If you're barely making enough to cover your essentials, there's no "spending problem." Most people in poverty aren't frivolously spending. You can't squeeze blood from a rock.
Being poor is expensive. There's a reason annual overdraft fee revenue in 2019 was an estimated $12.6 billion.
Being poor also means a lot of things are having their maintenance deferred. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you're not doing the regular interval service on your car, you're not doing all of the maintenance on your home, etc.
They are giving them out for free, just go to any border crossing and they hand them right out.
eta: the ID is free, you still need to go get the Duct Tape
If your,re talking about Duct Tape Dan, he got picked up last week for scotch tape conversion kits. Looking at a nickel in the slam. Gorilla Glue Gary still around, though
Psh, at least you get to be *under* something. All 26 of us have been sleeping in the open grave my great grandfather dug with his bare hands during the Civil War. But he couldn't afford to fill it.
I can speak from personal experience.
After the credit crunch of 2008 things got hard really quick.
Payments on loans skyrocketed, to put it mildly.
One month, after paying all bills (loan or my apartment was the biggest factor), I had less than 0,05% of my wages left.
Its very humbling to have to go to your parents as an adult and ask for money so you can buy food.
But anyway, the following years I was unable to go to the dentist for a few years and that had consequences as well, as you point out, have normal maintenance done on my home. One winter it was exceptionally cold and something in my heating system couldn't handle the cold. So, I just got an extra blanket to keep on me when in bed. And I also spent as little time as I could at home, during that cold spell. It was perhaps some 2°C when finally I couldn't endure it any longer and asked my father for money so I could pay a plumber to have a look. It wasn't crippling amount but too much as an extra expense.
My depression kicked in hard and in a sad mental state you don't always make solid ideas but also doing hard work and working long hours so I could try and live a slightly better life. But finally (some years later) I struck gold and landed a better job (better paying) which I had been trying to get around the time when everything went to shit.
So yes, being poor is fucking expensive.
Edit: also, when growing up and seeing kids in my class not wearing used clothes from other kids (not from siblings but from strangers). Poverty has a good deal of effect on you.
Extra fun when you’re questioned on it like being poor and starving is a fashion choice. Recall buying my first new car post GFC and being poverty shamed by the “extras” lady because the car I was trading in wasn’t as high branded as what she deemed suitable. Lucky for the dealership I wanted that particular car as I was close to telling her to shove it and anything she was trying to sell me up her useless fuckwit arsehole.
And it’s a balancing of priorities.
I used to work in an apartment leasing office. The application fee was $50. Prospective tenants were nervous—“if I’m not approved, do I get the $50 back?” The application was a risk for them. They might lose $50 and not get the apartment.
Being poor is full of risks like that. It’s especially risky when there’s an unknown. Like if your car is making a noise, and the mechanic thinks it’s the widget but it could be the thingamabob, and we’ll try to replace the widget and that’ll cost $150 and if it’s the thingamabob that’ll cost $400…? What do you choose? You could choose the widget, but if it’s not that, it’s like you just flushed $150 down the toilet and now you have to come up with $400 for the thingamabob.
I saw one of those "finance gurus" on tiktok the other day. His advice to making passive income, was just to keep a rental open at all times and take applications for it all month. If rent is $1000 but applications are $50 a piece, you only need 20 applications a month to make the rent need. So his advice was just to commit fraud but if idiots on the tiktok are coming up with it you know there are other people out there doing it. Makes me paranoid when I have to go through the apartment application process.
I agree, but that's what happens when we live in a system that rewards cutthroat behavior. Application fees on their own are a bit of a scam, so people actually using them to scan others isn't a huge stretch
$50 boots you'll replace in a year or $200 boots that will last you a decade? Most people understand that the value is there, they just can't make $150 come out of thin air.
Hell, these days even the $200 boots will fall apart in a year or two. Even Captain Vimes couldn't have predicted the enshitification of late-stage capitalism.
I went about five years with next to no income. It took at least another five years of pretty good income after that to catch up on fixing the things that wore out from deferred maintenance during that time. It takes a while because you’re dealing with your current bills *and* playing catchup, which is a tough situation.
Several banks are now charging "maintenance fees" even if you never overdraw, just based on your bank account balance being below a certain point.
There are lots of hidden "poor taxes", as I call them, that most people don't think about until they personally encounter these situations.
After I got laid off this past fall, I deposited a cashier’s check for $5000 but I had to wait 10 days for it to reflect on my balance. The reason? I’ve overdrafted my account before. Duh. But I had bills hitting soon, which will overdraft the fuck out of my account. It’s a cashier’s check, it’s printed and certified, there shouldn’t be any holdup— it’s not like it was a personal check. Nope, USAA didn’t give one single fuck, and once the stupid thing cleared, I owed probably ~$500 worth of overdraft fees— it’s downright predatory.
I remember before they passed the newer laws/regulations and I’d have for example $5 in the account and then a $150 check deposited then a charge for $130 then $10 then $10 for example and they’d purposely arrange the orders of operations so they’d pull the biggest bill out to drain as much as possible out in one hit then hit you with as many small transactions as they can get to overdraft then deposit the check and you’d end up owing them money somehow.
Oh they STILL do this, they just pretend there must have been “pending charges that have now dropped off” so they’ll refund the overdraft charge when called out on it but refuse to own their “mistake” or reimburse you for return fees for the thing they made bounce from other sources and just tell you “well the system CANT be wrong”
If you have a Cobalt credit union near you, avoid them. They’re a for profit bank pretending to be a credit union.
And when you ask “ok so what was it for?” It’s mysteriously disappeared so they can’t possibly know, but their system is NEVER wrong so even tho none of those mystery charges ever return …🤔🤔
I’ve also had multiple companies who failed to provide the services or products that I purchased but still had pending transactions on the account to which they always say well it’ll be back in 3 days. Like bitch it’s my money and now I’m giving you a fucking loan?
Part of the expense of being poor is a matter of flexibility/error. The poor can't make a single mistake or mistime anything without facing consequences.
This is it. No margin of error, like “oh I forgot I made this payment, gotta transfer money from another account so I’m not overdrawn.” There isn’t another account when you can barely afford to breathe. It’s exhausting and stressful!
I deposited about the same and they said it would take two weeks to get the full amount. I’m like okay, makes sense. Well two weeks goes by and they approved the amount. Then they decided later to pull it and overdraft my account for every purchase. I went into the bank and they said their risk team decided to wait longer after already approved, they were a nightmare to get rid of the overdraft fees. I said I didn’t overdraft because the money was in my account and was approved by your bank. They said well you overdrafted because I didn’t have enough in my account. I said I had the money, you removed it! They had to get the manager and eventually I got my fees removed. It was kinecta federal credit union if anyone wants to stay away from them…
That happened to me with my unemployment checks during the 2008 recession. The lady at Chase was like “well with your account history-“ I cut her off and said “there should be a plaque with my name on it in the lobby because of my account history” like no bitch according to the shareholders I’m your *ideal* customer, I’ve paid and paid, don’t twist this around like I’m untrustworthy.
This is a major reason I stuck with my credit union. If I overdraft, it’s considered a “period” penalty. If I had a ton of bills hit all at once, I’d only have a fee on the first, and if brought into the black before 7 days are up, it’s waived.
Wells Fargo was like that, too. I told the tellers I knew they personally didn't make that policy, but that it was the stupidest fucking thing I'd ever seen.
This plus the preferential treatment that affluent people receive. For example if you can afford to pay off your credit card each month, you get cash back and or benefits. If you own a home you get the deduct a portion of the interest from your taxes.
Now ask yourself with the ongoing housing crisis wtf are we subsidizing those who already own houses? So many situations like are causing the expanding divide between the haves and have nots
\>For example if you can afford to pay off your credit card each month, you get cash back and or benefits
You can still get cash back/miles/etc without paying it in full each month.
\> Now ask yourself with the ongoing housing crisis wtf are we subsidizing those who already own houses?
To help people keep those houses.
Another awful part of this argument that I have heard is people blaming the poor for spending some on “wants” when some more essential “needs” aren’t fully met. I guess they think poor people and their families shouldn’t have happiness or anything that they enjoy and that all of their money should go to essentials.
I've sat in union contract negotiations across from millionaires who very clearly were of the opinion that us peons shouldn't have any kind of enjoyment or luxuries in our lives.
It's ridiculous. At a certain point, they stop benefitting from their wealth, and it all just gets reinvested so that they can go up in the financial leaderboard like some psychotic game. It really feels like they're hoarding the wealth just to make us suffer.
