I mean real emergencies, not stuff that’s an emergency simply because you’re broke. That’s kind of the point; if that $10 per week / $520 per year was there, a huge chunk of these things would cease to be emergencies anymore.
I mean things like flat tires, plumbing problems, ER visits (that are actual emergencies), etc… Stuff you absolutely have to have done right then and you can’t put off.
Nobody really has $500/yr of those kinds of things year in and year out. It may average out to more than that, but it’s not a consistent thing, which also bears out my point that slow and steady building up of that cushion is an imperative for someone who’s on that knife edge of financial stability.
John Cheese is right on, but I didn’t find where he boiled it down to one simple fact (I was skimming some, so sue me):
Being poor is very expensive. He gives lots of examples, but they tie into this, they mostly exacerbate each other, and the permeate every part of your life. Just one made up example to show how it snowballs.
When the car breaks, and you have no savings, then you have to borrow. Because you are poor you have to pay high interest. And the car WILL break because you bought a crappy old used car that was all you could afford, and you can’t afford oil changes and like such, and even if you could afford the oil to change it yourself and filter , the manager will kick you out of your cheap apartment if he catches you changing the oil in the parking lot, and it is not like you have any tools anyhow.
So your car is dead and you decide not to borrow to have it fixed. Instead you buy a bicycle. For $100 at WalMart. It looked OK, and even came with cool features. The first week you find that a lot of the features don’t actually work. Within a month, two tops, the bike is as dead as your car. Maybe it just has flat tires, but you can’t afford a pump, and never learned how to patch a tube, and you don’t have a wrench to take the wheel off anyway. So you sell the bike to your neighbor for $5-20 because it is really hard to get a good price for a dead bike. Of course you could get a better price on Craig’s List, IF you had a computer and internet service, but you don’t because you are poor. So now you have spent $80-95 and you are back to walking and riding the bus.
Because you are walking and riding the bus, you can’t go to the lowest price grocery stores, because they are a long ways away. So you go to more expensive closer stores and spend more money. Also, the really low cost stores sell in bulk, but you don’t have the funds to buy that much and…once again… you are now walking riding the bus, so you can’t get it home to the storage you don’t have anyway.
Walking and riding the bus to work eats up a lot of your time, so you have less time to shop, cook and prepare lunches, so you end up buying convenience food, or getting your lunch from the roach coach.
I’m just trying to show how one thing (the car broke down) snowballs and adds expense to multiple areas of a poor person’s life.
In other words, the normal activity of capitalism produces winners and losers. That is perfectly reasonable, and there is nothing “unconstructive” about mentioning it.
Unless you have such a reverent attitude towards capitalism that it makes you uncomfortable to hear anything said about it that could be construed as having any negative connotation at all.
That’s not the impression I got from what miss elizabeth said. I thought that what she meant was that dracoi’s imprecise statement “2/3 of the poor don’t even work full time” is misleading partly because many poor people do work full time but not year-round.
In fact, I’m not seeing where dracoi got the “2/3 of the poor” claim from your cite at all. Maybe he misinterpreted the statistic that the working poor work on average 2/3 of the year:
Yes, that’s the 2/3s that I was thinking of. I wasn’t aiming for precision on the statistic as much I was trying to suggest that most of the poor, at least some of the time, could find four hours on a weekend to do some cooking.
But apparently I’ve been corrected: Poor people work too much to cook for themselves, especially the ones who are part-time, seasonally employed and disabled.
^ This is very true. It’s why I try very, very hard to save money.
But the months where we were falling $200 or $400 short of basic necessities - rent, food, fuel/utilities, my spouse’s daily medication - we simply could NOT save. If you’re a couple hundred in the hole each month you simply don’t have that $10.
Fortunately, our longest stretch like that was around 4 months, but even with food stamps, food pantries, the occasional odd job, and so on we could NOT even break even that month, and it largely was because we lacked health insurance. My spouse’s daily medications run about $800 a month - MORE than our rent. If he does not have these he WILL be in the hospital before the month is out. When we parked the car due to lack of fuel he was stuck at home - he’s disabled, walking everywhere is not an option for him. Oh, but he’s not disabled enough to qualify for disability benefits.
Yes, we clawed our way up from that. Yay for us. But saying “just save $10 a week!” ignores that some people really don’t have that to save.
Meanwhile - I LOVE to have $500 in the savings account. I don’t always have that much, but yeah, if you can pull that off you’re suddenly paying a LOT less interest, you can suddenly take advantage of bulk sales, you can cover minor emergencies with a lot less stress…
In my most poor years, when I could have been described by the “works only 2/3 of the year” those hours were not evenly spread. I had weeks I had zero paying work. I had other weeks I had two part-time temporary jobs and wound up working 100 hour weeks. Sure, when I had no work at all I could cook elaborate meals, take time to cook from absolute stratch, and so on… but when I was working 100 hour weeks no, I didn’t have time to cook. I didn’t have time to do my own wash. But I HAD TO work those hours as a hedge against the future unemployment that would occur when the jobs finished.
