Difficult to describe, somewhere between poor and middle class. I guess the best way to put it is that we were poor, but Mom was very good at living within her means. We owned our own house and didn’t have any debt, but everything was tight. During the winter, we’d play “Little House on the Prairie”, which meant that we didn’t eat any food that the Ingalls family wouldn’t have had in the winter, because that’s how we kept costs down enough to pay the gas bill. For that matter, in the summer our diet heavily featured home-grown vegetables from Mom’s garden.
By the numbers, we qualified for food stamps for the entire first decade of my life, but Mom could almost never get them, because the welfare office wouldn’t believe that a clean, well-groomed woman with a master’s degree could possibly be making that little (she was a teacher in the Catholic schools). When she finally did manage to get them, she was excited that she’d be able to stock up the pantry… And then we ended up hosting a family of Vietnamese refugees, and those food stamps intended for a family of four ended up supporting eight. Just goes to show that there’s always someone in greater need (though as it happens, they’re now millionaires).
Poor. Grew up on a farm with 6 other sibs. Step-dad was a worthless, abusive drunk. Mom worked hard at home, and at a job. Didn’t have a bathroom until I was 16 years old. We used an outhouse. We grew our own food. Didn’t get the fun stuff growing up like junk food, or toys. So, yeah. Poor.
I grew up under white trash who done did good. We were probably upper middle class, which made us pretty damned rich in Oklahoma. We drove on our vacations pulling a nice trailer. We had 3-wheelers to run around the riverbed. We had a house in the suburbs before we moved to a smaller farm town.
I went to private school for two years, and there I was poor. No Porsche, no ski-trips to Aspen, no maid, etc. My parents sold life insurance - they weren’t oil money, attorneys or bankers.
I then went to farm school, where I was in the top 10 of the rich kids at my school. This was weird for me, since junior high was all about being a nothing and now I was considered to a good catch for one of the girls from one of the local trailer parks.
Nowadays I see the same thing for my kids. We are lower upper class by income, housing puts us in what I would consider to be middle class, and my kids compare themselves to the richest kids around and ask me why we don’t go on vacation to the resort in Hawaii like a few of their friends go to.
Beats being poor like I was when I graduated. That is when our honeymoon apartment was a 2 bedroom shared with another grad student and our meal during the week was rice with something added.
Somewhere between working class and low middle class. We never went on real vacations, it was always to visit family. We did go to Germany but that was to spend summer with the grandparents and I suspect my grandfather subsidized those trips.
We had a 3 bedroom 1 bath home in a small town in Middle Tennessee. Our dad had retired from the military as an NCO and worked blue collar jobs. Our mom was a stay-at-home mom until they divorced and then she worked blue collar jobs including security guard, a seamstress in a shoe factory (my first job was in a the same shoe factory), cleaning lady, and as a clerk at Target. We had a garden every year.
On the other hand we always had two cars, and never worried about eating except right arond the divorce when things got rough for a while. I don’t recall qualifying for reduced lunch but I qualified for Pell Grants that paid my tuition and books while I lived at home and went to the local state university.
Small-town preacher’s kid. We didn’t have much cash, though we had a nice house provided by the church.
We always bought used, never went far for vacation (except Disneyword, once) and shopped at Jamesway, K-Mart and, if we were flush, Sears. If I wanted anything better, I could work for it. “Working-class” sounds right.
Solidly middle class. My dad made pretty good money, mom was stay at home. But my parents were depression brats, so we lived very thriftily. Recycling christmas paper and tree tinsel (used to fight over who got the one or two packets of new stuff we got each year to supplement what couldn’t be reused). Hand-me down or home made clothing most of the time. Never knew what a vacation was-- we just played outside in the summer, which was just fine. But never had to worry about food, clothes or any material needs.
Private (Catholic) schools for most of elementary school, but I’m not sure if that made us feel richer or poorer. Class sizes were huge, and the playground was usually the parking lot, with nothing but asphalt. Nothing fancy about those schools!!
Middle class. Dad was in management at a defense contractor, Mom was a stay-at-home mom. Public schools, community college, out-of-state state university. Vacations were in the back of a station wagon, towing a travel trailer, staying at state and national parks.