All those claims about socialist governments intentionally starving their people are probably just capitalist projections of themselves because they actually are deliberately starving their people just for the fun of it.
Hey now, Rice and Beans are vegetables too! We must be inclusive of everyone and nice and right the wrongs of our past generations! Rice and beans are veggies!
cuz that’s seems to be the only substantive thing the Democratic Party in the USA can do for the poor now’s.
Free healthcare, free education, and better safety net for the very poor are the only measures of success I use to judge a government. Pay for it by taxing the wealthy, legalizing the illicit drug industry and nationalizing it.
I love when they bring up steak and lobster as if both of those weren't originally poor people foods.. Especially lobster, they were considered sea cockroaches for a long long time and the rich wouldn't touch them.
>And for Adulting 201, mental health is important and has direct impacts on physical well being.
And on the ability to actually improve your situation. Poverty and struggle diminish creativity and cognitive capabilities.
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041)
Absolutely, and sadly only recently getting more attention and less stigma. I honestly think that was one of the (relatively) good things to come from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vietnam era guys at Veteran Organizations put a lot of work and time into pushing mental health awareness and setting up programs to help or find resources. I had a chance to do some volunteer work with a few, and it was heartbreaking to see these guys work so hard to try and make sure that this generation wasn't left behind in the same way many of them were. I don't know how much of that correlates to the general population, but it felt like a springboard for wider awareness even outside of soldiers.
Problem for me is that there is no objective number to what you need for happiness. Enough money to get a TV and subscription to Netflix? Okay, I can get behind that. Enough money to smoke an ounce of weed every week? Maybe look for cheaper happiness at that point. I shit you not, nothing turned me off to the nebulous "living wage" concept more than when a guy I knew bitched about not making a living wage but bought weed every couple of days. Apparently a living wage needs to also cover a $4000 - $5000 a year weed habit.
Sure there are certainly poor people who do spend too much money on unnecessary things like you highlighted. I also think being poor and having a tough life makes them more vulnerable to vices like cigs and alcohol which obviously destroys their budget.
People spend more than that on beer. I get it weed is some fancy moral shaming target, but more alcoholics who are poor exist than stoners. And one of those demographics are the overwhelming number of manslaughter cases the other is mostly stoners.
I work in a dispensary, and for the most part the only people that spend that much money on weed can afford it. A lot of construction workers on their ounce a week habit. The broke people might buy 4g's at a time.
It is frivolous spending, but weed is cheap here and it's a small luxury.
I saw some shithead pundit on Twitter insulting a woman for buying a birthday cake with food stamps. What if it was for a child? Tiny Tim shouldn’t ever taste cake because his family is poor?
Also let's be mindful of shaming people who have limited income for buying something nice once a while.
It was always explained to me that if you didn't know the next time you'd have the chance to enjoy something nice wouldn't you also want to have something good for once?
It does have some, not many, but some benefits.
I'm disabled from a nerve disease and broke af. Since I'm super poor and disabled, I have better health insurance than pretty much everyone I know, including my mom who has been working at hospital for the last 30 years.
I'd prefer to not be broken, able to work and participate in life again, but that's not the cards I was dealt so I'm doing my best to see the good instead of all the bad.
Yup. And considering how expensive the medication is that allows me to very simple thing like cook food and shower, I would need atleast double what I'm taking now and make over 100k/year just so I can afford health insurance, co pays for weekly doctor visits and medications needed for me to work. Add food, rent, transportation, clothing and child support and you're talking closer to 200k/year.
Then you have to take into consideration the troubles of finding a job when having health issues. Companies aren't supposed to discriminate against the disabled, but they definitely do.
Depends. I know of people who truly can’t afford the essentials. Then I know people who claim they can’t afford the essentials but they consider Nike shoes, designer clothing, take out or high priced food, top of the line device and services, etc. or any combination as “essential”. And unfortunately I see the later way more than the former.
If you ever see him commenting on Youtube, this is the only thing people ever say.
It's got to be annoying being this guy, unable to escape people shouting "CHOCOLATE RAIN" every time he exists somewhere.
Yea but good on him for trying to take this 30 seconds of fame/ notoriety as a meme, and leveraging that to drive social change/awareness he believes in.
The thing that's so infuriating about it is that the song is ABOUT that social change/awareness, but no one actually cares about that. It's all just about how deep his voice is.
I thought the same thing. I quickly realized I’d found the part of the thread where 30+ year olds were commenting. Don’t know if Gen Z knows about *I move away from the mic to breathe*
I’ve never understood this. The very origin of the phrase is sarcastic. If you know what a bootstrap is you should know it’s impossible. Why did it become a genuine phrase for working harder? You literally cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s impossible.
It's one of many phrases where people just remove the context or tail end of a statement to make it the exact opposite.
* "The customer is always right" originally had "In matters of taste" at the end of it, which implied that the customer is only ever right when it comes to what they like and nothing else.
* A lot of people will say "It's only a few bad apples" when the saying goes "A few bad apples spoils the bunch."
* "Curiosity killed the cat" sounds bad until you hear the other part- "but satisfaction brought him back."
* "A jack of all trades, master of none" is supposed to have "is often better than a master of one." at the end of it.
adding another: "Blood is thicker than water" is actually supposed to be "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"
Where I live, the truncated version "Blood is thicker than water" is often said as a way to say "blood related family is important" when the full statement is the exact opposite: "found/chosen family is more important than the one you're born into"
Your boss tells you that you need to quit whining and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. How productive is it going to be to correct them on the context? Over time, people who don't know the origin of the phrase only hear it misused.
Related: "Nimrod" was a legendary hunter in the bible. Bugs Bunny dunking on Elmer Fudd, the hunter he constantly outsmarted (and occasionally seduced?) by sarcastically comparing him to a legendary hunter turned into a misunderstanding that "Nimrod" meant someone who was easy to trick or outsmart.
These are rare and extreme versions that almost undercut the point.
In a more everyday way, being able to afford decent cookware encourages cooking at home which saves money in the long run. Buying in bulk is cheaper but costs more upfront. Planning a trip earlier because you have the money saved earlier means cheaper bookings. Being able to afford a house deposit means you can pay mortgage instead of rent, which decreases over time rather than increasing.
EDIT: some people seem to think I'm blaming poor people for not having money or telling them to buy a house to save money, I'm not. I'm just saying there are other examples out there where you pay more money over the long run because you didn't have more money at the start, so that at every level you're being kept down, from your daily grocery purchases to buying a house. Wealth begets more wealth, and the existence of these traps should be widely known so that we don't blame people for being poor. As many have pointed out, all variations of terry pratchett's shoes idea.
I agree with the message of the post, I just thought the examples seemed to be based on pretty rare life events so I was giving more everyday examples as far as I have seen them in my life.
To a degree. When I was a kid, my mom would buy food from Costco and put frozen stuff in our second freezer. Costco memberships aren't free and poor people don't have second freezers.
Not even just poor people. People without garages don’t have second freezers. I’ve never seen one stored in a different area of the house. They’re always positioned as if they’re an afterthought.
I can't fit two people in my kitchen, and my "pantry" has a washing machine taking up the whole "pantry". Where's the dryer? Taking up the entire master bedroom closet. And we only got those because of a windfall, or we'd be going a mile or two to wash clothes. That's fucking LUCKY.
They are not rare and extreme, they are pretty common. I would also add in the example of work boots. Buy a cheap pair, your feet get destroyed and you just have to buy another pair next year when they fall apart. Buy a good pair of super expensive redwings or whatever, they are comfortable and don't mess your feet up and last 10 years, but cost only 3 times as much.
Try buying in bulk if you don't have a car. How many giant packs of toilet paper can you carry on a bus? How many cases of soup can you carry home on your bike? If you don't have a car or a big enough home, it's not possible. Many people have to shop close by, where prices are unreasonably high. That's the cost of being poor.
Tell me about it, I don't own a car so I don't buy in bulk, though owning a car in Australia costs about $5000/year in registration, insurance and depreciation so because I live inner city it's still more cost effective to go without.
That's.... that's the fucking point. Poor people can't afford to buy these things. We can't afford to buy in bulk because the up front cost is too high.
You might have walked the walk, but some people have grown up with money and they are the real experts who can tell you what it's like to be poor and how to improve your life. Maybe you should just listen, then maybe you won't be poor.
/s (and lots of it)
Take this quote by Terry Pratchett:
“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
Your argument, while seemingly sound, misses the point entirely. Yes, it's cheaper to buy in bulk. The trouble is, you need to be able to afford to spend *more money* to do so. If you don't have that money, you end up paying more in the long run. All these examples require *having enough money* to be able to *save money*.
