Being Poor (2005)
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We were nowhere near as poor as some people, and it was only for a few years, and it was self-inflicted to some extent because I was starting a startup while my wife was getting reeducated. So I don't know what it's like to be really poor. Those stories on HN from people who, 20 years past lifting themselves out of poverty, still hold on to every old sock, that's not me.
But at the same time, having been somewhat poor: damn it rocks to be rich! We became rich overnight a few years ago when my wife got a job, and every time I buy a sandwich without worrying about the cost, I get excited mentally. There's always this "Omg can we afford th- oh haha we're rich! Of course we can, woohoo!" process going on in my mind and it's super awesome. I feel so decadent, so lavish! I'm buying a sandwich!
To me, that's the definition of "rich". Buying a sandwich that someone else made, anytime I want.
If you're rich enough to be able to buy whatever at the supermarket, or get your favorite sandwich for lunch without worrying about the cost, cherish that. I don't really believe anything from here to private jets is going to make me much happier in practice, but I never want to be below that bar again.
Thanks for sharing!
There were two thresholds that I remember distinctly: the first one was crossing from "poor" to "ok", when I could go shop for groceries and buy most things (though still looking at the price tags, to avoid the expensive stuff). That was a big step up from buying the bare necessities.
The second threshold, "rich", was when I realized I don't have to worry about the prices in my local grocery store. I can just buy whatever I want.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn't "rich" by any means, but it is enough to provide immense comfort and ease of living. I think many people who have this comfort are unable to appreciate what they have.
Not to mention that, from all I've seen and heard, European poor is also quite better off than US poor.
US poor means poor && deemed as a personal and moral failure && left socially unsupported && looked down upon in a class-aware way that's even worse than UK's traditional classism && getting into much more dangerous situations with much more crazies around, some of which will even be armed.
And as US poor, you also remain the one segment of society people can freely joke around and look down upon. They might pretend to support blacks, gays etc. in the asbstract, but could not care less if those are also dirt poor. As for the white poor, they don't even have the redeeming token minority status qualities so are open season for everybody - you could call them "white trash" with impunity.
I am annoyed waiting behind food stamp people at the grocery store making decisions between juice boxes and crackers at the checkout. Meanwhile I am too frugal to buy either of those.
My wife is treated like crap by Medicaid patients significantly more often than other patients.
There's a stigma that will exist regardless of the welfare state.
My girlfriend doesn't like homeless people and I don't get it, bcause they have harder life than we do. Irregardless whether they "deserve it" or not.
Welfare supports are very patchy, mostly run at the state level. As a general rule of thumb, long-term cash benefits are almost impossible to access, and "in-kind" benefits like subsidized housing like subsidized housing tend to have long waiting lists.
"Food stamps" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...) are one of the larger broadly-available benefits.
About mid-way through high school the family business went bankrupt and all assumptions about how I would go to college evaporated. So instead I ended up going to an electronics trade school on a student loan.
I did not have to pay tuition until after graduation, but I did have to pay all my living expenses myself. Had a minimum wage part time job from which to make rent, bills and food. Could barely afford to eat.
Got turned onto a store called WareMart that sold mega size boxes of really cheap products. A fellow poor schoolmate showed how to buy a huge brick of fake Velveeta cheese, giant tub of margarine and a potato-sack-size bag of elbow macaroni to make super cheap mac-n-cheese. The secret was to boil the macaroni for a long time so it would absorb a lot of water and get huge, then add a scoop of margarine and slab of cheese. You could eat for weeks on one purchase.
It was disgusting. But I lived, and finished school.
Upon graduation I had three offers at weekly salaries for more money than I had ever held in my hands. When I cashed my first paycheck I went to the grocery story and filled the basket with steaks and grilled one every night. Man, what a feeling. Despite making tons more in later years I have never felt so rich as when I spent that first paycheck.
To anyone who is still getting through it: avoid margarine and cheap process cheese. Trans fats and bargain-basement seed oils will jam you up.
