Why a cluck?
I’ve seen this (and many of the other poverty behaviors) at a step or two removed- one of my wife’s good friends was dating this guy (who is profoundly dumb, mind you.), and he and his family were pretty much poor, and so were their friends and their families.
So wife’s friend, who wasn’t terribly well off to begin with, dated this guy for a couple of years, until he got chucked in jail.
Anyway, this guy and his whole circle of acquaintances would get paid every other Friday, and would pay the bills that were threatening, and then blow the remainder on frivolous crap- jewelry, rims for their pickups, new phones, flat screen TVs, etc… so that they’d then be scraping for the next two weeks.
They had no qualms about having their baby mamas (in this case mamacitas, I suppose) be on WIC, and didn’t really spend any money on their kids. When their earned income tax credit showed up, it was reason for another orgy of dumbass spending.
And like others have said, everybody was always mooching off each other- if one of the zillions of cousins, uncles or brothers was having a hard time, they’d come leech off of this dude AND his girlfriend, putting both of them in a bind. Or they’d get the super-guilt-trip to lend whoever it was some money.
Long story short, a combination of dumb-ass decisions about money, and an inability to tell relatives to fuck off, kept this dude poor, and was threatening to drag girlfriend into poverty as well.
Once the girlfriend dumped his stupid, sorry ass, and found a reasonable job, she’s managed to dig out of debt and have enough cash to pay the bills and have some fun and nice stuff because she understands not to blow every last spare cent she has right as soon as she gets it.
A correction to what seems a misconception in this thread - in the US, around three quarters of poor households do not include anyone who works full-time, year-round. (Cite.). So the idea that poor people cannot cook or go to school because they are exhausted from their twelve-hour shifts is typically not the case.
In the US, if an adult is poor, and they do the following:
[ul][li]Graduate from high school[/li][li]Get married and stay married[/li][li]Don’t have children until you can support them[/li][li]Get a job, any job, and stick with it for at least a year, and don’t quit it until you have a better job lined up[/li][/ul]then after five years the chances are that you will no longer be poor. I would submit that “the poor mentality” is thinking that one cannot, or does not have to, do the above.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, I find it morbidly amusing to know some many people allegedly better off than I am who have continual car payments when I haven’t had one for 6 years - and still have a reliable vehicle. Two of them, actually.
Then, when one of those vehicles needs repairs these same people say “it’s time you ditched that old pile of rust - GET A NEW CAR!!!”. Uh… but the $800 for repairs is a LOT cheaper than months of new car payments… To which they say “BUT YOU CAN GET A NEW CAR!!!” But I LIKE my old car! It’s reliable, it gets great gas mileage, it’s comfortable, it does everything I need it to do. It’s much cheaper to fix it than to get a new one. Not to mention my car insurance would go up, my annual plates charge would go up…
Doesn’t make a dent with them - the most important thing is A NEW CAR!!!
We live in different worlds, those people and me.
[QUOTE=Saint Cad]
I was addressing the misconception raised in the thread that cooking real food is somehow harder or more expensive than cheap processed food. … Instead his point was that throwing a frozen pizza in the oven was easier and quicker than throwing a chicken breast in the oven.
[/QUOTE]
It may not be harder to cook fresh or “real” food, but it will often by much harder to GET fresh food because they live in what’s called a “food desert” where the principal options for obtaining food are fast-food restaurants and convenience stores. The easy option is walk two or three blocks to the Quicky Mart, where the fresh produce selection is a few bananas and apples that have been there for weeks, and the meat options are canned tuna or hot dogs on the roto-grill.
The hard option is to take an hour or more, depending on bus schedules, to ride the bus to a good grocery store, then ride back home with the groceries, hoping your food doesn’t decide to spart spoiling on the way home. That two or three hours travel time becomes a significant impediment, especially for people working two jobs.
[QUOTE=MsWhatsit]
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.
[/QUOTE]
From time to time, the grocery store I go to most often has chicken breasts on sale for less than thighs or whole chickens.
That certainly applied to me for a few years, however, the time I was not employed I was NOT simply sitting on my backside. I was looking for work. Diligently. So after 8 hours of looking for work, interviewing, and such I was just as tired as when I was actually working. Granted, I still managed to cook wholesome meals most nights but some nights I said screw it and we had reheated leftovers.
Going to school when you are not working is a problem because you have no money. Just being poor does not automatically qualify you for financial aid to allow you to go to school AND keep a roof over your head. Then you have the problem of coordinating work and school - schools want you to attend on a fixed schedule. A lot of employment these days wants you available at the drop of a hat so you can wind up having to choose between your job and your schooling.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that it’s not as easy as it might seem at firts.
Funny - I have
- Graduated not only from high school but college as well (4 year degree)
- Been married 25 years
- Do not have kids
Yet after 2007 I could get a job for years (was often told I was “too old to hire and too young to retire”). I was freakin POOR. I am just now creeping out of the whole, here in 2013 or six years later and we’re still at the poverty line.