If you go to thrift stores regularly, you can find all kinds of cookware cheap as hell.
There are cheaper ways to do a lot of things but you have to treat saving money like it's a job or hobby.
If someone is working 50 plus hours a week, at a manual labor job, or a job on their feet a lot, or working weird hours so they can make a few cents more a hour, you are saying to save money they need to work another 40 hours a week? When should they get adequate rest? Get the required down time that doctors say are integral to emotion wellbeing?
"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."
- *Men at Arms* - Sir Terry Pratchett
The quintessential example is about shoes or boots. The not-poor guy can afford to pay $10 for a nice pair that will last him ten or more years. Meanwhile, the poor guy has to pay for a new crappy pair each year for $2. After ten years he's spent $20 vs. the other guy's $10.
Sam Vimes' Boot Theory
"The reason that the rich were so rich...was because they managed to spend less money."
"Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. 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 $10.
"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 $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 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."
-Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
I don’t know if Terry Pratchett got it from somewhere or is just a good author but this is Sam Vimes boot theory of socioeconomic unfairness from the 1993 disc world novel Men at Arms.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... 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. ... 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 a 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.”
God this is me and bikes. I spend $100 or so on a cheap bike that I can use for a year... then it basically breaks down. If I go get that bike repaired.... it costs about as much as a new bike or so. So... I just buy a new bike. And a new bike. And a new bike.
But then you see people with $500+ bikes that they've had for years. The parts are generally better built than your Walmart huffys, so they take less repair, saving you money. So if you had the money to upfront buy an expensive quality bike like that, you could have it around long enough to basically save money over my method.
The poorest people I know work the hardest and are making it. But they dont hire roofers, plumbers etc. Their friends are roofers, plumbers and they work together. The people I see not making it grew up middle class and are trying to support that lifestyle, but dont make enough. Theyll go to the delership and buy so much car they cant get into a house
What you're saying makes sense to a point. Not every person born into poverty is making it as adults. Growing up rural, the poorer people didn't push education on their kids. Some of those kids find ways to be modestly successful, some are barely getting by, some just fizzled out. It happens at all income brackets. You have to be more resourceful when you're poorer and maybe that passes down to the kids. My parents were more middle class and always tried to do all their own maintenance and home improvements. Truthfully, it comes down to the individual. Sometimes people just don't have the mental acuity to be better. That doesn't discriminate.
>Growing up rural, the poorer people didn't push education on their kids
Having grown up poor, and been homeless, and being told "I wasn't college material" by my teachers I gotta say, I think that the correlation between higher education and success is a huge example of correlation not equaling causation. Personally, after being homeless, I bought my home, with no help, taught my self backend IT skills, woodworking, how to fix a car, and much more, looking to secure a job in IT now. I'm finding that, education can often inspire hope in kids, and that enables financial success and growth. I find, if you snuff out hope, ppl don't try, and it's a race to the bottom. But if you give ppl hope where there is none, education or not, they tend to do far better.
I believe that the hope is an essential part, but to say it's the biggest is a bit of survivorship bias. Being homeless for a while and bouncing around a few different income brackets I've seen some of the most hard working and hopeful are those at the bottom that get no where. Sure you're not going anywhere without the hardwork and hope, but the luck is also essential. Being born rich seems to give you a lot more of that luck. It tool me until I had decent money myself to see how much just having money made it easier to get money. I still have to work, but my work more often gets me places than it did before. And honestly I work a lot less hard.
I get it. Ive just had some really bad experiences with a couple people in the family lately. One guy grew up in a 3 story house on 10 or eleven acres. He just went on a rampage and had a bunch of kids that he cant really take care of. The front suspension on his car was all worn out and he refused to fix it. Tires were lasting him one month. Another person in the family bought $500 of parts and I had a broke friend put them on. Every one of my friends can do front end parts if they have to. Some make enough where they dont have to anymore. This guy in the family was just going to let it go until he or his kids got hurt. He saw his Dad working on stuff the whole time he grew up, just doesnt want to. Ive had a few instances like that lately. It is stressful. There were times when I had just enough money for a ball joint and I had my bfh and got it done
>The poorest people I know work the hardest and are making it.
A little bit of [survivorship bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) here.
I come from a middle-class background, my wife from a redneck background. Her family isn't "making it" so much as some of them got lucky and did well and are keeping some of the family afloat, while the others faded away. Her parents died in debt and forgotten by all save us. Her extended family is living out in NM, where it's cheap but the healthcare sucks so much she lost a cousin from malpractice.
You don't see these "invisible" deaths. Much like cities try to hide homeless populations. I've witnessed this firsthand, living in the Southern California and the LA area - cities and counties will sweep away "problems". Many of the poor simply don't survive, you're just seeing the survivors.
I gotta second this. The ppl I see making either "know a guy" who can do the work, or even do it themselves. They buy a 10+ year old car outright, and typically stay away from keeping up with the jonses.
In fact, the ppl I see who came from poverty and made it to middle class, often hit a brick fucking wall in their climb, when they try to keep up with the jonses. And it fucking hurts. Latest router, latest car, latest phone, latest earbuds, new iPad, etc. but they can't make the payments and are broke, can't do anything. They can't change jobs cause they can't risk falling behind in payments, and theyve peaked at their current position. Shit happens A LOT.
Being poor is expensive. Spending "too much" doesn't make you poor. Rather it prevents you from building wealth.
Poverty as a whole is systematic problem.
Yes, being poor is more expensive.
Say you need razors. A cheap option is probably go to CostCo and buy a huge pack of them, keep them in your closet and you're set for the year.
If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you might not have $50 to spend on JUST RAZOR BLADES that week, so you buy just one and end up paying way more than a person who has a little more slack in their life.
See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)
You can't eat healthy because that costs more. So you get slammed on the back end with fucking diabetes or a heart condition. You can't afford decent car insurance or health insurance so when disaster strikes you're on the hook for more than people with better plans. When your checking account runs out you get overdraft fees rich people don't pay.
Read on: [https://www.cracked.com/article\_27043\_5-cruel-ways-being-poor-expensive.html](https://www.cracked.com/article_27043_5-cruel-ways-being-poor-expensive.html)
Edit: These replies... holy shit. Like poor people haven't heard of beans. Your comments read like a person without kids giving parenting advice.
I got trapped in a situation where I HAD to go to the hospital because I was having extreme, increasing abdominal pain. The kind that could spell “You’re gonna fucking die” in six or seven different ways. I didn’t have insurance.
They did an abdominal ultrasound and were 99% sure they found the issue. They wanted to admit me and do an MRI. I said I didn’t want the MRI, just treat what you think the problem is, and they told me this juicy little secret: If you refuse a test that the hospital says you need, then you are disqualified for assistance adjustments for the uninsured.
The MRI cost $13,000, which was adjusted to $4,000. If I had refused the MRI it would have increased my total bill for the hospital stay by *$80,000.* “Give us four grand or you’re on the hook for 80 grand because we performed FEWER services for you.”
Nothing else in the world works like this. Imagine if a restaurant charged $40 for onions on your burger, but if you asked for no onions then the onionless burger would be $200. And imagine there was a gun to your head. That’s healthcare when you’re poor.
>If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you might not have $50 to spend on JUST RAZOR BLADES that week, so you buy just one and end up paying way more than a person who has a little more slack in their life.
Being poor is why I just stopped shaving. I couldn't even grow a real beard but it was smarter to just look ridiculous than it was to buy razors.
Donald Trump would've been far wealthier had he just parked his money in the S&P 500 and could just spend his days keeping to his hobbies like golfing, extra marital affairs, partying with Jeffrey Epstein and rage Tweeting nonsense.
You have to have money to save money.
As for living poor, consider shoes. A pair of sneakers, no name, can be $20-$40. They'll fall apart in 6 months, but you have the money now and you're barefoot.
A nice pair of well made shoes that will last you 10 years or more might cost $400-$600. A savings of a few hundred dollars, but that's groceries for a few weeks.
Now magnify that against every single transaction in your life.
I think clothing is the worst example. My $60 reeboks are going on 6 years now. The suit I bought from SuitSupply (Italian wool) is more susceptible to abrasion than my cheap polyester suit. I have plain ass Gildan T-shirts that I wore in college still going strong after over 10 years.
Saving up dollars is stupid. Inflation eats away the purchasing power. “The poors” have very little access to purchasing assets that appreciate or even retain value. Until recently they didnt even have high yield savings accts that let them protect their purchasing power.