My lunch + dinner of choice when I was stupid poor was mujaddara: it's lentils, rice, onion, oil, salt, and spices if you like that kind of thing.
Complete protein, adequate macro balance, and it's all real food. I'd call it "cheap as chips" but it's cheaper than that. You're better off spending a bit extra on olive oil and butter over the cheapest possible seed oils, if you can.
I was born in a Latin America country, middle class family, 375 USD monthly income for a house of 6 people.
Although I never went a full day without eating at least two meals, it wasn't rare to go sleep hungry.
My mom still managed to buy a PC for us, and that alone changed everything: I discovered programming in my early teens through a MMO game and learned web development, and since then I never stopped.
I'm now on my mid-twenties, but because I started so early with programming, I kinda hacked my career growth: to this day I already have 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as I was still a teen on my first internships. Started a CS bachelor but dropped as it was waste of time for me.
Today I work as the principal software engineer for a US startup remotely, and make 40x of my country's minimum wage.
Living through this gave me an empathy that I believe it's really hard to develop if you were born rich (definition of rich here: >upper middle class). There are so much things people take for granted, and they aren't available for people in lower classes at all. Geography is the biggest inequality in the world by a large margin.
I go to bed hungry every night, not because I can't afford food, but because that's how I control my weight.
This board is always a bit parochial, but there's no excuse for it when people are clear about where they are.
Yes, it is my choice. I also noticed that my food bill went down substantially when I started this.
The idea of growing up in a city/metro area where you could know someone local working for such companies sounded like sci-fi.
How would you fare if she lost that job though?
It's your business, so a rhetorical question really, but a "few years" at a high income rarely produces any lasting fortune.
2. If somehow it didn't, we'd go back to being poorish. Or I'd get a regular job or be a contractor. Either way, we'd live.
(In college my discretionary budget was $5 a week, so going to the movies meant going without something else.)
I also set up a home theater in the basement. The HD projector was somewhere around $3xx from Amazon. The big screen was $50 from Amazon, and about $50 of lumber to make a frame for it. The sound system was $40 from the thrift store.
It's as good as seeing a movie in the theater!
Too rich to get free money for college, too poor for my parents to have saved me anything. I was paycheck to paycheck for 3 years undergrad, and 3 years of wife's grad school.
Paycheck to paycheck doesn't even accurately define it. I didn't buy any luxuries like fast food or alcohol. Homemade everything.
Nowdays, even with a comfortable income, I still use a bike, and get very often free food at the end of markets, I try to pay whenever possible, or give back
“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.
The quality difference between a $10 product and a $100 product of the same type is enormous. But then when you go up to $200 the quality increases much less. There is a name for this that I can’t recall right this second, the point being that there is a sweet spot price/quality wise for most things.
Housing is also getting pretty bad. Essentially, the lower your income, the more you are expected to pay back to the bank since you can only put aside so much money for the mortgage each month.
A well-off person will pay his house as much as 2-3x faster than a 'poor' person, essentially allowing him to invest for the future at a much earlier stage in life.
Mortgage interest is also tax-deductible, while personal loan interest is not. This makes the mortgage the last debt to pay off, not the first.
This does not affect 80%+ people, who are better off with standard deductions since 2017 tax cuts and jobs act.
In 2018, 87% did not itemize.
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
In any case, this doesn't change that wealthy people are likely not in a hurry to pay off their cheapest debt.
No, 80% percent are better off with the standard deduction than itemizing given the Trump tax changes (which include increases, like limiting the SALT deduction, as well as cuts.)
One might almost imagine that there is a reason that no one at all has said “lower income people are paying more” in this discussion.
But have fun beating that strawman.
This ignores the indisputable fact that if personal loan interest were deductible, fewer would be better off with the standard deduction.
I mean, if you eliminate all specific deductions, everyone will be better off with the standard deduction no matter how small it is. That doesn’t mean no one is impacted by the elimination of specific deductions, in fact, it means the opposite.