I did work at my most recent job for 18 months but when my employer simply stopped paying me for six weeks I had no choice but to quit without “something else lined up”. Fortunately, I was able to obtain new employment within 2 weeks but I tell ya, it’s not like when I was young.
Shodan, your formula worked 10 or more years ago but there’s been a sea change. You can do everything right and still be poor, and it can take significantly longer than 5 years to climb back up even if you do everything right. Which means for those who do things less than perfectly it’s even harder than it used to be.
(I did get notice this morning that the Labor Board is supporting my wage claim. I am supposed to get a check for my missing wages in the next week or two, but if not I’ll have to take my former employer to court.)
Your cite is from 15 years ago. I would submit that the changes in the economy make it less relevant than you apparently believe.
Also, reading that paper, I have to say it doesn’t support you as well as it could. It’s true that many of the working poor are without employment full time all year, but as the paper points out, this isn’t by choice
[QUOTE=Shodan’s Cite]
Of those who do not work full-time, about half state that they are working part time because they cannot find full-time work. Thus the working poor face the problem of involuntarily working part time to a greater extent than other workers. Approximately 20% of the working poor are employed involuntarily part-time.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Shodan’s Cite]
A big problem for the working poor is lack of full-year work. The working poor work on average two thirds of a year, rather than year-round. This can partly be explained by the type of jobs the working poor hold. The working poor are over-represented among agricultural workers and machine operators, work that often involves seasonal employment.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Shodan’s Cite]
In addition, the working poor suffer from involuntary layoffs. They are over-represented among those who suffer from layoffs in employment. Although some people believe that the problem of working poverty would be solved by providing full-time year-round work, this does not appear to be true. Most (52%) of the working poor would not b e able to work their way out of poverty even if they held full-time year-round employment because their wages are too low. In addition, of the working poor who would be able to lift themselves out of poverty by working such hours, many are unable to do so because of health problems, which will be discussed below.
[/QUOTE]
In light of this, would you like to retract your statements, or find a cite that supports your assertions?
Plus the sales tax, if you buy a 20k car you have $1400 in sales tax.
I dislike how people try to tell me to buy a new car too. I’ve tried explaining even if I had to get both the engine and transmission replaced in a used car (highly, highly unlikely) it would cost about 3-4k in parts and labor, far less than the money I’d spend in interest, sales tax, depreciation, insurance, etc by buying new. even catastrophic repairs to a used car would be cheaper than buying a new car.
not that I need a new transmission and engine, but a used 2006 car with repairs is far cheaper than a 2013.
Actually, I think it’s more a question of “why are people that make no money constantly pissing their money away?”
I’ve heard stories of folks who pay something like 5% to a check cashing place to get an advance on their paycheck, that only gets them their money a few days early. You hardly make anything to begin with and you give 5% of it away to some crappy company.
You would think that someone who made very little money would be extra diligent to make that money stretch as far as it could, but that is frequently not what happens.
Well, it’s easy to see why someone with “very little” money might do that: they have to put new tires on their car TODAY or they lose their job: they are hungry TODAY. Their mom is getting evicted TODAY. What’s harder to understand is why so many middle-class people do the same thing.
Advertisers are constantly telling us that we DESERVE that new car, or new phone, or great furniture. And a lot of us listen. You can’t really blame the advertisers, because they don’t make money if we try to make do. A new car means that you’re successful. An old car with a few dings in it means that you aren’t successful, in their eyes.
My inlaws are in the habit of throwing away perfectly usable things. Maybe they’re tired of their furniture, they’ll buy a new suite (and pronounce it suit) from a place which will finance them with easy payments and put the old set out on the curb, rather than give the furniture to someone else or even (gasp) trade furniture for something that’s new to them. They discard old clothes because they aren’t in style. When we first got married, I had to teach my husband to change out of his good work clothes when he came home, because otherwise he’d go change the oil or something in his work clothes, and suddenly he’d need a new set of clothes for work. When I was growing up, my parents taught me to change out of my school clothes and into play clothes, so that my good clothes lasted longer. When we shopped for school supplies for our daughter, my habit was to look at the list, and see what supplies we had left over from last year. The colored pencil set has been worn down for an inch or so on each pencil, but there’s still plenty of pencil length left, and she’s not missing any pencils. We still have plenty of looseleaf paper, but we’re going to have to buy more spiral bound notebooks. His family’s habit was to simply go down to the store, list in hand, and buy everything listed, even if they already had perfectly usable items.
My dad taught me that one has to take into consideration ALL of the costs of keeping an item as opposed to replacing it. In many cases, it’s far cheaper to fix up that older car. But even the best maintained car will wear out sooner or later, and you’ll spend more money in maintaining it than if you replaced it.
My dad also taught me to save odds and ends from projects, whereas Bill was in the habit of just throwing out those extra bits of wood, and then he’d complain that he needed a bit of scrap wood for something. Or Bill would buy a package of screws, use most of them, and pitch the rest. Now, there’s saving and then there’s hoarding, but my father managed to make a lot of projects out of scraps from other projects. Taking care of things and making sure to get all the usability from all the items is as important as shopping carefully.