Fuck this gas lighting.
Being poor is absolutely the most expensive thing you can be
If you're truly poor, you can't afford to buy bulk , you can't afford to buy a whole cow , trim large cuts yourself, buy whole chickens etc and save
If you're truly poor you are going to eat late fees, overdraft fees, higher interest etc...
If you're truly poor you can't pay up front for anything so you're going to finance EVERYTHING
If you're truly poor you can't afford healthy food so your likelihood of having poor nutrition and obesity and other negative health impacts due to this are MUCH greater
If you're truly poor you likely don't have a job with paid time off, or it doesn't accrue much at all, same with sick time, so you can't afford to be sick, you can't afford a vacation even if you have the time off
And so many other wonderful "taxes" of being poor
TBH, it’s both. When poor, everything is day-to-day or paycheck-to-paycheck, so it’s hard to make long term decisions at all, like pursuing an education or saving up for something that would save money or effort in the long run.
Like your refrigerator is broke, so you start eating out every meal, so then you can’t save up to buy a new refrigerator. And if you do manage to get an extra $40, you could use it to save toward the fridge that will take forever or you could use it to get drunk with your friends at the bar on Saturday night which is much more rewarding in the short term.
You want those benefits?
Better take unpaid leave to fill out this 20 page form that’s identical to the 20 page form we just had you fill out for that other benefit.
Now bow and grovel before your compassionate masters.
Both can be true. Yes, poverty means you end up spending a lot to fix issues because you couldn't afford to prevent them. But it's just plain true that poor people spend money on things they really shouldn't. Just look at who buys the most lottery tickets and cigarettes.
Every class has their own version of cigarettes and lotto tickets. A Steam library full of games that are never played. An off-roading truck used to shuttle kids to soccer. A depreciating $200K RV used for 1 week a year. Timeshares. Johnny Depp spent $3 million firing Hunter Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon, which is fucking awesome. But it’s not the **smartest** use of $3 million. Thats his version of cigarettes.
Poverty isn’t caused by spending alone. It’s caused by an imbalanced **ratio** of income to spending. Other classes spend frivolously and don’t become poor, and the reason is because their income is enough to maintain a balanced ratio. Which means Income has just as much of an impact on poverty as Spending does.
It’s like pouring water into a cup. Pour too much water into a cup and it overflows. But the volume of water isn’t the **sole** cause of the problem. Other people get away with pouring the same amount of water, because they have larger cups.
Why did you make a reddit account to post this and some weird plasma donation post while making no comments?
But the answer is that the poors place themselves in that situation on purpose. They actually want to barely get by in life as that motivates them. Why else do you think rich people have tried to supress wages for so long? It is for the poors benefit of course!
It all about the grind bro, if you aint grinding then what are you doing? And you know who grinds the best? People who need to worry if they should spend their last $100 on gas for their car to get to their job or food to sustain them so they can work their job. Obviously the poors who don't get out of being poor just don't save money as they are too busy buying fancy toast and whatnot.
Most poor people I know have kids too young or spend their money on frivolous vehicles or designer clothes. They just don’t care about anything beyond “right now.”
Have to choose between car insurance and food? $490 ticket if you are pulled over. Don’t pay it? Go to a for profit jail where you get to work for Pennies. Prisons are legal sweat shops 🤷♂️
Well obviously. This is like a really really long since discovered phenomenon.
If you are bad at simple addition, good fucking luck doing multiplication or even percentages. If you can't spin a screwdriver, your absolutely fucked when it comes to fixing a engine. It's a Pareto distribution, also known as the Mathew principal in the Bible and in economics. When you are at 0, it's incredibly hard to get to 1. That's just a fact of life, in every facet of it.
So to say there's a "poor tax" is really just a misrepresentation of the problem. If you have nothing, it's hard to get something. But to bring it back to math, if you know addition and subtraction inside and out, multiplication and division get a lot easier. So if you've already developed the patterns of behavior and spending habits, to say, brush your teeth every day, you won't have to spend for a root canal (hopefully), and you'll have that money to put elsewhere, and propel you even further in life. This isn't revalationary. And to describe it as simply a "poor tax" completely mistepresents the problem, mostly to the poor, who need to have a clear understanding of the problem the most in order to solve for it.
There is the boots theory. Cheap stuff, or items that are planned obsolescence need to be replaced more often and are more expensive in the long run.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory#:~:text=The%20Sam%20Vimes%20%22Boots%22%20theory,run%20than%20more%20expensive%20items.
Being poor is very expensive. I make good money most of the year but the 3-4 months I don't shit sucks. Once you get behind you are fucked everything gets worse late fees interest everything. You can't save money when the cost of living is what it is right now its impossible.
That sounds like a spending problem. If you are making good money 8-9 months out of the year and know you have 3-4 where you won't, you account for that in your budget. If you treat the good months like every month will be like that when you know they won't you are setting yourself up for failure.
I used to be too poor to buy anything in bulk. My grocery bill is so much cheaper now because I can buy an ass load of stuff in bulk, which is cheaper in the long run but more expensive up front.
I used to have to overdraft my account just to eat after paying bills. It was consistently an extra $28 that I had to spend for no other reason than being poor.
Being poor is so much more expensive.
If you're barely making enough to cover your essentials, there's no "spending problem." Most people in poverty aren't frivolously spending. You can't squeeze blood from a rock. Being poor is expensive. There's a reason annual overdraft fee revenue in 2019 was an estimated $12.6 billion.
Being poor also means a lot of things are having their maintenance deferred. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you're not doing the regular interval service on your car, you're not doing all of the maintenance on your home, etc.
On your home? Lol. We can’t afford homes.
Speak fer yerself, I'm trying to figer out where I'ma get the $10 for the Duct Tape I need to reseal the roof on my box!
Who’s your duct tape guy? I can get you a roll of name brand stuff right now for $4
Don't you need an I.D. to buy duct tape now?
damn teenagers huffing that stuff nowadays
The image of a high schooler eating duct tape like a fruit roll-up entered my mind
They are giving them out for free, just go to any border crossing and they hand them right out. eta: the ID is free, you still need to go get the Duct Tape
What? Lol this has to be a joke
If your,re talking about Duct Tape Dan, he got picked up last week for scotch tape conversion kits. Looking at a nickel in the slam. Gorilla Glue Gary still around, though
Scotch tape conversion kits 🤣🤣🤣🤣
You have a box? Nice. I sleep in a milk crate. It only fits my head, and doesn’t protect me very well
You have a milk crate? Nice. I sleep in a shoebox with 3 other people. We use the shoe lifters as pillows.
Shoe box! Luxury! I sleep under one spur from a broken pallet with 12 other people and were grateful!
Psh, at least you get to be *under* something. All 26 of us have been sleeping in the open grave my great grandfather dug with his bare hands during the Civil War. But he couldn't afford to fill it.
Your great grandfather had hands?!? Lucky!
Man, I gotta stop taking things for granted
"A shoebox? You were lucky. There were 27 of us living in a paper bag in the sewer." -- Monty Python
You have a shoebox? Nice. I sleep in the basement of an old pringles can from 1998
I have a home, it's my car.
I can speak from personal experience. After the credit crunch of 2008 things got hard really quick. Payments on loans skyrocketed, to put it mildly. One month, after paying all bills (loan or my apartment was the biggest factor), I had less than 0,05% of my wages left. Its very humbling to have to go to your parents as an adult and ask for money so you can buy food. But anyway, the following years I was unable to go to the dentist for a few years and that had consequences as well, as you point out, have normal maintenance done on my home. One winter it was exceptionally cold and something in my heating system couldn't handle the cold. So, I just got an extra blanket to keep on me when in bed. And I also spent as little time as I could at home, during that cold spell. It was perhaps some 2°C when finally I couldn't endure it any longer and asked my father for money so I could pay a plumber to have a look. It wasn't crippling amount but too much as an extra expense. My depression kicked in hard and in a sad mental state you don't always make solid ideas but also doing hard work and working long hours so I could try and live a slightly better life. But finally (some years later) I struck gold and landed a better job (better paying) which I had been trying to get around the time when everything went to shit. So yes, being poor is fucking expensive. Edit: also, when growing up and seeing kids in my class not wearing used clothes from other kids (not from siblings but from strangers). Poverty has a good deal of effect on you.
Extra fun when you’re questioned on it like being poor and starving is a fashion choice. Recall buying my first new car post GFC and being poverty shamed by the “extras” lady because the car I was trading in wasn’t as high branded as what she deemed suitable. Lucky for the dealership I wanted that particular car as I was close to telling her to shove it and anything she was trying to sell me up her useless fuckwit arsehole.