Of course in reality these schemes are traps to get poor people to overspend, but the issue is not that they are physically unable to buy long lasting items, but that the system is constantly trying to trick them in to failing.
I do agree that it is a better scenario than having to always buy the lesser quality item, but you still are paying the 'poverty tax'
There it is. Barely hidden by more advanced financing.
When they are available, it is never really for things like shoes or the specialty-sized bra you really need that they do not sell at Wal-mart or a non-specialty store (I spent over $100 for my last one, and had to order in the US or wear something that didn't fit).
Instead, they'll lease you furniture, refrigerators, and stoves with the promise that you'll own it some day (and honestly, for washer/dryers, this might be the intelligent choice as it is cheaper than the pay laundry if you have a family). They'll give you a car loan for a bad car, too.
Buy now pay later schemes aren't even worth it if you are financially insecure: I'd have never done this with my ex, for example, even if I knew that on paper, we might have the money. My ex, you see, is my ex for a reason, and part of that reason was money simply going missing, sometimes meaning that I couldn't buy more food or be afraid of running out of gas. Poverty - on paper - is like this.
They are absolutely a trap but if you were financially smart, you could use them to your advantage to overcome the initial investment vs lifetime cost problem.
The issue is not so much that these people have no options, but that they do not have the knowledge to pull them out of the endless traps that get marketed to them.
The problem is that when you are strapped for cash your freedom of action is limited and it is hard to be financially smart due to the stress.
You not only get your boots discounted and/or bundled with some other offer, there's a fair chance you don't have to pay for them at all.
I've been on both sides, and the differences are a real eye-opener.
But cars are optional if you live somewhere with working mass transportation.
I buy cheap hotdogs for meat, and cheap cars that I drive into the ground to get my money's worth out of them, but I can't afford to pay rent. I've been almost homeless for the last year.
But, I just bought a house a few days ago. I bought it super cheap, and it needs a lot of work that I'm doing myself.
I still can't afford to pay rent, not because I couldn't, but because it's a waste of money.
I didn't think twice about buying this house because it was a fantastic deal.
5 years from now I will have spent less than someone that is still one payment away from being evicted if they miss a rent payment.
I want to quote Morgan Housel here
"Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself"
Of course you should be happy and grateful.
Being born in any circustance is not something anybody can decide. It's even worse when people feel bad about having born in or having good circustamces.
This is a message that the American media tries to get us to internalize through selective storytelling:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-true-story-behind-the-...
That being said, we do a disservice to our youth if we overemphasize the role of luck in being in poverty or not. There are strong correlations between poverty and lifestyle choices people typically do have control over.
- Starting your career before having children. In many cases, this implies finishing a certain amount of school and/or training.
- Marrying a responsible person and staying married
- Avoiding substance abuse
- Planning your pregnancies [1]
- Avoiding a criminal record [2]
And then there are risk mitigation strategies to avoid catastrophe:
- Establishing an emergency fund
- Living within your means
- Getting insurance and keeping up with payments
- Avoiding high risk investments and career moves [3]
I guess I feel that people who have figured out the basics are hesitant to preach what they practice. All of the above seems like a given to people who are comfortably middle class. But if you didn't have wise parents and nobody says anything out of an overemphasis on empathy, you could make any of those mistakes easily and then get treated like a fool.
[1] Tragically, some people are raped and become pregnant against their will, which is why we shouldn't judge folks, but the mass majority of pregnancies do not happen for this reason. Considering the abortion rate for married women, it seems that accidental pregnancy is actually very common.
[2] Again, don't judge. People are falsely convicted of crimes. People have criminal family members. People make dumb choices and learn their lessons. But being violent over beefs or going for joy rides in stolen cars is just setting yourself up to struggle financially.
[3] If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
2.) Rich people marry more often. There is strong cultural expectation that you marry oafter you are self sufficient and stable. However, being married does not make you rich.
3.) If you are establishing emergency fund, then you are less poor. Also, poor don't do career choices, they have jobs or don't have jobs.
I was talking about what we should be teaching the young. Being born into a family that knows how to avoid unforced mistakes is absolutely important. Especially if society is to busy emoting about poverty to teach young people the "secrets" of avoiding it.
I pointed out that the emergency fund is a risk management strategy. It's for people eke their way into some money. Telling poor people to just have savings is useless, but that wasn't what I was saying.
Like in particular teenage pregnancies are going down while social mobility also goes down. Non pregnant teenagers are still unlikely go from poor to non poor.
Avoiding powerty is something you do when you start in higher class and prevents falling. But most poor were born that way was my point.
Lastly, if my daughter got pregnant, she would be able to get enough financial support from me to finish high school and college. It would sux, but she would not become poor because of that.
Especially the bad shoes. Oh my, the bad shoes, leaking and tearing themselves apart all the time. Walking around in portable puddles whenever it rained or the snow started melting. I hated that so much, but good shoes were too expensive.
Also note that there was no instagram/facebook/yt so you could not even compare yourself with people you don't know as kids can do now.
In a way I am greatful for my experience. Gives a lot of perspective and sympathy for people who struggle with money.
He said the locals treated them well & there wasn't really a reason to feel bad about being poor, it was just the situation everyone was at and didn't even really imagine it being any different.
The truth about communism.
I’ve never been poor, but we were lower middle class early on and middle middle class by the time I reached high school. My parents always scrimped and saved. The cars my family owned were all one step before the junkyard. I never got Christmas presents except for 3 years that I can remember. It was disappointing but not soul crushing. We never felt poor but we never ate out ever and never went on vacation ever. Getting Kentucky Fried Chicken was a luxury.
When I graduated from college, I was unemployed for the first few months and needed to stay with friends. After I got my first job, I was the lowest paid person I knew. I also scrimped and saved like my parents, but I never felt poor. I would track all my spending to the penny, until I had saved enough such that I could forget about the change in my pocket.
I’m now a low-single digit millionaire which isn’t that much in Silicon Valley but good enough for me. At one point a few years ago my wife and I were earning over $1M/year. My wife is now C-suite and I’m essentially retired. We have two multi-week trips a year and my kids have never sat in economy. I haven’t had to think about what the price of things were in 15 years now. I just buy whatever I want, which is frankly not much besides computer equipment for myself. Most money I spend is on the kids. I drive a 10 year old Toyota but my wife drives a Porsche.
There’s the old saying that sticks with me. “My father rode a camel, I rode a Mercedes Benz, my son will ride a Lamborghini, my grandson will ride a camel.” My kids are hard workers at school and we try to keep them grounded but their privilege really shows through in ways that I never expected. They really don’t know the value of money or how much things cost. We don’t really spoil them with toys and such but if there’s something educational like a set of books or lego, I will get it for them without thinking. I need to figure out a way to get them to understand the value of money but it’s very hard. Granted they are still young but it’s an important topic that I need to know they understand because I don’t want my grandchildren to suffer because I spoiled my kids now.
The one upside to that flight is that the plane is going land fairly promptly, you can’t circle for too long after a 19 hour haul.
Make them get a job for their discretionary spending. Talk about your journey and your parents’ journey. Discuss society wide statistics and what percentile you’re in. Show them how much their lifestyle costs, and how much they need to earn to afford it, and how few people actually earn that much.
Showing them the data and how to interpret it to understand their odds so that they properly calibrate their expectations and goals is one of my goals for my kids.
Now how to do that without building a deep well of lasting hate and resentful towards their father...I'm not the man to help with that part. Good luck.
Then again maybe we are all just horrifically poor here apart from a select few. Western indices certainly seem to think so.
In some areas, everyone is horrifically poor. In the US, however, it has been painfully obvious in every single place that I've lived that not everyone is horrifically poor and has a panic attack over half of a dollar spent on some food of better quality.
