Ask me what it's like to be poor!

What are you studying in college?

Do you have a brother and a sister? Or just a brother?

The odd thing about being a kid and being poor, is that you don’t realise what it really means, its just ‘normal’.

Its only looking back that it occurs to you that you were ‘poor’, and even now it doesn’t fit the image that you see or hear about. You don’t necassarily feel down, depressed or deprived, you just get on with it. You’d maybe live on tinned beans and potatoes and bread at home and get a proper meal at school.

I don’t think that our family, or anyone around in the same condition thought of themselves as lower class, or wanting charity - that was for ‘really poor’ people. Really ‘poor’ people had get shoes given to them from charities second hand, we qualified for shoes from social services so they were new - although they would be handed on down. When most folk around you are the same this is just how you live.

I would not have even considered sharing beds as children as being poor, well not at the time, we eventually had the luxury of a proper bath instead of a tin tub, plenty in my town did not have toilets inside the house, and did not have plumbing in the house, except for the kitchen sink. Back then, if you wanted a proper bath, you paid to go to the local baths for a couple of pence.

Our house electric supply was 5amps, which would run your lighting only , eventually we moved into a house with an indoor bathroom and toilet, along with two firegrates and an electric outlet in every room - and yet we didn’t think we had moved up and we missed the neighbours and the neighborhood. We also gained a garden and really had no idea what to do with it.

I suppose its easy to make a list of things we didn’t have, like carpets, cups (we used jamjars) - rugs made from scraps of old material sewn into clumps, central heating was uncommon, we knew which house you had to run to if there was an emergency - to use the telephone, no problems playing in the street as no one had a car, no garden - in the old house - and washing hung up on raised lines across the street.

Despite all this, we at least had our own front door - our only door in fact as we lived in a back to back house - there’s still plenty around my hometown still.

The OP does sound poor compared to us, not not that much, the main problem is just the lack of their own place.

I don’t want to give the impression that the government failed us, or anything like that. We benefited greatly from welfare programs. A lot of fault lies with my mother, who made some awful decisions and was generally too trusting of people. She wasn’t a bad person. Just misguided, and an awful judge of character.

My mother left immediately after my father died. She was young at the time (only 20), and had no idea that she was entitled to SS benefits. It was only after she was preparing to drop out of nursing school that she was made aware of the program. But she had remarried, so she didn’t receive any money, and what she was given to take care of my brother and I wasn’t anywhere near $1000/month. Almost all the money she received went directly to my stepfather, who likely spent it on alcohol - like I mentioned earlier, he was an alcoholic, and not just a regular alcoholic, but a full-blown drunk who spent every cent he had on booze and would later need a liver transplant. Not even needing a transplant was enough to discourage him. He later drank himself to death.

She didn’t want us to be anywhere near her when she was doing drugs or getting clean. So later, after she left our stepfather, she gave the benefits to a married couple she knew and believed to be responsible people, and for the better part of two years, they took care of us and we only saw my mother on holidays and birthdays and the occasional weekend. Almost none of that money went to us. They spent it on whatever. I don’t know. They weren’t abusive, but they didn’t care much about us and so only provided us with the absolute essentials, like food, shelter and water.

I’m a double major. I’ll have a degree in Linguistics and History. Not practical at all, I know.

My sister was born when I was ten years old. Most of what I’ve related here occurred before she was born.

This is exactly right. When I was a child, I didn’t think in terms of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. I had been poor my entire life so there was really no other context in which I could examine my situation; it wasn’t like I had once been middle-class and had fallen into poverty, something I believe would have made me acutely aware of how little money we had, but rather, it was just the way we lived.

You make an excellent point, that gives me a missing piece of the puzzle. We were always lower middle class (I don’t think we qualified for “poor”), but both my parents were raised on farms (my mom on a Mennonite farm), and they knew exactly what to do to make the most out of what we had. Sewing, gardening, canning, baking, carpentry, mechanic work - they did everything themselves.

Does it ever bother you when you run into someone who believes that everything in life is earned through hard work, and that circumstances of your situation have nothing to do with future success?

Or someone who begrudges you the welfare payments you received as a young person,payments that no doubt actually kept you alive and enabled you to go to college and become a productive member of society?

If welfare was used in the way it was truly intended, then it would actually be an investment, because the claimant should be raised to a position where they can work, learn skills and pay taxes.

Round my former estate, which was a step up from the back to back terrace, it is now actually a worse place to live than the original surroundings, its all welfare, high crime, low thought processes and welfare dependency.Drugs don’t help much either, but there is little to aspire to as nowadays if you don’t stay on to higher education your life chances are very much worse.

The rents in the association homes are too high, which are paid by welfare, and it completely removes any financial benefit of working - as the income from low wages jobs is just enough to disqualify you from rent subsidy - you end up with the total costs of life and work as being worse off than on welfare.
Yes of course there is the self respect thing and building up a better prospect for the future, but you must realise that the future does not exist at this level. There is only now until the next payday, thats all there is.

The poor are not pretty, or charismatic, its not romantic, they are often boorish, rude, offensive and ill educated and ignorant - but when you are one, you do not feel that way at all, you don’t even notice it, if you get kicked you hardly feel it, because its normal.

You don’t feel sorry about it, its not like loads of self pity and plenty of folk are generally worse off, poor just is.

Great thread. I was also poor growing up, and I’ve remained poor my whole life. Mostly by choice. I have never had much ambition. I don’t really mind not having much money. Guess I’m just used to it. It is strange though, because many people who grew up as poor as me found themselves doubly motivated to escape poverty whereas it seems that I’ve just learned to embrace it, or at least live with it.

Oh, sure. But it happens so often now that I’m starting to find it funny.

A few questions (starting to get old hat, as I’m pretty much asking everyone it):

  1. What’s (in your opinion) the secret to life and/or happiness (feel free to answer each separately)?
  2. Are you religious/spiritual/atheist in any way, and how does that mesh with your experiences?

Peace out and have a nice day :slight_smile: