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Comment by merth | Hacker News Reader

I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.

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In the terminology of the article - which I enjoyed and recommend that you read when you get time - these friends of yours are not 'poor', they are 'broke'.

article says broke for temporary, these people poor 10-20 years. that doesnt sounds like temporary. they get government or familiy support, and rarely work short term here and there.

That still doesn't make them poor.

I see this all the time in developed countries. The “poor” in a place like America are different from the poor elsewhere. Often times, the poor in America are just people making bad decisions, living beyond their means. You see it in the places they choose to live in, the cars they own, the number of children they have, etc.

Ah all you had to do was mention avocados and we had boomer bingo.

This argument is baseless.

All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).

"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.

Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.

You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.

As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.

Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.

> Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help.

It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.

On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.

Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder.

Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.

I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.

Just curious. What is your experience with poverty in your own life?

I grew up in an ultra rural part of Pennsylvania. I honestly thought my life was pretty good, and I had great parents and a great school with teachers who cared. My parents were(/are) great, but I later found out my school was ranked D- in the state. I think my parents didn't have huge earnings potential, but were really good at saving. So, my thoughts come directly from my life. A grade school friend of mine came home one day and told his parents that his little sister lost her retainer at school, and his parents were wailing and moaning for literally days over the $150 replacement. Meanwhile, my little brother did the same exact thing a few months earlier and my parents were able to deal with the issue, even though my mom and dad worked the exact same jobs as my friends parents.

My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.

> You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.

I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.

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