So, it’s not just how many hours are averaged per week over a year. The episodic nature of some types of employment can make it very difficult to get some basic chores done.
You know, it’s a low blow to include the disabled in that - there are disabled people who either can’t cook, or are less able to cook. My spouse, for example, has very little sensation left in his hands. He does little cooking because we don’t want to have to rush him to the ER with cuts and burns all the time. If he didn’t have me living with him he’d be eating mostly crap and microwave stuff (actually, these days he does eat mostly microwaveable stuff, but it’s my cooking in the microwave, not the commercially available crap).
As for the seasonally employed, etc. I’ve already detailed the situation I found myself in of working two jobs like a maniac, followed by no work at all for awhile. Yeah, when I had time I cooked. When I didn’t, well, you still gotta eat something.
I did work too much to cook for myself when I was poor. That’s why I only cooked once a week. 2 hours of work on Sunday kept me fed all week. I wish I’d had a dishwasher, though. And I did get a little tired of lentils for a while.
I wonder how big a barrier irregular schedules are. When I was working for pennies, I was still able to pull in 70+ hours each week. That adds up to a hefty sum for a single guy with no health problems. And by hefty I mean out-of-pocket health insurance, IRA contributions, and flying to see family 1-2x/year. However, that would have been impossible if my work consisted of jobs with unfixed schedules. Maybe it’s possible if the 2nd job is something that can be done on one’s own time, but I don’t think most minimum wage jobs work that way.
Your distinction is completely unclear. But to reiterate–unexpected “stuff you absolutely have to have done right then and you can’t put off” surely costs most families over five hundred dollars a year. I am not sure how to demonstrate this. I am also not sure how one could sensibly deny it.
The point that I am getting at is that there is eventually a point of diminishing returns when it comes to economizing. And this means that a sensible sacrifice for a middle-class person may not be sensible for a poor person. .
For example, it’s easy for me to cut my $50 weekly grocery bill down twenty bucks to $30. I can do this by focusing on generic brands and in-season produce. It would hardly affect my life. It’s MUCH harder for someone with a $30 grocery bill to cut that down twenty bucks to $10. At that point, you are looking at rice and beans with an onion on special occasions. It makes a MASSIVE impact on your life, and severely degrades your quality of life.
Likewise, it’s easy for me to buy a used car, because it’d be a two-car family and I work in a salaried position with flex hours. It’d be MUCH harder for someone to buy a used car when it’s their only car and they can get fired for being a half hour late to work. It’s also easy for me to spend some extra time cooking dinner, because I frankly have a fair amount of leisure time. But for someone whose schedule is already packed, that “extra hour or two” a week is much more precious, and losing it has a massive impact and probably some trade-offs that mean other parts of your life become unsustainable. The poor don’t get extra hours in the day or extra bursts of energy to deal with all the additional burdens of poverty. They have the same daily pressures that anyone else has, plus some more.
So while having money in the bank is a laudable goal, so is getting through the day with your health, sanity and family intact. A life of absolute bare-bones austerity is no more sustainable than a life on maxed-out credit cards. You can maintain an absolute laser-like focus on saving money for a short time, especially if you are young and don’t have a family going on this journey with you (I, too, have done the three-jobs and living-on-beans thing). But eventually you do need to maintain good financial habits while also throwing a bone to other priorities, or else you are going to lose other important forms of capital- your health, your social networks, and your children (who need attention and affection as well as money).
If you’re suddenly out on disability from work AND you’re the breadwinner with a very underemployed spouse, you’ll get a taste of “poverty mindset” very quickly. Even doubly so when there are no industry opportunities on the horizon for your spouse even though s/he’s been job hunting for over a year AND you have no idea if your disability will be permanent. If it is permanent, you can kiss your FT job-with-benefits goodbye. And, because you’re of a certain age and because you’ve been in one particular industry for over half your life, your chances are very slim for picking up another job (or even two PT jobs) in order to maintain your already fiscally conservative lifestyle.
You can kiss the house you’ve inherited goodbye because you can’t pay the taxes. You can’t afford to continue living in the area where you’ve lived all your life because of the COL, so where do you go?
What happens if your spouse never gets another job in his/her industry?
What happens to you, the breadwinner?
The fact that both you and your spouse were raised in upper middle class families, have college educations, and have never, ever had to face these scenarios before…um, yeah.