Poor, although not desperately so. We lived in a working class neighborhood, but my father was ill and couldn’t work. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide at night to support us six kids.
This was before food stamps, but we qualified for government surplus food. We ate a lot of canned mystery meat and government orange cheese in five-pound blocks. My mother was very inventive in making recipes with what we got. I never ate in a restaurant aside from a pizzeria or Chinese place until we took a high school class trip to see a play in Manhattan.
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By the time I graduated high school me, my grandmother and my youngest aunt were living in a two family house my two oldest aunts and one husband purchased in the Parkchester section of The Bronx. We were by then lower middle-class, I guess.
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We were near-neighbors then, since I’m from just north of Parkchester (although I had probably moved away by the time your family arrived).
Middle class when my parents were married. My father was a department supervisor for a a large food distribution company/grocer and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. House in the suburbs, sister in Catholic school (I was in public school because they had a gifted program my mom wanted me in).
Post divorce, we still had the house since my mom got it in the settlement but my mom worked a full time job and 1-2 part time jobs during any given week, bills went unpaid until they arrived in red envelopes and I learned a lot about stretching ground beef and eating buttered noodles. My mom worked in a call center, tended bar and sold crafts on the weekends (among other jobs). But we weren’t evicted, still lived in the nice neighborhood, my sister stayed in her school until she graduated out for junior high. I guess “working class poor”? Scraping by but one problem away from having the house of cards fall in on ya.
Lower middle class, I guess. Ten years before I was born, the family was poor. Meat was seldom served, rutabaga soup was common, no car, etc. My brother remembers it well. My father was a lumberman, and my mother was a ‘shopgirl’. Best thing that happened to her was when the asshole finally left. She took on two jobs and met a guy who wasn’t an earner, but was decent. He was a bartender, and she got into a state government job. By the time I was old enough to realize anything, we had food on the table, a decent small house, car, etc. Didn’t lack for anything.
My kids grew up the same way on military salary. No luxury, but never went without.
It’s a little weird in my situation. We lived middle class, on the low side. The smallest house in a neighborhood of medium sized houses. Parents were always worried about money, when gas went up it was time for SOS and other cheap nasty meals because the economy was about to collapse. They ran old beaters into the ground, my dad fixing them himself like a college student. I was in Jr. high before I really thought about it critically, because it was just the way things were, but I realized he had to make 2-3 times the neighborhood average , and still worried about money 2-3 times as much. Not cheap, but they were both emotionally scarred by being kids in the depression, and life was just a race to hedge as much as you can against the inevitable day when everything goes to hell.
They loosened up a bit while I was in college, but now in their older years they are turning into serious “horde gold and food because every single news story is further proof of the collapse of society” types They could be comfortable and enjoy what they have built , but that will never happen.
Ha, me too except it was crappy manse until one grandparent helped with a mortgage. Bumfuck California. My brother and I mowed lawns and paid for just about everything for ourselves. In other words, parents paid for household necessities and we bought our own clothes, spending money, food outside of the house, etc. I paid 100% of my own way through University.
Similar to Eve – including the same old-money neck of the woods – except my mother was the one who’d grown up poor (her parents were immigrants, and her father died when she was fairly young, so my maternal grandmother raised three girls while running a taproom in North Philly), and my father’s background, though DAR-eligible, was middle class. He was making very serious money while I was growing up, though.
The financial fortunes changed radically when I was in in jr. high, so I graduated from a public high school in San Diego and then the University of California, which I paid for myself, unlike my older siblings (boarding school and prestigious liberal arts colleges).
Same here, except it was a HS graduation lunch for the 5 or so “honor graduates” we had instead of 1 valedictorian. I was pretty nervous because I didn’t know what all the various forks were for. We weren’t poor, like you, but my parents had a very real Depression era mentality about spending money on frivolous things like restaurant meals.
Emphasis added. Is there something else about your father that you’d like to share with us?
Sorta, kinda educated working class, I guess. We were a bit outside the norm. My father had a PhD in physics from Cornell and my mother had at least some art school background, but they turned their backs on academia/professional life in favor of radical politics. After turning down a position a professorship at a university and a brief post-college stint as a professional working for a film company, my father spent a couple of years at an auto plant putting on bumpers, then transitioned into full-time political writing and copy editing for a pittance. My mother did a bit of the latter as well, occasionally supplementing that with working at frame shops, waitressing, and later in life reception/secretarial/typesetting. My later step-mother was firmly blue-collar including years on an auto line, my even later step-father was another typesetter/editor type ( with a degree from NYU ).