If I could have lived where I lived, but without needing a car, I wouldn’t have been poor. A car isn’t a luxury in a place designed for cars, but a burden. You’re constantly told driving is a “privilege”, but you can’t go to work without it and maybe not the grocery either. You’re worried that it will break down because not only will you not get to work (and maybe get fired) and don’t know how you will repair or replace it, but because you know you can’t even pay the tow truck company to drag it off the road. Tires cost money so you drive on bald tires until you literally can’t, white-knuckling it on ice-covered roads. Gas prices swing widely so you’re always watching and planning can be tough. You have to choose between insurance you can’t really afford and breaking the law. Since you use cheap gas without additives you fail the smog test and have to take your car to a shop (which you worry may rip you off) where they will guess at the problem, but if it doesn’t work you have to repeat the process once more before, for a fee, you can be exempted. Cars were a massive source of anxiety for me when I was poor.
Instead of worrying about shelter and food, I had to worry about a car, shelter, and food; and basically in that order.
I had friends get two of the same car, so they could cannibalize the second for parts for the first.
I ran across an anecdote where it was found that people would rather make $80K/year in a neighbourhood where everyone else made $70K, rather than make $90K where everyone else made $100K.
Especially when we're talking about small numbers percent-wise, the intuition that it's better to be earning slightly more than your neighbors, rather than slightly less, is accurate. It translates to more discretionary income, more savings, more optionality.
I, while living alone in a house in partial construction (missing a wall) in the Southern California mountains would get a ride from a friend or a neighbor to high school (20 minute drive into town). If I had some (about a dozen a bag, one bag a month), a single russet potato tossed in the toaster oven would be breakfast (no seasoning, grab and go). I was on free lunch at school, but I’d pocket an extra hamburger to sell at a reduced price in the lunch yard. That extra dollar would get me a can of soup that I heated on a wood burning stove for dinner.
For me, having to steal food to be able to buy different food that can store better is a being poor. I’ve got a thousand other stories growing up. But now I’m on track for an early and comfortable retirement; no complaints.
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...
• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...
• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...
Isn't buying vegetables, cheap meat cuts, flour and other basic staples much cheaper and healthier?
To put things in context: I'm European and been homeless, the core of my artistic research and career is precisely about food for the homeless.
Every person that cooks often that I've talked to grossly underestimates how much time their cooking takes them.
The ones that are more efficient either have a ton of cooking experience and talent or just a great kitchen setup, which is a rare luxury and generally a large investment.
Turns out, people started ordering food for home a lot more, even though they now had the time as well as the incentive to save money due to the uncertainty.
Add to it that you don't even make your 10000 steps a day like you normally would just by existing, if you want to keep little health you have to make more time for exercising too.
So I guess there must be something else going on here. I guess the situation must somehow be less simple and obvious than you assume. Reality, it appears, just doesn't match your simplistic view of how the world should work.
Here's an article from yesterday's NYT that has a historical background section about halfway down:
When No Landlord Will Rent to You, Where Do You Go? https://nyti.ms/33ZiTKV
You can cook in microwaves and rice cookers, no?
Poverty simply means you live without things. I lived for some years cooking on burner plates because I couldn't afford propane/natural gas (different houses). I also didn't have hot water. If my electricity got turned off? No warm food.
There are a number of rentals that do not come with appliances. "You can use what is there, but if it breaks, I'm not replacing it" happens a lot too. Maybe you can rent one, maybe not. You can probably carry a rice cooker home if you don't have transportation, but not a microwave (easily, anyway)
There are plenty of low cost apartment buildings with shared toilets and no bathtub/shower. That's when a gym membership might be necessary at the very least. Except in covid times when you weren't allowed to use the gym's shower facilities.
No room for a fridge, cooker, or anything else.
It also takes a long time to learn to cook effectively, and you need a decent kitchen, utensils, storage, spices, scales etc. which all cost money.
There's also the mindshare element, if you need to do a thousand things to survive, adding cooking from scratch to the list is really hard.