I’m not sure if I qualify as “working poor” — I’m single, never married, and have no kids out there to support, and I make around $20k-22k/year. But in my current job (where I’ve been for a little over seven years), I literally work 2/3 of the year. I’m a cook at my city convention center, and we’re pretty much dead in Jan-Feb and Jul-Aug. I work a bit here and there in those months, but nothing steady.
On thing I hate about the non-steady work is that I’d really like to get myself a decent car, instead of the 21-year-old, $600 piece of shit I drive. But having had debt problems in the past (I finally got all my debt cleared up a few years ago), I’m extremely reluctant to take on new debt when I don’t have a predictable income from one month to the next. The one plus is that I’ve been with the same bank for 15+ years now, and they know me, so hopefully I won’t have too much trouble getting a loan from them when the time comes. I’m at the point where I would really like to get a credit card for emergencies (like my car’s recent fuel pump failure, which cost me $360 to fix - fortunately I’d already paid my rent and had enough money left to cover it). But the repair bill canceled out the new computer monitor I’d been meaning to buy (I was actually on my way to Wal-Mart to see what they had when my fuel pump went out )
When I find the time, I cook off an entire package of pasta in one go, cool it, and then use a scale to portion it out into Zip-loc bags, which I freeze. I always keep one portion thawed in the fridge. When I want to eat it, it’s a simple matter to heat sauce in my large sauté pan, throw the pasta into it, cut up some meat and vegetables and sauté them in another pan, then add them to the pasta and sauce, toss it all together, top it with grated parmesan, and plate it. Not having to cook the pasta “to order” every time means I can have myself a tasty, nutritious meal prepared in about 10-15 minutes. (I hate spending more time to cook something than it’s going to take me to eat it.)
And yeah, I also wish I had a dishwasher. I don’t mind hand-washing, and would actually prefer to wash my dishes as soon as I’m done with them. But my WW2-vintage (or maybe even older - I have an honest-to-goodness icebox) apartment building has communal water heaters, and my apartment is the one farthest from them. Since I don’t want to stand around for the 10 minutes it seems to take to get the hot water to my kitchen sink, the dishes pile up. What I end up doing is, on my day off, I go down and wash the dishes immediately after I shower, while I have the hot water there.
This is the worst thing about working in the convention business. No fixed schedule — I work when there’s work. For the last 7+ years, I haven’t worked the same schedule two weeks in a row, and rarely have the same shift two days in a row. That’s one reason I want out. I’ll gladly take a lower wage for a fixed, predictable schedule. It’s completely impossible for me to plan anything in advance. I’d love to be playing in a band, but how do you book a gig in advance when you have no idea if you’re going to be needed at work that night?
It’s funny to me the American psychology on this. The US is one of the least socially mobile of all developed countries. Inspiring anecdotes aside, if your parents are poor you are very likely to be poor in your adulthood, and vice versa.
And yet a strong feeling that there is no excuse for being poor, and people just need to get off their lazy asses and start a business. As if everyone has a great idea for a business, can secure the capital, and failure is either unlikely, or easily recovered from.
Of course there are some people who lack aspiration and responsibility. But you can’t blame a nation’s social and economic inequality on a huge chunk of the population being lazy good-for-nothings.
The idea of free market economics and capitalism is not “everyone go start their own business”. It’s not realistic for everyone to start their own business. The idea is that if you create an environment that encourages entrepreneurship, more people will start their own businesses, those businesses will hire people, those workers will have money to spend and so on and so forth, creating a virtuous circle of economic growth that benefits everyone.
I’ve pondered the question at great length. I’m generally sympathetic to the poor (or at least more sympathetic than I was in the past). Not for ever actually having been poor, but more because I’ve been somewhat financially successful in my career and I see how people in my peer group think and act and behave. Basically it goes something like this:
Most of them grew up in middle class to affluent suburbs. Their biggest worries growing up were making the football/soccer/cheerleading squad, being popular and getting good enough grades to get into a decent college. Of course there were screw ups and burn outs and kids without much money, but no scary poor people like in the urban areas 30 minutes away.
In college (typically paid for by their parents), they were surrounded by people just like the ones they grew up with (excluding, of course, the burnouts, losers and hoodlums who got into trouble and otherwise screwed around in high school and didn’t have wealthy parents to pay their way). After four years of being told how they are the best and brightest and future leaders of tomorrow, possibly being part of a fraternity where they learn the politics of exclusion, they get a job with one of the many Fortune 500 companies, investment banks, consulting firms and other employers conducting on campus interviews.
Anyhow, by adulthood, after years of hanging out with people primarily just like them, they are patting themselves on the back for all the good choices they made on their meteoric rise to the middle while at the same time saying stuff like “with my grades, I have no idea how I ever ended up as Vice President of Marketing”.
So my advice for poor people is as follows:
-Do your best to be born to white affluent parents
-Try to grow up within an hour or so of a major urban area like New York, Chicago, or Boston (preferably in the nice parts).
-Make sure your parents have the $50-60k a year for tuition, books, room & board to get into a decent college
-Alternately, you could also try and get an athletics scholarship
-Learn the behaviors and mannerisms you will need to impress an interviewer (this is easy, as they are taught in most prep schools)
-If you happen to lose your job (this happens to rich people as well. Just look at Lehman or Bear Sterns), don’t be afraid to network with your old fraternity brothers, lacrosse team mates or your new hire start buddy from your first job whose now a managing director somewhere.
-Try to avoid making stupid mistakes. Just because the white directors at the firm where you work go to strip clubs and brothels, drink and do coke until 4am, it’s not ok for the black dude from the mail room to blaze up a joint in front of them at a corporate happy hour event.
-Also try to start working when the economy is good enough that companies are forced to actually hire people outside of the executives circle of friends, relatives and business partners.
My point is that there are things that are an emergency to anyone- things like injuries, catastrophic failures of appliances, etc… that can’t be predicted, and that have to be fixed right away, regardless of monetary status. Having your water pipes bust is an emergency because they can wreck the rest of your house.
Then there are things that are emergencies because of an inability to afford the consequences, not because they’re really an emergency. For example, a flat tire isn’t really an emergency… unless you’re so broke that you don’t have a spare tire, and can’t afford to replace or fix the flat. For most people, we’d put the spare on, pay about $150-200 for a new tire to be put on the rim, and have the spare put back where it goes, then bitch a little about what a pain in the ass it was. Hardly an emergency.
They’re both emergencies, but there’s a crucial distinction- some of them are either avoidable with cash reserves (preventative maintenance), or cease to be such a huge deal if you have cash reserves (things like flat tires).
Right now I’m waiting to hear if I have to pay anything re a fender bender I was involved in last week. I have a $500 deductible on my auto insurance because I can’t afford the higher premium/lower deductible anymore. If I have to pay for any of it, that’s going to impact my ability to pay other bills.
If anything happens to my house (plumbing, heat, etc.), I’m going to be SOL because I’ve had to dip into my reserves since I’ve been out of work. I’m already paying off a couple of loans on top of everything else. Right now I don’t know if I’m going to be able to return FT. If I can’t, I don’t know what I’m going to do. We can’t afford to move, yet we can’t afford our house, so…?
The fact that a good many Americans subscribed almost exactly to this trajectory is, I think, one of the reasons why nearly everyone here was knocked to their knees during the recession, and now, the aftereffects. Having to suddenly think of “poverty mentality” when you’ve never had to even entertain the thought because that’s “other people” can be very, very frightening.
I have lived with a serious roach infestation. They got into the VCR display (yeah, it was a long time ago), an oven is easy - or under the bubbling lid of a crockpot. If it wasn’t in a jar or tupperware, they got in. They ate through cardboard boxes, got into unopened cereal (through the plastic bags), laid eggs in the clean laundry and clean linen. This means you didn’t have clean laundry - and the laundromat wasn’t convenient. You had roach laundry. And you couldn’t eat much at home, everything - dishes, pots, was covered in roach droppings.
Boy that sucked. I’d sort of forgotten about that.
Yeah I’m still there and I do see myself in the article. Especially the part where we can’t afford the deals so we wait until we’re absolutely desperate and hope by then we’ve saved the money by the time whatever it is breaks completely. As with our air conditioner that made squeaky noises, then louder squeaking noises despite cleaning it as best we could, then making such a racket we couldn’t use it anymore… then we just sat hot until it was unbearable (something like 104 degrees) then we bought a used one that didn’t really work all that great and only lasted until September. Then we were on the lookout for another used a/c.
Same with tires. Tires go bad before we get new ones, and then they’re still not new. Used tires cost 20 bucks. If you don’t have the money for new you keep getting used even though they have a drastically shorter lifespan. It would be nice to have enough to get all tires replaced with new ones but I never have the money at once.
I grew up like this, and here I am at 43 with the same mentality. I don’t know how to get out of it and it benefits me to stay this way since I still don’t have the money for a new a/c or tires. I just stopped wanting things.
My one downfall is animals. I don’t seek them. I lived in a bad neighborhood where people just abandoned their animals and hell, I don’t want to see them suffer so I start taking care of them. I get them fixed and make sure they’re fed even if I can’t afford the full package every year at the vet. I try to find new homes and often I’m successful, but two little dogs and three cats later I feel like a fool, but hey, at least my pets love me. I know that sounds totally wackadoodle, that I can’t afford tires but spend 30 dollars a month on pet food. I didn’t plan to be this way! I guess that’s the problem. I don’t really plan anything. I don’t set goals because I’m too busy trying to focus on everything I need to do on a daily basis.
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