Explain the "poor" mentality to me

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not really sure where this should go but I’ll start in GQ assuming there’s a factual answer for this.

Why is it that people that are perpetually broke have a broke-person mentality. I’m not talking about people with little money but the sort of person that works but never has money for gas or is always begging $20 off people. Of the people I know there’s a few commonalities. It starts off with a sense of entitlement that people should help them out because they’re broke rather than helping themselves because, “I can’t I’m broke.”

Another big one, most people I know that are perpetually broke get the “cheapest” food they can which is among the most expensive (per food value) and processed food out there. It is a hell of a lot more expensive than real cooking - even something as simple as chicken in the oven for 30 min. and some rice for dinner or eggs and toast for breakfast.

They are in a dead-end low-paying job but have no ambition to improve themselves. I know the job market is hard and school is expensive but these are people that always have an excuse of why they can’t fill out a FAFSA to see what financial aid is available or applying for a better job. They seem to be working at a place 5 years making a buck over minimum wage.

The biggest indicator is that they have a complete lack of priorities. They can’t afford gas or food but they can apparently afford expensive shoes. They throw expensive parties for their kids. You know the type at Chuck E Cheese or the local putt-putt that’s outrageously expensive and could be done for 1/4 of the price at home and the kids have just as much fun. My favorite are that they can’t afford a cell plan (probably because of the bad credit deposit) so they use the prepaid plans and then use the cell so much they spend twice (at least) what they would on a plan.

And they always have pets. You can’t afford to feed you kid, but you can buy/feed a couple of animals.
So what is it where they just don’t seem to understand how basic household money/budgeting works? Is it the old phrase “spend a pound to save a penny”? or is there something where they make decisions to act like they have money on extraneous stuff because it is a break from the life where they don’t have money because they spend it on extraneous stuff?

2

I think you already said it. Priorities, it makes sense to them but since your priorities are aligned differently, it makes no sense to you. And when they want something more then what they have they will suddenly reorganize themselves and their goals. Some folks are okay just getting by until they aren’t

3

This article is, I believe, very relevant:

The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor

4

You have cause and effect mixed up. Some people have the “poor mentality”, and because of that mentality, they end up being poor.

Of course, that’s not the only way it can work. You also sometimes find poor folk who are poor for some other reason, and are really good at being poor: They’re the ones who find discounts for everything, and know how to feed an entire family for 50 cents a meal. And even when they do manage to improve their situation, it’s not always in immediately-obvious ways-- You won’t find such a person buying a big-screen TV, because they’ve put a much higher priority on things like improving their education.

5

A guy who writes under the name “John Cheese” (which I assume is a pen name) at the website Cracked.com has some excellent essays about why it’s so hard to pull yourself out of poverty. Here are some of them:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people/

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-great-ways-to-remind-yourself-that-youre-poor/

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/

You have no idea how locked into their social background most people are. I finally made it to getting two master’s degrees and a good job, even though I was born in a struggling working-class family with eight kids. It took me till I was twenty-nine, and I spent all that time just barely scraping by.

Incidentally, John Cheese is one of the best essay writers working today. He doesn’t get much recognition because his material appears on a website known for snide humor. Here’s a link to a website with all of his Cracked.com material:

Pitchmeister scooped me on one of the essays.

6

This will not answer all of your question but it’s a start: The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor

And… beaten to the punch. But yeah, this guy knows his stuff.

7

Maybe the poor don’t have time for “real cooking” any more than rich people do? If you get off work from your job at Burger King after working a shift at Wal-Mart chances are you aren’t going to feel up to cooking a grandiose dinner from scratch as opposed to sticking a frozen pizza in the oven.

8

For some years before I retired, I worked for an aircraft parts manufacturer just outside of Seattle. We had about 200 employees on the factory floor. Now, back in those days the minimum wage was around 7 bucks per hour, and a lot of those folks were making about that.

Each noon the roach coach would come by with sandwiches, coffee, etc. A whole lot of those minimum waged people would get their lunch there, spending almost an hour’s wage to buy their lunch. Not too cost effective.

