Living in poverty is likely to develop a mindset, in order to survive, that won't scale pulling you back out of poverty. That is, where you never start making smart financial decisions or plan ahead because, you know, the life is a mess enough because of various factors due to having little or no money or peers telling you to act otherwise.
There have been a number of discussions and even anecdotal comments on HN to probe into this. For example, feeling lucky at Google gave me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461773