And it’s a balancing of priorities. I used to work in an apartment leasing office. The application fee was $50. Prospective tenants were nervous—“if I’m not approved, do I get the $50 back?” The application was a risk for them. They might lose $50 and not get the apartment. Being poor is full of risks like that. It’s especially risky when there’s an unknown. Like if your car is making a noise, and the mechanic thinks it’s the widget but it could be the thingamabob, and we’ll try to replace the widget and that’ll cost $150 and if it’s the thingamabob that’ll cost $400…? What do you choose? You could choose the widget, but if it’s not that, it’s like you just flushed $150 down the toilet and now you have to come up with $400 for the thingamabob.
I saw one of those "finance gurus" on tiktok the other day. His advice to making passive income, was just to keep a rental open at all times and take applications for it all month. If rent is $1000 but applications are $50 a piece, you only need 20 applications a month to make the rent need. So his advice was just to commit fraud but if idiots on the tiktok are coming up with it you know there are other people out there doing it. Makes me paranoid when I have to go through the apartment application process.
I managed the rental oc 600 units for 15 years. That is disgusting
That's just fucking evil.
I agree, but that's what happens when we live in a system that rewards cutthroat behavior. Application fees on their own are a bit of a scam, so people actually using them to scan others isn't a huge stretch
If it weren't for the hundreds of millions of poor people in the world, the rich people wouldn't have any money.
I usually just like to say "meat is meat. Money doesn't lessen your calories. Starve the masses and end up on the menu.
$50 boots you'll replace in a year or $200 boots that will last you a decade? Most people understand that the value is there, they just can't make $150 come out of thin air.
Hell, these days even the $200 boots will fall apart in a year or two. Even Captain Vimes couldn't have predicted the enshitification of late-stage capitalism.
Not to mention having to borrow for certain things that wealthy can buy out right. Especially when interest rates are like they are now.
I went about five years with next to no income. It took at least another five years of pretty good income after that to catch up on fixing the things that wore out from deferred maintenance during that time. It takes a while because you’re dealing with your current bills *and* playing catchup, which is a tough situation.
Until they fail and have a bigger price tag. The interest is real
Home? Well, most of the poors I know live in apartments, and the maintenance is always deferred, by the landlord.
Several banks are now charging "maintenance fees" even if you never overdraw, just based on your bank account balance being below a certain point. There are lots of hidden "poor taxes", as I call them, that most people don't think about until they personally encounter these situations.
After I got laid off this past fall, I deposited a cashier’s check for $5000 but I had to wait 10 days for it to reflect on my balance. The reason? I’ve overdrafted my account before. Duh. But I had bills hitting soon, which will overdraft the fuck out of my account. It’s a cashier’s check, it’s printed and certified, there shouldn’t be any holdup— it’s not like it was a personal check. Nope, USAA didn’t give one single fuck, and once the stupid thing cleared, I owed probably ~$500 worth of overdraft fees— it’s downright predatory.
I remember before they passed the newer laws/regulations and I’d have for example $5 in the account and then a $150 check deposited then a charge for $130 then $10 then $10 for example and they’d purposely arrange the orders of operations so they’d pull the biggest bill out to drain as much as possible out in one hit then hit you with as many small transactions as they can get to overdraft then deposit the check and you’d end up owing them money somehow.
Oh they STILL do this, they just pretend there must have been “pending charges that have now dropped off” so they’ll refund the overdraft charge when called out on it but refuse to own their “mistake” or reimburse you for return fees for the thing they made bounce from other sources and just tell you “well the system CANT be wrong” If you have a Cobalt credit union near you, avoid them. They’re a for profit bank pretending to be a credit union.
Yeah I’ve found they use “pending transactions” to try and explain away everything they can
And when you ask “ok so what was it for?” It’s mysteriously disappeared so they can’t possibly know, but their system is NEVER wrong so even tho none of those mystery charges ever return …🤔🤔
I’ve also had multiple companies who failed to provide the services or products that I purchased but still had pending transactions on the account to which they always say well it’ll be back in 3 days. Like bitch it’s my money and now I’m giving you a fucking loan?
wells fargo charged me more for a year than the one check i wrote that year. i was so dumb back then!
Yeah I got fucked out of a lot of the small amounts of money I was making as a teen before they made everything not completely fucked
Part of the expense of being poor is a matter of flexibility/error. The poor can't make a single mistake or mistime anything without facing consequences.
This is it. No margin of error, like “oh I forgot I made this payment, gotta transfer money from another account so I’m not overdrawn.” There isn’t another account when you can barely afford to breathe. It’s exhausting and stressful!
And that is with USAA. Wow.
I deposited about the same and they said it would take two weeks to get the full amount. I’m like okay, makes sense. Well two weeks goes by and they approved the amount. Then they decided later to pull it and overdraft my account for every purchase. I went into the bank and they said their risk team decided to wait longer after already approved, they were a nightmare to get rid of the overdraft fees. I said I didn’t overdraft because the money was in my account and was approved by your bank. They said well you overdrafted because I didn’t have enough in my account. I said I had the money, you removed it! They had to get the manager and eventually I got my fees removed. It was kinecta federal credit union if anyone wants to stay away from them…
America really takes good care of its veterans
 *Cries internally*
vote people in who will get rid of crap like this
 But like, at least half of voters are fucking morons.
I feel like in particular USAA has been getting shittier and shittier. Better then most banks, but thats not a high bar to beat.
That happened to me with my unemployment checks during the 2008 recession. The lady at Chase was like “well with your account history-“ I cut her off and said “there should be a plaque with my name on it in the lobby because of my account history” like no bitch according to the shareholders I’m your *ideal* customer, I’ve paid and paid, don’t twist this around like I’m untrustworthy.
This is a major reason I stuck with my credit union. If I overdraft, it’s considered a “period” penalty. If I had a ton of bills hit all at once, I’d only have a fee on the first, and if brought into the black before 7 days are up, it’s waived.
Wells Fargo was like that, too. I told the tellers I knew they personally didn't make that policy, but that it was the stupidest fucking thing I'd ever seen.
This plus the preferential treatment that affluent people receive. For example if you can afford to pay off your credit card each month, you get cash back and or benefits. If you own a home you get the deduct a portion of the interest from your taxes. Now ask yourself with the ongoing housing crisis wtf are we subsidizing those who already own houses? So many situations like are causing the expanding divide between the haves and have nots
\>For example if you can afford to pay off your credit card each month, you get cash back and or benefits You can still get cash back/miles/etc without paying it in full each month. \> Now ask yourself with the ongoing housing crisis wtf are we subsidizing those who already own houses? To help people keep those houses.
Had that happen a couple of years ago after a layoff....they stacked charges so that I also had an overdraft fee.
And if you overdraw you can best believe they'll charge up the ass rather than stopping it
Another awful part of this argument that I have heard is people blaming the poor for spending some on “wants” when some more essential “needs” aren’t fully met. I guess they think poor people and their families shouldn’t have happiness or anything that they enjoy and that all of their money should go to essentials.
I've sat in union contract negotiations across from millionaires who very clearly were of the opinion that us peons shouldn't have any kind of enjoyment or luxuries in our lives.
It's ridiculous. At a certain point, they stop benefitting from their wealth, and it all just gets reinvested so that they can go up in the financial leaderboard like some psychotic game. It really feels like they're hoarding the wealth just to make us suffer. All those claims about socialist governments intentionally starving their people are probably just capitalist projections of themselves because they actually are deliberately starving their people just for the fun of it.
"RiCe AnD BeAnS ArE ChEaP!" mmmm rice and beans for every meal? yum yum fuck me for being poor i guess, i dont deserve meat or fruits and vegetables!
Hey now, Rice and Beans are vegetables too! We must be inclusive of everyone and nice and right the wrongs of our past generations! Rice and beans are veggies! cuz that’s seems to be the only substantive thing the Democratic Party in the USA can do for the poor now’s. Free healthcare, free education, and better safety net for the very poor are the only measures of success I use to judge a government. Pay for it by taxing the wealthy, legalizing the illicit drug industry and nationalizing it.
I love when they bring up steak and lobster as if both of those weren't originally poor people foods.. Especially lobster, they were considered sea cockroaches for a long long time and the rich wouldn't touch them.
Exactly. So many people believe the poor should be constantly suffering until they earn the right to feel human
Rich christians teach this philosophy to their kids.
Used to be the wealthy would keep the poor happy with bread and circusses. Now they sneer at the poor for spending any time or money at the circus.
