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> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.

As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.

I don’t make it a habit to curse out loud at my phone as I read things, but this did it for me.

It’s like a bunch of apes took over our society and worked as hard as possible to make everything as cruel as possible for no particular reason.

you can convince people to give up anything as long as it's in service of punishing "the bad ones"

Hah!

Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.

The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.

Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.

Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.

We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.

HN folks ought to watch Good Fortune ft. Keanu Reeves [0]. Still out in theaters.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ

Not even on my radar. Thanks looks like a good time

Thanks for the reco

It looks like a good movie and in looking forward to its arrival on streaming but I'm curious the relevance of it to parent comment.

Curiosity denied; it would spoil the plot!

Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.

I was chatting with a buddy about this. Older, libertarian fellow. He was in this situation, several times. And he was able to pull himself out of it.

That was all the "proof" he needed to be against helping the poor, because if he could do it, anyone could do it.

I was talking to a conservative chap the other day during the SNAP crisis and he was foaming at the mouth that SNAP needed to be abolished. I asked him what to do about the people with disabilities who couldn't work. He told me he knew personally of two people born without arms or legs who have factory jobs earning $45/hour and have no need of SNAP and therefore anyone disabled who was claiming SNAP was a scammer. And if they really are that disabled, he went on, then their family should be taking care of them and not the state.

p.s. this person has also never paid taxes in his entire life because "government is a scam"

Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.

I find myself doing that. I'm not sure if it's just a silly habit I have because I don't like to run out of anything even if it is not important or if I picked it up from my dad who lived through the "great" depression as a child.

Conversely, I had an acquaintance that grew poor, and would finish 95% of the cookies in a bag, but always leave the almost empty bag to the next person to find out, even if it had to stay that way for months.

Strangely, she did that only with comfort foods.

Yea this is exactly what I’m describing

The 'blank in the firing squad' technique of snacking is a pretty typical girl thing.

Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable.

But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).

Gotta maintain that figure if you ever wanna escape poverty. Reba McEntire wrote a whole song about it.

(joking, but not nearly as much as I wish I was)

I do it to avoid being blamed, I don't know what you're on about. I've never cared that much about the semantics of how many cookies I ate (then again, I'm on hacker news so I might not be the best representation of the female populace)

I tend to do the cookie baking, so it'd be a little silly for me to be mad over someone eating them.

And for what it's worth, no one deserves blame for their cookie habits.

Additional anecdata, and also a woman:

I do this for any or all of the following reasons:

* (culture) it is polite to leave something for the next person

* (I have roommates) I don't want to be the last person who finished something. I would be obliged to replace it.

For the typical girl thing, I haven't seen this behavior in real life with my family members or friends. I have heard of the concept on social media.

I do this, but it's not really about if it's "gross" to eat a whole bag or not. I don't feel like doing that anyway. It's mostly that if you share food, I think it's considerate to leave one if there's more than one left. Someone else might be having a really bad day, but a small consolation could be that they didn't get home to discover there aren't any cookies left.

My wife grew up very poor and does the same stuff. And then she’ll get mad at me if I finish the stale cookie from 6 months ago.

A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.

Money psychology is interesting in that people often end up being traumatized by their parents into behaving identically when the circumstances no longer warrant it, OR have a knee-jerk reaction living their life completely the opposite way because growing up that way drove them insane.

A similar thing happens with children of parents who came out of war zones or famines. Sometimes the children are explicitly taught that violence or starvation can come at any moment. Often they learn to feel under threat implicitly by picking up their parents’ affect, without any message or lesson being clearly stated.

I wonder how much of this is "I'm saving it for a rainy day" vs "I was conditioned that eating the last one of a treat leads to conflict".

Yes.

I remember watching something on BBC about minimalism years ago when I was doing my PhD and earning £13k a year and thinking that I just couldn’t do it because it relies on you having the money to repurchase something you need that you threw away

Absolutely. Our disposable society is a privilege for those who can afford it and an absolute curse for those who can't.

Exactly. And there's a complicating related situation that, if you have housing instability, there can also be pressure not to own anything more than you need, in terms of difficulty and cost having to move it or lose it on short notice.

Keeping stuff around and refusing to fix things are not necessarily correlated to being poor.

Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).

They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income. It all comes from mental issues.

I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.

> they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly

Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.

If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.

And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.

What an oblivious statement.

Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.

Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.

All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.

Thanks for the correction.

Yes they are poor because they make bad decisions. If you are unable to avoid repeatedly making bad purchasing decision, you are poor not just because of unfortunate circumstance but because you are unable to not be poor because of personal limitation (sometimes I may be stupidity, sometimes addictions or other bad behaviors).

My father manages employees that constantly have garnishment on their salaries because of some unpaid debt. Yet they make decent wage and could afford an OK life if they didn't blow most of it on stupid stuff.

So what I mean is that you cannot put all the blame on the "system" and the marketers selling appetising food or whatnot. Those people keep making those choices themselves and outside out of taking their liberty there is not much you can do about it. I actually think the current system affords them a better life than they could otherwise.

It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality

My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.

I spent years getting over the idea of saving some half broken thing because “I might need a part from that later”

Specially because occasionally the usefulness of such saved junk appeared to prove the thought right, the rest of the unused pile of junk notwithstanding.

And the more skilled and richer and better tooled up you get over time the more potentially useful everything is so the more you feel like you have to save it.

As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.

When I was younger, I've spent an entire summer working here and there, with the explicit goal to buy an 8MB stick of ram, so I can play Quake. Got the biggest ballacking from my dad about "wasting" all that moneis. Since then, storage and memory, the only things I'm actively trying to save.

I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.

Definitely agree on the mentality it creates and how long it lasts. I’m fairly well off now, but grew up very poor. First developing world poor where running water and toilets were shared with the whole building, the whole family crammed into a single room. Then western world poor, where my parents and some friends that lived together (to save money) would walk to get groceries, buy one bus ticket to have one person carry the groceries on the bus most of the way back, and the rest of the group walk to the bus station and help to carry the groceries the rest of the way home.

Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.

Something I find interesting is that my mother grew up in similar conditions - poor in Borneo in the 50s, my aunt was literally born in the jungle while hiding from the Japanese

And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.

There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.

Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.

I think also perhaps the reasons for being poor. My family was poor but so was everyone else. It was structural. So as a result (my hypothesis), there wasn’t even the hope of being rich, just not so poor. So for instance the mentality was always to save, not invest, because no one has the money to invest could afford to lose whatever meager savings there was.

As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.

Same here.

Its interesting that the same mentalities that get us out of poverty are not the same ones that make people rich.

You could naively assume that competence around money would be universal.

> its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.

From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?

Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.

I think its more about having enough that you don’t spend all your cycles worrying about money; and more importantly that there’s a way to get on some kind of positive reinforcement treadmill whereby effort is rewarded financially.

That makes sense, but I was trying to figure out something else: if there's someone in this situation I want to help, what (at minimum) could I expect to have to do to get them out of that situation?

I think a better way of thinking about it is to be a lifeline instead of monetary amount.

Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.

If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.

Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.

Thank you!

What does "be a lifeline" mean? If it means "rescue them every time they have a financial emergency", is that an infinite commitment?

absent sufficient income, basically yes.

Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?

Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.

We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).

There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.

but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.

> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else

I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.

Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture

> I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile

When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need, instead of hoarding five metric tonnes of crap that you'll never use.

If you haven't used something in the past 5 years, you can almost certainly toss it.

It's a lifestyle that snowballs. You can't "just start throwing things away" because your life has grown up around the assumptions of having your brand of junk around.

> you can just buy the thing you need

Ah but if only it were so simple. In my woodworking shop, in pretty much every project I end up using odd scraps for either temporary scaffolding or jigs or what have you that would be difficult to buy. You would have to go out of your way to buy a large board, and cut it up intentionally. Even then you would not have as rich a set of scraps. Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.

> Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7Fw7bZoPyVU

> When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need

What I need is time. Whereas buying things is stupidly time consuming, running completely counter to what is needed.

I don't have it all. Sometimes I have no choice but to go buy parts when a breakdown occurs, but that's never a welcome experience. You're looking at a good hour or more to source even if it is available locally, and often you have to travel far and wide to find someone who has it in stock. Worse, sometimes the only stock available is on the other side of the world in who knows where, leaving you down for days while you wait for it to show up...

Once someone invents a magical teleporter that can spit out what you need in a split second on demand, then money to spend when you need it becomes more powerful than already having what you need, but we're a long way from seeing that become reality.

If people lived like this the vectrex would have fewer units left alive and no one is making new vector displays anymore.

I for one welcome out capitalist induced pack rat disorders for the elderly as it guarantees that vintage and retro survives.

> a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt

Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.

I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha

If it's any consolation that's how finances work for most governments.

No consolation needed - if I come across as woe is me it's not the intention. It is what it is and all that. I've got food, I've got shelter. It'll do.

You're born, you keep your head down, and you die - if you're lucky.

> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care

If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.

In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.

it’s not terribly uncommon even in the UK to be generationally unemployable.

Homelife being bad = bad grades

bad grades = no support for further education

no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs

no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).

The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.

I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.

It's amazing how much upward mobility software development has provided to countless people that didn't finish high school or university.

Story of my life.

I work and earn money, my balance has never been above zero. Worded it clumsily maybe.

I don't know if it would be useful to you, but perhaps try reading some of the blog posts on earlyretirementextreme.com. Lots of good ideas there on how to save money, be frugal, etc.

Or read a book like "Your money or your life"

> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care.

You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?

Low salary for the role in my local area and not moving to a city when I still had the ability to take credit out

It sounds to me like you don't need income from labor. I'm not going to cry for you.

He’s indicated in a sibling thread that he’s not looking for sympathy.

He’s trying to help you empathise that in reality these kinds of holes are really difficult to escape from; moreso than you think on first glance. It’s also very easy to fall into them even if you think you’re immune. Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.

In light of that, your response is just horrible.

Most people spend insane amounts of money on things they don't need to impress the people they don't like.

Two hypothesis:

1) The nature of interest in unsecured loans is high interest (almost by definition) and increasingly so if you are seen as a credit risk. Thus small debts compound over time making them unbearable for longer.

2) Our friend is merely Keeping up with the Jones’ despite never going above a zero balance.

One of these is uncharitable and ridiculous- the other is a known issue that keeps people in poverty.

I’ll let you figure out which.

I guess I wasn't being clear: I wasn't talking about the person from this thread!

You said:

> Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.

My reaction was to this. I agreed with you, and added the cause: utter financial recklessness. People spending money on things they don't need instead of saving say a quarter of their salary.

For some time I was earning a couple times the average salary in my region of the world. Yet I found that spending about the average salary was more than enough to live a very comfortable life. I feel this is not the norm for whatever reason: most people inflate spending to match their income, and then they're 2 bad decisions (or even some bad luck) from poverty.

> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.

I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.

I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.

I recently got yelled at by a schizophrenic homeless man with serious anger issues that was hungry. And he’s better off than a large percentage of the world. Poor is relational.