As a sort of amusing aside, we paid each Friday at noon. About 11:30, some 20 or 30 wives would gather in the parking lot, focused on intercepting their spouses paycheck before he could get it into a bar on the way home after work that afternoon.

9

I think the number one preventable mistake made by the “self-inflicted” poor is that they look to other people to see what they can afford. Because we have a strong stigma attached to discussing financial details, it’s really easy to overestimate how much other people are spending, or to assume other people are the same as you, and that therefore you are “allowed” whatever they have.

For example, it’s easy to get the impression that everyone else at work can afford to go out to happy hour and drink whatever they want whenever they want to if you don’t realize:

  1. Bob didn’t really bow out because he wants to get up early to jog. Actually, he doesn’t want to spend the money.
  2. Frank has been nursing that one beer all night because he can’t afford two.
  3. Jenny is on her third margarita, but she has two roommates so that she can afford a social life.
  4. Suzie has $15K at 22% on her credit cards.
  5. Jordan lives in a house he inherited from his grandfather.

If you are a certain type of literal minded person, because no one has said 'No! I cannot afford that!" you think everyone else can afford it no problem. And it’s easy to miss that while some people have nice cars, and some people go to Starbucks every day, some people have fancy phones, some people have fantastic clothes, some people have cable, some people go on vacation, etc., few people have all of these. So you feel like “everyone” does this stuff, so you can to, and then when you don’t have any money, you are genuinely perplexed as to why not–everyone else does! And you live like everyone else! It’s not fair, you’ve been screwed by the universe somehow, and since no on else has money problems, near as you can tell, it’s reasonable that all those lucky jerks help you out. After all, they are rolling in it.

There is a particular version of this that married couples engage in called “You can do X if I can do Y”. Jordan asks Pat “Can I buy this toy?” Pat says “No, we can’t afford that”. Jordan decides Pat is being mean, Pat feels guilty, and somehow the whole thing becomes an emotional, marital issue instead of a practical one. It’s an “if you loved me” thing. Then, when Pat “gives in” and approves the purchase, Jordan feels like they don’t have responsibility for the decision because Pat said it was okay, so it must me, and Pat feels like it was the right decision because they love Jordan so much and Jordan really, really wanted toy. Then, Pat feels resentful because Jordan got a toy, and so spends even more money they don’t have on something else. That, too, is ok, because it’s “fair”.

10

I grew up dirt poor, the poorest people in my home town absolute bottom of the barrel. This article is right on the money.

11

But how is it that some people have priorities that do not include being able to feed your kid or have gas to get to work?

This is a grandiose dinner?
Chicken breast in oven. 350 for 30 min.
1 cup rice & 1.5 cup water on stove. Bring to boil and simmer covered til water absorbed.

Believe it or not, healthy home cooking is not more time consuming or expensive then heating up processed crap. And I will work 14 hour days and still come home and cook something.

12

I was coming in here to recommend John Cheese as well!

13

Did you read those articles? Do you actually want to know answers to your questions, or are you just here to bash poor people?

14

Emergencies are one thing that’s hasn’t been discussed so far. Plenty of people - even in the middle and upper classes - spend every dollar they receive. You can get by like this for a long time, but eventually something really bad happens - you get laid off, someone gets really ill, the furnace goes out, your car’s transmission dies, there’s a hurricane, etc.

Now you have “no choice” but to finance this emergency and you justify it to yourself because its 1) necessary to life and 2) unplanned and unexpected. Since you need the money right now, so the financing is often at very unfavorable terms (like payday loans) and could easily be 20-60% interest.

Since you had to finance the emergency at ridiculous rates, the $5,000 emergency now costs 10,000 by the time you’re done paying it off… which might take 5-10 years, during which time another “unexpected” emergency has popped up.

If you’d had even 5,000 in a savings account, you could ride out many disasters without the financing and without the interest - you’re not just 5,000 ahead, you’re 10,000 (or more) ahead.

Ultimately what poor people tend to miss is the fallacy in their thinking about emergencies. While the exact timing and details of an emergency are unplanned, everyone knows that unexpected bad things happen. There’s even a bumper sticker, right? People who are upwardly mobile (for the long term) set aside funds to cover these emergencies, and people who end up poor (for the long term) don’t set aside those funds.