You don't need utensils, scales, nor anything decent, just a container that can be put on the fire. I survived cooking in army surplus over a tin can stove.
Food is basic survival so I don't know what to say about the mindshare element, especially when cooking from scratch saves you money and keeps you healthy.
Anyway, for me, maybe 50/50 I'd forget the soup on the stove and it would char a bit.
If you forget stuff on the fire then yeah go get a burger
In my neighborhood, a wealthy liberal enclave called Marin County, preparing something paletable from raw ingredients is usually more expensive than cheap salty starchy food.
There are no cheap cuts of meat at my Safeway.
Most people are horrid cooks. They might think they can cook, but usually it's just awful. (Learning how to cook is not my point though.)
Poor people have huge problems, and cooking a nutritious meal is down on the priority scale.
Plus---for many poor people, the little bit of enjoyment is eating something that tastes good. I can see why the poor gravitate towards the lousy quick food.
(My all means I am poor. I don't eat crappy food though. I was a cook in my teens though. I'm glad I learned how to cook, but understand those that didn't.)
Sorry how can raw ingredients be expensive? I'm talking about staples flour, onions, carrots, beans, rice, etc.
Is there a database with US staples prices somewhere?
Literally just the price tags in the store. I once baked some pumpkin spice muffins for a friend in NYC who wasn’t in the habit of cooking (so I had to buy everything). Total cost: $45. I think it would have come to about $10 in London (where I live).
Admittedly, he’d have had some flour and butter to spare after that. But you have to somewhat know what you are doing to take advantage of the remaining ingredients.
Cooked well, that will lead you to a bland meal. Cooked badly it will be pretty awful. If you're used to high in salt/sugar it will taste awful regardless.
Craft Mac and cheese is $1/portion and ready in less than 10 minutes with one dish.
Any one else here have parents put random stuff in your Mac to "balance the meal"?
Mac with tuna. Mac with peas. Mac with what EVER was handy.
Oh it brings back memories.
In season vegetables are dirt cheap. If not frozen, prepared, mixed veggies are a couple dollars for 5-6 servings (no need to wash or cut!). Chicken is easy to find at <$3/lb, same with hamburger. Rice and beans are dollars per pound.
The real answer is, like most things that humans do that aren’t good for them (eat too much and end up obese, not exercise, not eat healthy, smoke, drink too much, not take medication or go to the doctor or dentist), is cheap, starchy food is just easier and lower effort.
Those things are cheap in the US now?
I know people who don't take their $4/month heart medication prescription and end up hospitalized.
I know people that when faced with the choice of walking around the block for exercise would rather watch Netflix despite their uncontrolled type 2 diabetes and doctor telling them exercise will keep their blood sugar under control.
In my examples this was a person who had a pre-existing dentist who already accepted their insurance - it was literally just the effort to go they couldn’t muster.
The $4 heart medicine was not insurance related. It was already in their medicine cabinet, they just couldn’t muster the energy to set a reminder to take it (or even take it if their spouse reminded them).
And the last one is purely the trade off between Netflix and a walk.
When I was a kid, steak was a rare luxury.
These days, you can buy a nice steak in the supermarket for $3 (I buy when they have a 2 for 1 sale). Heck, a bag of chips costs about that. You don't have to be much of a cook to cook it, either. Just put it in the frying pan.
A dozen eggs is $1.99.
The expensive stuff is the cookies, candy bars, doritos, etc.
Even high fat ground beef is still $4 a pound.
Beef is dirt cheap compared to candy bars, frozen pizza and chips.
Processed food is _so_ cheap.
[0] https://www.walmart.com/grocery/ip/Great-Value-Rising-Crust-...
That's right. But you can get a microwave for $9.99 at the thrift store. I see bread machines for a similar price. If you can follow directions like "gather the ingredients, dump them in the bread machine, push a button" you can make incredibly tasty fresh bread for next to nothing.
Just yesterday I went to the thrift store, and donated a bunch of stuff I don't use anymore, and bought a bunch that I did have a use for. It's a cheap way to live without compromise.
A pound and a half of pizza, not even close?
The nutrition in the steak is better, but I don't see any other basis of comparison where it could be cheap. The right candy bar (high in peanuts) will have lots more calories and something like 50% of the protein, for half the total price of the steak.
The other reply already pointed out how cheap wheat calories can be.
And a dozen eggs for $1.99.
The store also sells bulk peanuts for far far less than peanut candy bars cost. Like $2.99 per pound. You pour it in a bag, weigh the bag, put the label on it, and voila! And it's good for you, too, unlike the sugar-ladened candy. No prep required.
So? They're still cheaper than chips and a lot better for you.
This is completely false. You should stop propagating things you don't know about.
Check out Efficiency Is Everything, you can eat for $1.50/day on raw ingredients.
On $1.50/day I eat only rice and salad.
Nobody is a perfectly rational economical agent, like most comments in this subthread seem to suggest. Stuff sucks, work was hard today, you're tired, and you haven't even started thinking about dinner yet. Fuck. Let's just do hamburgers today. Can't afford them but let's worry about that tomorrow.
I say this as a person that lived homeless and that comes from a line of people that had to make do with scraps.
I guess it could also be cultural, who knows.
I'm not poor, which is thankful because it means I can live off food bars instead of having to prepare meals daily, which would annoy me a lot.
That line is long. It only takes one generation feeding their children a diet of pre-made meals and snacks to break it.
Prepped food on the other hand is half the price in the US than it is in the UK. These two factors combined make it a no brainer to go for the prepped stuff over the raw ingredients when you are trying to save money.
But of course, the economic stimulus for corporations is for you to become addicted to salt, sugar, and fat. From ads to aisle positioning, junk foods are first. Big Food is the modern day Big Tobacco.
I've worked with poor people in different countries, and even with the homeless. A lot of them eat mostly junk food, smoke, drink sodas, chew gum, watch junk TV, some gamble, many don't brush often, most don't exercise, and many get trapped in unpaid loans. And it's worse for their kids. Churches of all denominations used to steer them out of that path. This is a massive society whole now, and note I'm not a religious person.
But between on one hand enabling liberals telling them it's not their fault and it's out of their control, and on the other hand media bombarding them with advertisements of such products, it's becoming impossible to contain. Add that to the YOLO culture of social media.
This is not going to end well if we don't make drastic measures right now.
Cooking requires both time and resources. Most healthy ingredients have a limited shelf life and are bulkier (low calorie density) so you need to do your shopping more often. You then need to store them so they don't spoil too quickly (which is harder if you have a small kitchen and no pantry). Then you need to prepare meals in advance and cook them, both of which requires not only dedicated time but also time available on a somewhat predictable schedule, not to mention making meal plans in the first place to organize your shopping, which not only takes time but also mental energy.
Compare this to simply stocking up on cheap meals and throwing one in the microwave for a few minutes at dinner time.
Immigrants also occasionally to have support networks that born-american poor do not. Additionally, while some immigrants appear to be barely scraping by, sometimes its an improvement of circumstances compared to the okd country. That resilience is borne out of environments no American should be subjected to, IMO.
The problem isn't just poverty, it's generational poverty. Immigration is expensive and time consuming, whether you take the legal route or not. If you managed to immigrate to another country, that's already a huge achievement regardless of how much money you'll make there.
Also even cheap/easy unhealthy food can mean different things depending on your circumstances. There are plenty of tales of startup founders living on ramen before their company turned a profit or landed the investment but their situations are very different from those of the working generationally poor.
The ramen is always a temporary thing, a cost-cutting measure on your way to becoming a millionaire (or at least falling back onto your family's safety net of free rent and food if you fail). The Saturday McDonald's on the other hand is the highlight of the week because there's literally nothing to look forward to and you're already on the last dimes of your payday loan.
Looking at how the lifes of my school classmates went I believe there's a positive correlation, but its influence is minor comparing to things like career choices and having connections or not.
My father grew up on relative poverty (post war Spain), and the value of things is something it's always present with him and how he educated me unconsciously. Fixing broken things, scavenging parts, the value of food, time and work. Seeking comfort and security, instead of luxury. Or put it differently, the luxury is having a car that works and is nice (and second hand), not a luxury car per se. Luxury is having bread every day with your food. Luxury is being able to fix your own toilet or watering your plants.
I am forever grateful for these, and kind of sorry I cannot fully comprehend what and how he did it. I earn well over the average wage, and still I buy my computers second hand.
If you can somehow buy that efficiently (hard these days), you're set for a prosperous and safe life, with almost no drawbacks.
It was embarrassing. Dehumanizing in a lot of ways. We bought old books that many times didn’t even have the material we needed for our courses and our grades suffered. We both did poorly.
Both our families were poor and would offer help if we asked but we rarely did since they didn’t really have much either.
After we graduated we both went to grad school. It was a little bit better because we both had graduate assistant jobs. So we each had two jobs and things were a little less lean. Until the car broke down. That set us back.
After grad school my wife got a job as a university instructor. I got a job working in marketing. Things were better for a little while. Until my wife got sick. Turns out she has an autoimmune disease that is rare and difficult to manage. We didn’t know that for a while.
Nightly trips to the emergency room. Doctor visits. Specialists. MRIs. CAT scans. Blood tests. More specialists. Oncologists. “You might have brain cancer.”
That was a decade ago.
It was so hard. Every single day we were just trying to make it to the next day in one piece. We moved to a new house that didn’t smell like urine because we could afford it. Until she just couldn’t work anymore.
Our rent was $700 a month. We were trying to build savings. Our $2500 a month student loans and stacks of medical bills made it hard. We ate cheap food but we ate. Our phones only got cut off sometimes. I got a job offer in Europe. We were going to take it. Until her dad got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
We stayed. He died. She had a short term mental break down. The engine in our car blew up. $4000. The flooding started. We went to sleep every night hearing rats in our walls. Our dog died. Our cat died. We couldn’t do anything about it. We wanted to give up. Every second of every day was a struggle. Until I got a new job.
My base salary is $165,000 usd. I get 20% performance bonuses. I have amazing health insurance for both of us. I have a vibrant and rapidly growing retirement account. We moved from the south east to the north east.
My wife has good doctors now. A whole fucking medical team. She’s doing good. More good days than bad days. And the bad days aren’t as bad. And the seizures have stopped. And she doesn’t wake up screaming. We toasted fucking marshmallows on our porch last night and we go on hikes and visit antique stores and see nice things we like and sometimes we even get greedy and buy something just because we can.
We’re rich now. We buy food we like. We have savings. We have investments. We bought a new car and paid it off. The old car had to be towed away when we moved and the scrap yard guy gave us $200 for it.
Every single time we see a couch on the side of the road. Every single time we see a help wanted ad. And every single time we spend a dime. We both get anxious. Maybe not. Maybe next time. Maybe I need to call them. Maybe what if but what do we do if how why when we shouldn’t.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. And it’s not something I’d wish on anyone. And we weren’t even that poor. We never were homeless. We came close some times.
Being poor is awful. And its effects last a long time event after you think you made it out. Our credit is shit. We’re fixing it but it’s a slow process. We can barely get qualified for any type of loan. Home ownership is out of the question for a few more years. And I’m glad the car is paid off. That’s one less monthly bill.
Being poor from the start sucks, but it at least teaches you things how to navigate in life with what you have.
they know their bank balances down to the cent.
"Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave."
The most traditional dish in my hometown is literally called "cooked water".
If anything, boomers had the rise from poverty, and it's gen-x who got it good. And this is only true in western countries anyway.
It's not "bad" but you definitely can feel it being the cheapest thing that you could do to fill you up.