to think about what the price of things were in 15 years now. I just buy whatever I want, which is frankly not much besides computer equipment for myself. Most money I spend is on the kids. I drive a 10 year old Toyota but my wife drives a Porsche.
There’s the old saying that sticks with me. “My father rode a camel, I rode a Mercedes Benz, my son will ride a Lamborghini, my grandson will ride a camel.” My kids are hard workers at school and we try to keep them grounded but their privilege really shows through in ways that I never expected. They really don’t know the value of money or how much things cost. We don’t really spoil them with toys and such but if there’s something educational like a set of books or lego, I will get it for them without thinking. I need to figure out a way to get them to understand the value of money but it’s very hard. Granted they are still young but it’s an important topic that I need to know they understand because I don’t want my grandchildren to suffer because I spoiled my kids now.
[+] [-] filleduchaos|4 years ago|reply
Then again maybe we are all just horrifically poor here apart from a select few. Western indices certainly seem to think so.
[+] [-] sethammons|4 years ago|reply
I, while living alone in a house in partial construction (missing a wall) in the Southern California mountains would get a ride from a friend or a neighbor to high school (20 minute drive into town). If I had some (about a dozen a bag, one bag a month), a single russet potato tossed in the toaster oven would be breakfast (no seasoning, grab and go). I was on free lunch at school, but I’d pocket an extra hamburger to sell at a reduced price in the lunch yard. That extra dollar would get me a can of soup that I heated on a wood burning stove for dinner.
For me, having to steal food to be able to buy different food that can store better is a being poor. I’ve got a thousand other stories growing up. But now I’m on track for an early and comfortable retirement; no complaints.
[+] [-] teddyh|4 years ago|reply
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...
• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...
• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...
[+] [-] rzzzt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcooks|4 years ago|reply
Isn't buying vegetables, cheap meat cuts, flour and other basic staples much cheaper and healthier?
To put things in context: I'm European and been homeless, the core of my artistic research and career is precisely about food for the homeless.
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
In my neighborhood, a wealthy liberal enclave called Marin County, preparing something paletable from raw ingredients is usually more expensive than cheap salty starchy food.
There are no cheap cuts of meat at my Safeway.
Most people are horrid cooks. They might think they can cook, but usually it's just awful. (Learning how to cook is not my point though.)
Poor people have huge problems, and cooking a nutritious meal is down on the priority scale.
Plus---for many poor people, the little bit of enjoyment is eating something that tastes good. I can see why the poor gravitate towards the lousy quick food.
(My all means I am poor. I don't eat crappy food though. I was a cook in my teens though. I'm glad I learned how to cook, but understand those that didn't.)
[+] [-] dalemyers|4 years ago|reply
Prepped food on the other hand is half the price in the US than it is in the UK. These two factors combined make it a no brainer to go for the prepped stuff over the raw ingredients when you are trying to save money.
[+] [-] lookalike74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|4 years ago|reply
Looking at how the lifes of my school classmates went I believe there's a positive correlation, but its influence is minor comparing to things like career choices and having connections or not.
[+] [-] p0d|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoNameHaveI|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtpoorcoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kh_hk|4 years ago|reply
My father grew up on relative poverty (post war Spain), and the value of things is something it's always present with him and how he educated me unconsciously. Fixing broken things, scavenging parts, the value of food, time and work. Seeking comfort and security, instead of luxury. Or put it differently, the luxury is having a car that works and is nice (and second hand), not a luxury car per se. Luxury is having bread every day with your food. Luxury is being able to fix your own toilet or watering your plants.
I am forever grateful for these, and kind of sorry I cannot fully comprehend what and how he did it. I earn well over the average wage, and still I buy my computers second hand.
[+] [-] oblio|4 years ago|reply
If you can somehow buy that efficiently (hard these days), you're set for a prosperous and safe life, with almost no drawbacks.
[+] [-] theshadowknows|4 years ago|reply
It was embarrassing. Dehumanizing in a lot of ways. We bought old books that many times didn’t even have the material we needed for our courses and our grades suffered. We both did poorly.
Both our families were poor and would offer help if we asked but we rarely did since they didn’t really have much either.
After we graduated we both went to grad school. It was a little bit better because we both had graduate assistant jobs. So we each had two jobs and things were a little less lean. Until the car broke down. That set us back.
After grad school my wife got a job as a university instructor. I got a job working in marketing. Things were better for a little while. Until my wife got sick. Turns out she has an autoimmune disease that is rare and difficult to manage. We didn’t know that for a while.
Nightly trips to the emergency room. Doctor visits. Specialists. MRIs. CAT scans. Blood tests. More specialists. Oncologists. “You might have brain cancer.”
That was a decade ago.
It was so hard. Every single day we were just trying to make it to the next day in one piece. We moved to a new house that didn’t smell like urine because we could afford it. Until she just couldn’t work anymore.
Our rent was $700 a month. We were trying to build savings. Our $2500 a month student loans and stacks of medical bills made it hard. We ate cheap food but we ate. Our phones only got cut off sometimes. I got a job offer in Europe. We were going to take it. Until her dad got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
We stayed. He died. She had a short term mental break down. The engine in our car blew up. $4000. The flooding started. We went to sleep every night hearing rats in our walls. Our dog died. Our cat died. We couldn’t do anything about it. We wanted to give up. Every second of every day was a struggle. Until I got a new job.
My base salary is $165,000 usd. I get 20% performance bonuses. I have amazing health insurance for both of us. I have a vibrant and rapidly growing retirement account. We moved from the south east to the north east.
My wife has good doctors now. A whole fucking medical team. She’s doing good. More good days than bad days. And the bad days aren’t as bad. And the seizures have stopped. And she doesn’t wake up screaming. We toasted fucking marshmallows on our porch last night and we go on hikes and visit antique stores and see nice things we like and sometimes we even get greedy and buy something just because we can.
We’re rich now. We buy food we like. We have savings. We have investments. We bought a new car and paid it off. The old car had to be towed away when we moved and the scrap yard guy gave us $200 for it.
Every single time we see a couch on the side of the road. Every single time we see a help wanted ad. And every single time we spend a dime. We both get anxious. Maybe not. Maybe next time. Maybe I need to call them. Maybe what if but what do we do if how why when we shouldn’t.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. And it’s not something I’d wish on anyone. And we weren’t even that poor. We never were homeless. We came close some times.
Being poor is awful. And its effects last a long time event after you think you made it out. Our credit is shit. We’re fixing it but it’s a slow process. We can barely get qualified for any type of loan. Home ownership is out of the question for a few more years. And I’m glad the car is paid off. That’s one less monthly bill.
[+] [-] thrwxx5667890|4 years ago|reply
Being poor from the start sucks, but it at least teaches you things how to navigate in life with what you have.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] LeCow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] princeb|4 years ago|reply
they know their bank balances down to the cent.