15

One thing that article forgot. If you’re on any type of assistance, that windfall check could get you thrown off if it’s saved.

16

A lot of people don’t understand the burden of the *legacy *of poverty. It is very hard to ever save for emergencies, because when you are in a culture of poverty, there is always an emergency, from someone you care about.

The idea of a poor person having five thousand put away for a rainy day is difficult, because it is always drizzling on him and very often storming on a friend or family member.

17

The working poor are often too exhausted by their work and dealing with all the daily hassles that poverty entails to be able to do much about about improving their condition (including doing things like cooking, let alone taking courses). Poorly paid jobs are mostly a lot more exhausting, unpleasant, and dispiriting than better paid ones are. The non-working poor are often too depressed about their situation to be able to do anything. (Lots of the working poor are too.) One way to deal with the misery of your situation is through drink, or drugs, or other destructive vices such as gambling (or even just goofing off, or the sorts of things mentioned in the OP like having a pet, or buying expensive shoes to cheer yourself up). Those only make things worse in the long run, of course, but sometimes people need them in order to get by without falling into utter despair in the short run, and if you can’t get through the short run, the long run doesn’t matter anyway.

Also, it is important to remember that a capitalist society depends on there being a good degree of inequality in order to function. Capitalism runs on competition, and you don’t have a competition unless there are losers as well as winners. If everybody “bettered themselves” there would be nobody to do the really shitty jobs that need doing, and no horrible examples to scare the moderately comfortable into working harder and harder to avoid falling into poverty, and to generate even more wealth for the few at the top, who really run things. Viable capitalist societies have thus evolved mechanisms to perpetuate inequality and to make sure some people will always be poor. (It doesn’t have to be the same people all the time, but it often is, as it is easier to keep people poor than to impoverish them.) If too many poor people started bettering themselves, it would soon become harder and harder for those still poor to do so, and probably also become easier for others to fall into poverty through some bit of bad luck or bad judgement. If a once-poor person gets abetter job, it will often be at the expense of some formerly not so-poor-person, who will henceforth become poor.

That does not mean, mind you, that every capitalist economy has the optimum or lowest necessary percentage of poor people and the optimum amount of inequality that it needs in order to function satisfactorily, and too much poverty leads to a an inefficient capitalism (and thus less wealth for those at the top) just as surely as too little does. We don’t really know where the optimum level of inequality lies, even if we do not question the fundamental assumption that the proper goal of an economy is to make the wealthy as wealthy as possible.

18

I was addressing the misconception raised in the thread that cooking real food is somehow harder or more expensive than cheap processed food. I had read the article when it came out originally (yes I read Cracked.com every day) but the point Mdcastle raised was not that people prefer Kraft mac & cheese to real homecooked mac & cheese. Instead his point was that throwing a frozen pizza in the oven was easier and quicker than throwing a chicken breast in the oven.

And that is part of the “poor” mentality. Ignoring the taste issues for a second, there is the misconception that cooking a home meal is harder or more time consuming than heating up processed food.

19

Why are you buying chicken breast? Chicken breast is an expensive cut of meat. If you weren’t living an unnecessarily extravagant lifestyle, you’d be buying chicken thighs on sale.

Also, that chicken breast recipe is unpalatable and possibly unsafe as written. Yes, I am nitpicking, but before you saunter in to criticize poor people for not cooking super cheap and healthy dinners on their own, you might want to investigate how to, you know, actually cook something.

20

One of my college friends came from a poor family and was at school thanks to financial aid and a lot of student loans. He and I were basically in the same boat financially, making decisions on a regular basis about whether the overdraft fees on the checking account would be worth it in order to buy a couple days’ worth of groceries before the next paycheck arrived.

His mom was a flake. She would call him up a few times a year with some sob story about how her latest boyfriend hadn’t paid his half of the rent like he was supposed to, or her car broke down, or whatever, and could my friend help out? Just this once?

He always did, too. He’d scrape together whatever small amount of money he had and send it to her, and never ever managed to get ahead. I asked him why he didn’t just tell her no, and he’d shrug and say, “She’s my mom.”