So I should specify straight up this was in my mid-late teens and early twenties, my parents marriage and lives sort of went crazy and I being the idiot teenager took full advantage. So it was my own fault for my shitty situation, but I really wanted to talk about the nitty gritty day to day life questions.
Just to start out with most people have a warped perception of what public assistance involves or is like, or they live in a very generous state. I lived in Texas, and yes it does seem comparatively harsh.
First of all when you go to file you will notice that this is not in any way a overnight endeavor, most other families there are multi-generational efforts in that they have put so much effort into getting “welfare” you could almost consider it a job. They want documentation of EVERYTHING, and you often get into catch-22 situations. For instance I was asked for the past X years of federal income tax filings to prove my income, I had never worked so could not produce these. They told me to go file with the IRS anyway, IRS said if you did not work do not file as filings years of $0 income filings(one when I was not legally allowed to work!) will just trigger a fraud investigation and audits, so don’t do it.:rolleyes:
Thats one example of the kind of morass of documents and catch-22s you will spend years navigating, at some point you realize I could go get a job in the time I am wasting here.
The case workers are often harsh and seem to attempt to chase people away whether intentionally or not.
Another area of misconception is hospitals, going to the hospital with not a penny and the flu and claiming to be an illegal immigrant does not in fact get you seen by a team of doctors. They turn away anything but life threatening injuries, and that is flexible based on what they think they can get away with.
There is a lot of subtle ugliness like that when you are poor, what can we get away with with this guy? How likely is it he would bother calling the cops, how likely is it he would know the law etc.
Time is the one thing you have tons of, hell I now in the modern age of being the father of a toddler find myself yearning for that time. Now I often find I can’t even follow the plot of a film, forget reading novels like I did!
Most people are not assholes, although I never really panhandled so I can’t speak to that aspect.
Libraries were helpful, I never bothered with church organizations because the few times I had chance to encounter them there was the religious thing which bothered me(I felt that if I voiced my true opinions it would not go over well) and the stuff they offered was pretty basic.
It was pretty much all my own fault, but looking back I realize I didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary as far as stupidity levels for my age. The problem was that I had no parents there to catch me when I fell. My parents also had no social network to speak of to look to for help, although my sister helped me a lot even though she was going through a rough patch as well.
Oh and there are an awful lot of poor people who don’t really fit into a traditional diagnosis of mental illness but are basically unemployable. Nowadays most would probably say they had Asperger’s syndrome or were on the autistic spectrum.
Some friends who were getting social security disablity for mental illness like depression(debatable but I do believe she was unemployable) convinced me to go apply, so I went to the SS office and they asked for my health records and diagnosis and I told them I had none and had no money for mental health services. They set up an appointment with TexStar? a state mental health agency, so I went to the appointment and spoke to the psychiatrist honestly. At the end he told me the only way he reccomends for SS benefits would be for me to do a stint of inpatient evaluation in a state hospital and he could guarantee nothing and couldn’t tell me how long it would be.(he gave me the vibe he was calling my bluff). And it worked because as bad as I had it being in a Texas state mental hospital was worse.
Also it was difficult for me to prove state residence as they wanted utility bills, and aside from ID I had nothing to prove an address.
I basically woke up and started working, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and expecting my parents to help me(really just excuses) it also helped that a lot of my social circle started dieing or going to prison which was hard.
When you are poor there is no such thing as false charges, if you get arrested and charged no matter how ridiculous the charges you will ALWAYS plead out, ALWAYS! They could charge you with being cyborg-Hitler and it doesn’t matter whether you have a private or public defender they will get the prosecutor to plead it down to disorderly conduct with probation and tell you that going to trial is crazy, if you press the issue they will make you fire them by their actions.
The cops treat you different if they know you are poor or homeless, its always best to dress well enough and not reveal any info that makes you a target.
The cops know you have no ability to defend yourself.
Oh and in Texas you must prove indigence to get a public defender, with documents. And sometimes they decide to send you a large bill afterward anyway if they decide your documents are not in order. If you don’t have a lawyer at your arraignment the judge will tell you to get one first and then postpone the arraignment.:smack:
So lets say you go the private attorney route, so you scour the phone book or ask some friends who they liked. The prices charged alone direct the poor to the guy that charges $500 USD up front for the whole case, and he swears he will take this case all the way to the supreme court! Wow!
What really happens is no matter how bad the case he just gets you to plead out with the prosecutor, they all do. They claim the world but if you actually want a lawyer who will take it to a jury you’re looking at minimum around 10 grand up front lump sum.
I often :smack:when I see people casually say get a good lawyer, as if they are on the shelf at Wal-mart.
Probably middle class to upper middle class, my father was a regional service manager for a well known supplier of office machines. He was not well liked and then there was a scandal and he was thrown under the bus and told resign or be fired, its complicated but no charges were filed and the company never even took it to the police. After this things went downhill.
(Field techs were fraudulently collecting money from customers and pocketing it, when this was discovered they claimed my father was the mastermind.)
I used to be really poor, too! I remember seeing a fast food place offering 59 cent burgers and thinking “Man, I wish I had 59 cents!”
What did you do for food? I wasn’t on any kind of assistance, so I ate a lot of day-old bread from a local bakery and would splurge on store-brand macaroni and cheese every once in a while. I think I figured out at one point I was living on around 30 cents a day for food.
These ask me threads are getting silly. “Ask me why there is a horn growing out of my head” maybe. A whole lot of people have been poor, nothing special there.
Agreed. I had nothing after graduating from high school. Even working I could not afford to live. I kept working, did better, and lived quite well thereafter. I don’t consider a person with the means and ability to make a living to be poor.
Yet I at least constantly see people grossly misrepresent how things work, such as those who are convinced hospitals pamper to every whim and need of the indigent and illegal immigrants. That is fantasy, pure and simple but it rarely is challenged.
You say that you woke up and started working. What were your perceptions before that moment? Did you think that being poor was fate? Something that happened to you beyond your control? It sounds like you got a job fairly easily/quickly - what do you think would have happened if you had not been able to find employment?
IOW - do you think it is easy, or difficult, for most people to escape poverty?
What was the series of jobs you took to get yourself out there?
Are you college educated? If you are, did you go back after pulling yourself out of poverty, or were did you goto college when you were with your parents.
But not all of us have been. I’ve never been what I would consider poor, so I find this interesting. Even though most of us have been through High School, I still find that thread interesting because it is a totally different perspective of High School than I had or what my kids are going through.