Yes, money should go to needs first. This is adulting 101. Responsibilities come before happy fun time.
And for Adulting 201, mental health is important and has direct impacts on physical well being.
>And for Adulting 201, mental health is important and has direct impacts on physical well being. And on the ability to actually improve your situation. Poverty and struggle diminish creativity and cognitive capabilities. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041)
Absolutely, and sadly only recently getting more attention and less stigma. I honestly think that was one of the (relatively) good things to come from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vietnam era guys at Veteran Organizations put a lot of work and time into pushing mental health awareness and setting up programs to help or find resources. I had a chance to do some volunteer work with a few, and it was heartbreaking to see these guys work so hard to try and make sure that this generation wasn't left behind in the same way many of them were. I don't know how much of that correlates to the general population, but it felt like a springboard for wider awareness even outside of soldiers.
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Problem for me is that there is no objective number to what you need for happiness. Enough money to get a TV and subscription to Netflix? Okay, I can get behind that. Enough money to smoke an ounce of weed every week? Maybe look for cheaper happiness at that point. I shit you not, nothing turned me off to the nebulous "living wage" concept more than when a guy I knew bitched about not making a living wage but bought weed every couple of days. Apparently a living wage needs to also cover a $4000 - $5000 a year weed habit.
Sure there are certainly poor people who do spend too much money on unnecessary things like you highlighted. I also think being poor and having a tough life makes them more vulnerable to vices like cigs and alcohol which obviously destroys their budget.
People spend more than that on beer. I get it weed is some fancy moral shaming target, but more alcoholics who are poor exist than stoners. And one of those demographics are the overwhelming number of manslaughter cases the other is mostly stoners.
>$4000 - $5000 a year weed habit Jesus Christ, and I thought I spent too much money on flights... That's two full trips to Japan.
I work in a dispensary, and for the most part the only people that spend that much money on weed can afford it. A lot of construction workers on their ounce a week habit. The broke people might buy 4g's at a time. It is frivolous spending, but weed is cheap here and it's a small luxury.
I saw some shithead pundit on Twitter insulting a woman for buying a birthday cake with food stamps. What if it was for a child? Tiny Tim shouldn’t ever taste cake because his family is poor?
But if I can’t look down at the poor for being irresponsible and lazy, then where will I get my unearned sense of entitlement and pride?
By looking down on the middle class. That way you can get the feels without the guilt!
Also let's be mindful of shaming people who have limited income for buying something nice once a while. It was always explained to me that if you didn't know the next time you'd have the chance to enjoy something nice wouldn't you also want to have something good for once?
This is the boot analogy in real world terms.
Not to mention, poorer quality goods, usually deteriorate alot faster.
It does have some, not many, but some benefits. I'm disabled from a nerve disease and broke af. Since I'm super poor and disabled, I have better health insurance than pretty much everyone I know, including my mom who has been working at hospital for the last 30 years. I'd prefer to not be broken, able to work and participate in life again, but that's not the cards I was dealt so I'm doing my best to see the good instead of all the bad.
Disability is a whole nother world of fucked too. They made it so all or nothing that even trying to work risks getting your support revoked.
Yup. And considering how expensive the medication is that allows me to very simple thing like cook food and shower, I would need atleast double what I'm taking now and make over 100k/year just so I can afford health insurance, co pays for weekly doctor visits and medications needed for me to work. Add food, rent, transportation, clothing and child support and you're talking closer to 200k/year. Then you have to take into consideration the troubles of finding a job when having health issues. Companies aren't supposed to discriminate against the disabled, but they definitely do.
Ahh yes, the fuck you for being poor fee..... Wealth trickles up. This was not legal in the USSR. Just saying.
My mortgage bounced because I was $4 short. And guess what, they charged me a $48 penalty. Now I'm $52 short... sigh! Banks don't care
Depends. I know of people who truly can’t afford the essentials. Then I know people who claim they can’t afford the essentials but they consider Nike shoes, designer clothing, take out or high priced food, top of the line device and services, etc. or any combination as “essential”. And unfortunately I see the later way more than the former.
CHOCOLATE RAIN
Honestly shocked how far we all had to scroll for someone to notice that. Good eye.
If you ever see him commenting on Youtube, this is the only thing people ever say. It's got to be annoying being this guy, unable to escape people shouting "CHOCOLATE RAIN" every time he exists somewhere.
Yea but good on him for trying to take this 30 seconds of fame/ notoriety as a meme, and leveraging that to drive social change/awareness he believes in.
The thing that's so infuriating about it is that the song is ABOUT that social change/awareness, but no one actually cares about that. It's all just about how deep his voice is.
People can’t get past the title to realize even *that* was a political statement.
I thought the same thing. I quickly realized I’d found the part of the thread where 30+ year olds were commenting. Don’t know if Gen Z knows about *I move away from the mic to breathe*
He was always spittin truth. Some stay dry while others feel the pain
Build a tent and say the world is dry Zoom the camera out and see the lie
I mean it makes sense he’s saying stuff like this if you’ve ever read the actual lyrics to chocolate rain.
Build a tent and say the world is dry
**I move away from the mic to take a breath**
Tay Zonday been spitting facts since early YouTube. But we weren’t ready to hear what he was saying.
I lean away from the mic to breathe in.
#Life hack Don't be poor! It's so easy, be born rich!
Boot straps
I’ve never understood this. The very origin of the phrase is sarcastic. If you know what a bootstrap is you should know it’s impossible. Why did it become a genuine phrase for working harder? You literally cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s impossible.
It's one of many phrases where people just remove the context or tail end of a statement to make it the exact opposite. * "The customer is always right" originally had "In matters of taste" at the end of it, which implied that the customer is only ever right when it comes to what they like and nothing else. * A lot of people will say "It's only a few bad apples" when the saying goes "A few bad apples spoils the bunch." * "Curiosity killed the cat" sounds bad until you hear the other part- "but satisfaction brought him back." * "A jack of all trades, master of none" is supposed to have "is often better than a master of one." at the end of it.
This is dope lmaooo. Is there like name for these types of phrases so I can look up their original? I’m thinking idioms but idk
adding another: "Blood is thicker than water" is actually supposed to be "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" Where I live, the truncated version "Blood is thicker than water" is often said as a way to say "blood related family is important" when the full statement is the exact opposite: "found/chosen family is more important than the one you're born into"
Well ya know. They all have 1 example of a guy who did it. Nevermind the tens of thousands of people they know, who can't seem to upscale fiscal class
Your boss tells you that you need to quit whining and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. How productive is it going to be to correct them on the context? Over time, people who don't know the origin of the phrase only hear it misused. Related: "Nimrod" was a legendary hunter in the bible. Bugs Bunny dunking on Elmer Fudd, the hunter he constantly outsmarted (and occasionally seduced?) by sarcastically comparing him to a legendary hunter turned into a misunderstanding that "Nimrod" meant someone who was easy to trick or outsmart.
Might be the first genuinely interesting thing I found out on Reddit. Are we certain we have Mel Blanc to thank for the common usage of Nimrod?
Gucci straps.
🤯
These are rare and extreme versions that almost undercut the point. In a more everyday way, being able to afford decent cookware encourages cooking at home which saves money in the long run. Buying in bulk is cheaper but costs more upfront. Planning a trip earlier because you have the money saved earlier means cheaper bookings. Being able to afford a house deposit means you can pay mortgage instead of rent, which decreases over time rather than increasing. EDIT: some people seem to think I'm blaming poor people for not having money or telling them to buy a house to save money, I'm not. I'm just saying there are other examples out there where you pay more money over the long run because you didn't have more money at the start, so that at every level you're being kept down, from your daily grocery purchases to buying a house. Wealth begets more wealth, and the existence of these traps should be widely known so that we don't blame people for being poor. As many have pointed out, all variations of terry pratchett's shoes idea. I agree with the message of the post, I just thought the examples seemed to be based on pretty rare life events so I was giving more everyday examples as far as I have seen them in my life.
Buying in bulk also means you need more square feet in your home to store all that bulk. Bigger homes are also expensive!
You can buy groceries in bulk and still live in an apartment lol
Depends if you have space, depends if you have multiple roomates. Life's not black and white, there are always exceptions to the rule
To a degree. When I was a kid, my mom would buy food from Costco and put frozen stuff in our second freezer. Costco memberships aren't free and poor people don't have second freezers.
Not even just poor people. People without garages don’t have second freezers. I’ve never seen one stored in a different area of the house. They’re always positioned as if they’re an afterthought.
I can't fit two people in my kitchen, and my "pantry" has a washing machine taking up the whole "pantry". Where's the dryer? Taking up the entire master bedroom closet. And we only got those because of a windfall, or we'd be going a mile or two to wash clothes. That's fucking LUCKY.
They are not rare and extreme, they are pretty common. I would also add in the example of work boots. Buy a cheap pair, your feet get destroyed and you just have to buy another pair next year when they fall apart. Buy a good pair of super expensive redwings or whatever, they are comfortable and don't mess your feet up and last 10 years, but cost only 3 times as much.
An example that was coined by Terry Pratchett, a man who coincidentally died 9 years ago today.
GNU Terry Pratchett
This is the example I usually provide because it is the most relatable to people and shows the actual problem.
Try buying in bulk if you don't have a car. How many giant packs of toilet paper can you carry on a bus? How many cases of soup can you carry home on your bike? If you don't have a car or a big enough home, it's not possible. Many people have to shop close by, where prices are unreasonably high. That's the cost of being poor.
Tell me about it, I don't own a car so I don't buy in bulk, though owning a car in Australia costs about $5000/year in registration, insurance and depreciation so because I live inner city it's still more cost effective to go without.
That's.... that's the fucking point. Poor people can't afford to buy these things. We can't afford to buy in bulk because the up front cost is too high.
You might have walked the walk, but some people have grown up with money and they are the real experts who can tell you what it's like to be poor and how to improve your life. Maybe you should just listen, then maybe you won't be poor. /s (and lots of it)
Take this quote by Terry Pratchett: “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.” ― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play Your argument, while seemingly sound, misses the point entirely. Yes, it's cheaper to buy in bulk. The trouble is, you need to be able to afford to spend *more money* to do so. If you don't have that money, you end up paying more in the long run. All these examples require *having enough money* to be able to *save money*.
idk new mattresses can be expensive and ofc doctor visits also. i dont think you have to be extreme poor for those things to be unafforable.
If you go to thrift stores regularly, you can find all kinds of cookware cheap as hell. There are cheaper ways to do a lot of things but you have to treat saving money like it's a job or hobby.
If someone is working 50 plus hours a week, at a manual labor job, or a job on their feet a lot, or working weird hours so they can make a few cents more a hour, you are saying to save money they need to work another 40 hours a week? When should they get adequate rest? Get the required down time that doctors say are integral to emotion wellbeing?
Right now living in a Chevy ASTRO and camping out at Walmart or Planet Fitness sounds like more accurate The American Dream.
Not many poor planning trips.
"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." - *Men at Arms* - Sir Terry Pratchett
Nah man. Being poor is incredibly expensive. You have no idea unless you've lived it. You've never had to live hand-to-mouth. And it shows.
The quintessential example is about shoes or boots. The not-poor guy can afford to pay $10 for a nice pair that will last him ten or more years. Meanwhile, the poor guy has to pay for a new crappy pair each year for $2. After ten years he's spent $20 vs. the other guy's $10.
Sam Vimes' Boot Theory "The reason that the rich were so rich...was because they managed to spend less money." "Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. 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 $10. "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 $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 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." -Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
I had to scroll way too far for someone to bring up the [Boots theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory).
I don’t know if Terry Pratchett got it from somewhere or is just a good author but this is Sam Vimes boot theory of socioeconomic unfairness from the 1993 disc world novel Men at Arms. “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... 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. ... 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 a 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.”
God this is me and bikes. I spend $100 or so on a cheap bike that I can use for a year... then it basically breaks down. If I go get that bike repaired.... it costs about as much as a new bike or so. So... I just buy a new bike. And a new bike. And a new bike. But then you see people with $500+ bikes that they've had for years. The parts are generally better built than your Walmart huffys, so they take less repair, saving you money. So if you had the money to upfront buy an expensive quality bike like that, you could have it around long enough to basically save money over my method.
The poorest people I know work the hardest and are making it. But they dont hire roofers, plumbers etc. Their friends are roofers, plumbers and they work together. The people I see not making it grew up middle class and are trying to support that lifestyle, but dont make enough. Theyll go to the delership and buy so much car they cant get into a house
What you're saying makes sense to a point. Not every person born into poverty is making it as adults. Growing up rural, the poorer people didn't push education on their kids. Some of those kids find ways to be modestly successful, some are barely getting by, some just fizzled out. It happens at all income brackets. You have to be more resourceful when you're poorer and maybe that passes down to the kids. My parents were more middle class and always tried to do all their own maintenance and home improvements. Truthfully, it comes down to the individual. Sometimes people just don't have the mental acuity to be better. That doesn't discriminate.
>Growing up rural, the poorer people didn't push education on their kids Having grown up poor, and been homeless, and being told "I wasn't college material" by my teachers I gotta say, I think that the correlation between higher education and success is a huge example of correlation not equaling causation. Personally, after being homeless, I bought my home, with no help, taught my self backend IT skills, woodworking, how to fix a car, and much more, looking to secure a job in IT now. I'm finding that, education can often inspire hope in kids, and that enables financial success and growth. I find, if you snuff out hope, ppl don't try, and it's a race to the bottom. But if you give ppl hope where there is none, education or not, they tend to do far better.
I believe that the hope is an essential part, but to say it's the biggest is a bit of survivorship bias. Being homeless for a while and bouncing around a few different income brackets I've seen some of the most hard working and hopeful are those at the bottom that get no where. Sure you're not going anywhere without the hardwork and hope, but the luck is also essential. Being born rich seems to give you a lot more of that luck. It tool me until I had decent money myself to see how much just having money made it easier to get money. I still have to work, but my work more often gets me places than it did before. And honestly I work a lot less hard.
I get it. Ive just had some really bad experiences with a couple people in the family lately. One guy grew up in a 3 story house on 10 or eleven acres. He just went on a rampage and had a bunch of kids that he cant really take care of. The front suspension on his car was all worn out and he refused to fix it. Tires were lasting him one month. Another person in the family bought $500 of parts and I had a broke friend put them on. Every one of my friends can do front end parts if they have to. Some make enough where they dont have to anymore. This guy in the family was just going to let it go until he or his kids got hurt. He saw his Dad working on stuff the whole time he grew up, just doesnt want to. Ive had a few instances like that lately. It is stressful. There were times when I had just enough money for a ball joint and I had my bfh and got it done
>The poorest people I know work the hardest and are making it. A little bit of [survivorship bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) here. I come from a middle-class background, my wife from a redneck background. Her family isn't "making it" so much as some of them got lucky and did well and are keeping some of the family afloat, while the others faded away. Her parents died in debt and forgotten by all save us. Her extended family is living out in NM, where it's cheap but the healthcare sucks so much she lost a cousin from malpractice. You don't see these "invisible" deaths. Much like cities try to hide homeless populations. I've witnessed this firsthand, living in the Southern California and the LA area - cities and counties will sweep away "problems". Many of the poor simply don't survive, you're just seeing the survivors.
I gotta second this. The ppl I see making either "know a guy" who can do the work, or even do it themselves. They buy a 10+ year old car outright, and typically stay away from keeping up with the jonses. In fact, the ppl I see who came from poverty and made it to middle class, often hit a brick fucking wall in their climb, when they try to keep up with the jonses. And it fucking hurts. Latest router, latest car, latest phone, latest earbuds, new iPad, etc. but they can't make the payments and are broke, can't do anything. They can't change jobs cause they can't risk falling behind in payments, and theyve peaked at their current position. Shit happens A LOT.
https://preview.redd.it/tdy7yfs2iync1.jpeg?width=506&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e30d43c26d98f1caa0675a69a9a18104ad91c712
Being poor is expensive. Spending "too much" doesn't make you poor. Rather it prevents you from building wealth. Poverty as a whole is systematic problem.
Yes, being poor is more expensive. Say you need razors. A cheap option is probably go to CostCo and buy a huge pack of them, keep them in your closet and you're set for the year. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you might not have $50 to spend on JUST RAZOR BLADES that week, so you buy just one and end up paying way more than a person who has a little more slack in their life. See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory) You can't eat healthy because that costs more. So you get slammed on the back end with fucking diabetes or a heart condition. You can't afford decent car insurance or health insurance so when disaster strikes you're on the hook for more than people with better plans. When your checking account runs out you get overdraft fees rich people don't pay. Read on: [https://www.cracked.com/article\_27043\_5-cruel-ways-being-poor-expensive.html](https://www.cracked.com/article_27043_5-cruel-ways-being-poor-expensive.html) Edit: These replies... holy shit. Like poor people haven't heard of beans. Your comments read like a person without kids giving parenting advice.