+1
I’ve seen couples driven to bankruptcy over this. This morning on Facebook, I saw a couple who makes barely $34k a year between them do the “I get to buy all these Special Edition Dr. Who DVDs and this sword online because my husband bought a whole bunch of stuff for his coin collecting hobby.” The net result is they spent a month’s net salary on luxuries to make themselves both feel better. Meanwhile, the car still doesn’t run…
Thanks to needing to have my car’s fuel pump replaced recently, I’ve now officially spent more money on fixing/maintaining this car than I paid for it to begin with. Granted, I only paid $600 (bought it from a former roommate).
Oh, when I say saving to buy something, I mean buy an upgraded part for the computer, or a new game or something- the sort of small thing credit would be unavailable for that just cost a bit more than he could spare right now.
Mind you, he’d never had a bank account, so I’m not sure he would have been able to get credit anyway. Probably a good thing, or I’m sure he would have been as much in debt as the rest of his family were.
No, that isn’t necessary, since my cite supports my assertions quite nicely.
Unless you can come up with a cite where I claimed that it was voluntary, which you can’t.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, you said if poor people would get full time jobs, they wouldn’t be poor, which implies they have some choice in the matter. If what you meant was really that poor people wouldn’t be poor if they had good jobs, but they can’t get those jobs, then frankly I don’t even understand why you posted.
If homeless people had houses they wouldn’t be homeless. If drug addicts weren’t addicted they wouldn’t be addicts. If criminals stopped committing crimes, they wouldn’t be criminals. Hey look everyone! I just solved all these problems!
Oh, wait, no I didn’t. That’s completely stupid.
Chicken or egg? I guarantee you that if there was a market for fresh food in these “food deserts” that someone would serve that market. Maybe it’s rampant pilferage that keeps it from being profitable, but I suspect that’s not the case.
My local Kroger and Wal-Mart serves both a predominantly apartment-dwelling poor black population, and a upper middle class white home-owning population and without fail, the poor people are the ones with frozen tv-dinners, gallons of orange drink, and other cruddy prepared food, while the not-poor people have produce, meat and other healthier options. This is in the same store mind you, so it’s not like the people in my area don’t have the option- they choose not to buy produce and healthy food.
Beyond that, I think one of the big issues with poverty is the “right now” mentality; everything is pretty much immediate from what I understand. There’s no concept of “Hmm.. I have $150 left over from my last paycheck. I should put that in a savings account.” Instead, it’s “I have $150 left over! Woo hoo! I’m going to have a barbecue and invite all my friends and spend $150.”
Then when things go sideways, and he needs $125 to go to the local urgent care clinic, he’s broke, so he lets his problem get worse until he can go to the ER, thereby sticking the rest of us with his bill.
[QUOTE=miss elizabeth]
That’s completely stupid.
[/QUOTE]
Well, your characterization of it is quite stupid, but that has little to do with what I said.
That having been said, this is GQ. I understand how upsetting it must be to be confronted with facts you don’t like, but that does not affect the truth value of the facts.
Actually I listed a number of factors that tend to correlate with non-poverty, all of which are demonstrably true. So unless you care to dispute that high school graduates are just as likely to be able to find work as drop-outs, or to assert that divorce and failure to form a stable household do not affect economic status, or that married people do not tend to earn more than non-married ones, or that having children you can’t support has no effect on poverty levels, or that a history of job stability means nothing when searching for other employment, I guess you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that you do not seem to understand the situation.
Regards,
Shodan
You produce a cite that says the opposite of what you said it does, and I’m the one who’s been confronted with facts I don’t like?
Uh huh.
I appreciate your patient explanations, I really do. And I know how hard it must have been to add the dripping sarcasm without ever letting on it was you who made up facts to suit his agenda. Masterful, really. But since you have no real rejoinder, and a cursory read of our exchange is so illuminating as to who’s in the right here, I’m content to end our exchange and let the audience judge for themselves. Good day.
Regards,
Elizabeth
I do agree that a lot of public assistance programs are designed in a way that can encourage continued dependence and make it more difficult to get off of them. I’ve seen it with a client on disability who was only allowed to make up to $800/month on the side before losing disability benefits - this person had no way to work their way up the income ladder - they either stayed below $800 or made the leap all the way to $2000 in one jump. So your finance zone is a real thing, and I think public assistance hurts people as much as it helps.
But… what are people spending their money on? If a 2,000 savings account is allowed, how many of them have even that much in savings? Let’s face it, most of these people are accruing obligations to pay as fast as they possibly can - rent, cable, phones, etc. and when they have a windfall it goes to a big screen TV. When I used to manage apartments, the three biggest TVs in our 96-unit complex belonged to the three biggest recipients of public aid. One of those three people also had a boat. I make far more money than they do and yet I still consider a TV like that to be out of my price range.
I don’t want to be glib about the difficulties of being poor or getting yourself out of poverty, but those kinds of choices can make you poor even if you didn’t start that way.