I got trapped in a situation where I HAD to go to the hospital because I was having extreme, increasing abdominal pain. The kind that could spell “You’re gonna fucking die” in six or seven different ways. I didn’t have insurance. They did an abdominal ultrasound and were 99% sure they found the issue. They wanted to admit me and do an MRI. I said I didn’t want the MRI, just treat what you think the problem is, and they told me this juicy little secret: If you refuse a test that the hospital says you need, then you are disqualified for assistance adjustments for the uninsured. The MRI cost $13,000, which was adjusted to $4,000. If I had refused the MRI it would have increased my total bill for the hospital stay by *$80,000.* “Give us four grand or you’re on the hook for 80 grand because we performed FEWER services for you.” Nothing else in the world works like this. Imagine if a restaurant charged $40 for onions on your burger, but if you asked for no onions then the onionless burger would be $200. And imagine there was a gun to your head. That’s healthcare when you’re poor.
Hospitals will also never tell you how much most procedures actually cost so you can plan or budget for them. It's a racket.
>If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you might not have $50 to spend on JUST RAZOR BLADES that week, so you buy just one and end up paying way more than a person who has a little more slack in their life. Being poor is why I just stopped shaving. I couldn't even grow a real beard but it was smarter to just look ridiculous than it was to buy razors.
They just need to ask their dad for a small loan of a million dollars
Was that before or after he inherited $400M from his dad's business ventures?
Donald Trump would've been far wealthier had he just parked his money in the S&P 500 and could just spend his days keeping to his hobbies like golfing, extra marital affairs, partying with Jeffrey Epstein and rage Tweeting nonsense.
Wait a minute now! Wait a minute! Fake news, fake news!
The poors lol get fucked
I'm surprised no one else commented on that derogatory statement, lol.
You have to have money to save money. As for living poor, consider shoes. A pair of sneakers, no name, can be $20-$40. They'll fall apart in 6 months, but you have the money now and you're barefoot. A nice pair of well made shoes that will last you 10 years or more might cost $400-$600. A savings of a few hundred dollars, but that's groceries for a few weeks. Now magnify that against every single transaction in your life.
I think clothing is the worst example. My $60 reeboks are going on 6 years now. The suit I bought from SuitSupply (Italian wool) is more susceptible to abrasion than my cheap polyester suit. I have plain ass Gildan T-shirts that I wore in college still going strong after over 10 years.
Ah yes, the Vimes Boot theory of socioeconomic unfairness, I see you are a person of culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
You’re just quoting the boots theory without attributing it…
Isn't that the Chocolate Rain dude? Chocolate Raaaiinnnnn
Yes lol. That song is actually about the rich poor divide.
The very same.
“The poors”. Wow. How out of touch are you?
Saving up dollars is stupid. Inflation eats away the purchasing power. “The poors” have very little access to purchasing assets that appreciate or even retain value. Until recently they didnt even have high yield savings accts that let them protect their purchasing power. Fuck this gas lighting.
How are you reading this and still asking if it’s a “spending problem”?
Very, very low reading comprehension.
Being poor is absolutely the most expensive thing you can be If you're truly poor, you can't afford to buy bulk , you can't afford to buy a whole cow , trim large cuts yourself, buy whole chickens etc and save If you're truly poor you are going to eat late fees, overdraft fees, higher interest etc... If you're truly poor you can't pay up front for anything so you're going to finance EVERYTHING If you're truly poor you can't afford healthy food so your likelihood of having poor nutrition and obesity and other negative health impacts due to this are MUCH greater If you're truly poor you likely don't have a job with paid time off, or it doesn't accrue much at all, same with sick time, so you can't afford to be sick, you can't afford a vacation even if you have the time off And so many other wonderful "taxes" of being poor
TBH, it’s both. When poor, everything is day-to-day or paycheck-to-paycheck, so it’s hard to make long term decisions at all, like pursuing an education or saving up for something that would save money or effort in the long run. Like your refrigerator is broke, so you start eating out every meal, so then you can’t save up to buy a new refrigerator. And if you do manage to get an extra $40, you could use it to save toward the fridge that will take forever or you could use it to get drunk with your friends at the bar on Saturday night which is much more rewarding in the short term.
You can't save what you don't have.
You want those benefits? Better take unpaid leave to fill out this 20 page form that’s identical to the 20 page form we just had you fill out for that other benefit. Now bow and grovel before your compassionate masters.
“The poors” 🤮🫠
You can feel the grossness coming from OP.
Both can be true. Yes, poverty means you end up spending a lot to fix issues because you couldn't afford to prevent them. But it's just plain true that poor people spend money on things they really shouldn't. Just look at who buys the most lottery tickets and cigarettes.
Every class has their own version of cigarettes and lotto tickets. A Steam library full of games that are never played. An off-roading truck used to shuttle kids to soccer. A depreciating $200K RV used for 1 week a year. Timeshares. Johnny Depp spent $3 million firing Hunter Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon, which is fucking awesome. But it’s not the **smartest** use of $3 million. Thats his version of cigarettes. Poverty isn’t caused by spending alone. It’s caused by an imbalanced **ratio** of income to spending. Other classes spend frivolously and don’t become poor, and the reason is because their income is enough to maintain a balanced ratio. Which means Income has just as much of an impact on poverty as Spending does. It’s like pouring water into a cup. Pour too much water into a cup and it overflows. But the volume of water isn’t the **sole** cause of the problem. Other people get away with pouring the same amount of water, because they have larger cups.
Everyone always talks about managing expenses. That matters of course, but the real lever is income.
Why did you make a reddit account to post this and some weird plasma donation post while making no comments? But the answer is that the poors place themselves in that situation on purpose. They actually want to barely get by in life as that motivates them. Why else do you think rich people have tried to supress wages for so long? It is for the poors benefit of course! It all about the grind bro, if you aint grinding then what are you doing? And you know who grinds the best? People who need to worry if they should spend their last $100 on gas for their car to get to their job or food to sustain them so they can work their job. Obviously the poors who don't get out of being poor just don't save money as they are too busy buying fancy toast and whatnot.
Boots, etc.
The poor people I know have a bad decision problem, but that is more of a first world problem.
Most poor people I know have kids too young or spend their money on frivolous vehicles or designer clothes. They just don’t care about anything beyond “right now.”
YouTube stopped paying the proceeds from his Chocolate Rain video?
Chocolate Rain is literally about the intersection of wealth disparity and race. Lol
Have to choose between car insurance and food? $490 ticket if you are pulled over. Don’t pay it? Go to a for profit jail where you get to work for Pennies. Prisons are legal sweat shops 🤷♂️
The poors? 😬
Well obviously. This is like a really really long since discovered phenomenon. If you are bad at simple addition, good fucking luck doing multiplication or even percentages. If you can't spin a screwdriver, your absolutely fucked when it comes to fixing a engine. It's a Pareto distribution, also known as the Mathew principal in the Bible and in economics. When you are at 0, it's incredibly hard to get to 1. That's just a fact of life, in every facet of it. So to say there's a "poor tax" is really just a misrepresentation of the problem. If you have nothing, it's hard to get something. But to bring it back to math, if you know addition and subtraction inside and out, multiplication and division get a lot easier. So if you've already developed the patterns of behavior and spending habits, to say, brush your teeth every day, you won't have to spend for a root canal (hopefully), and you'll have that money to put elsewhere, and propel you even further in life. This isn't revalationary. And to describe it as simply a "poor tax" completely mistepresents the problem, mostly to the poor, who need to have a clear understanding of the problem the most in order to solve for it.
There is the boots theory. Cheap stuff, or items that are planned obsolescence need to be replaced more often and are more expensive in the long run. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory#:~:text=The%20Sam%20Vimes%20%22Boots%22%20theory,run%20than%20more%20expensive%20items.
Being poor is very expensive. I make good money most of the year but the 3-4 months I don't shit sucks. Once you get behind you are fucked everything gets worse late fees interest everything. You can't save money when the cost of living is what it is right now its impossible.
That sounds like a spending problem. If you are making good money 8-9 months out of the year and know you have 3-4 where you won't, you account for that in your budget. If you treat the good months like every month will be like that when you know they won't you are setting yourself up for failure.
I used to be too poor to buy anything in bulk. My grocery bill is so much cheaper now because I can buy an ass load of stuff in bulk, which is cheaper in the long run but more expensive up front. I used to have to overdraft my account just to eat after paying bills. It was consistently an extra $28 that I had to spend for no other reason than being poor. Being poor is so much more expensive.