We were always renters ( sometimes apartments, sometimes houses ) and after my folks first separated I became well-acquainted with food stamps for the first year or two while living with my under-employed mother. That said we never went hungry, never went without heat or other utilities, I consistently got a small allowance when I was old enough and my divorced parents managed to dig up transportation fees to ship me from one end of the country to the other every summer.
Middle class. My father was a school principal. My mother worked very much outside of the home, but her income was so small it’s almost not worth talking about it. Principals do well, but with four kids, a house, two cars, and a wife that likes to shop, “well” could only go so far. But it was middle-class–including all the ups and downs that come with that.
Of course, as a kid I didn’t know much about the “downs”. I thought we were as middle-class as the Huxtables. Even when my mother pulled shifts delivering pizzas one year, I didn’t know we were in “hard times”. Maybe it was because we lived in a neighborhood where “hard times” were everywhere and very visible, and we stood out? It was only later that I realized all the cheap K-Mart clothes didn’t reflect my mother’s tastes.
But we did have it better when I was in high school. Cable TV, family vacations to places other than Indiana, orthodontics, and private violin lessons. My sister and I even got a car (to share) when we were 16. My older siblings didn’t have any of these privileges because they came up during the “hard times”. Oh well. They should have popped out later.
I will say this. My mother, intentionally or not, did a good thing by greeting all requests for things with, “I don’t know if we can afford that.” Or if we asked if we could go to McDonald’s for dinner, she’d say, “Do you have McDonald’s money?” It taught me that money can be exhausted and that wanting “big” can lead to disappointment.
My dad was a teacher so middle class by culture. The first house I remember was a semi detached with a mortgage but I was born in a council flat and my brother in a nasty damp rented flat (my parents got into the much nicer council flat after he had whooping cough and the doctor supported their application). Both my parents’ fathers died when they were young so their mothers were struggling widows, unable to give much financial help. Up until I was about ten I think my parents were struggling for day to day money. Mum was making her old dresses last, Dad rode a pushbike to work and grew vegetables on an allotment. He took an evening job coaching football (soccer if you must) to make ends meet, he continued to have a second job well into my teens.
Mum knitted some of our clothes and when she got a sewing machine made some too (but she wasn’t very good at that). Having grown up in wartime she was skilled at making food stretch and shopping for bargains. What I remember vividly is the arguments over money. I hated hearing them, quite often it was about mum wanting extra money for my clothes or hers. And there was a period when dad would come home to a better tea than the rest of us had, tucking in to bacon and sausages while my brother and I begged him for scraps. (I’m not blaming him for getting extra food, he would have a school dinner but being a sports master he went through a lot of calories).
Our house was heated by a couple of coal fires, there was no heating in the bedrooms or bathroom (quite common at the time). I remember in the winter when I was little mum would set the fire then heat up my clothes in front of it before calling me down.
I never thought we were poor however (and obviously still don’t) the poor kids came to school in torn plimsolls (sneakers?) even in the snow, they lived on the council estate (though not all the families on the estate were badly off). Their parents let them pick potatoes in the summer holidays from primary school – I thought it would be fun and couldn’t understand why I was forbidden.
Things got better by the time I was a teenager. Mum started a part time job. Dad’s salary went up as there were a number of increases in teacher’s pay and he became a department head. We’d almost always had a yearly holiday but we graduated from self catering in caravans to self catering in farm cottages. We even went to a hotel! We’d had a car ever since Dad got a job in the next town but we got a better one (I’ve a feeling the car wiped out most of the salary increase but increased our quality of life of course).
I did rather well out of mum’s job, from when I was around 14 she gave me an allowance for clearing up the breakfast things and making tea. I spent quite a bit of it on clothes and toiletries (so saving my parents some money) but she still bought the big things like shoes and coats.
So, struggling to keep up a lower middle class lifestyle, moving up to struggling to keep up a middle middle lifestyle.
They could be comfortable and enjoy what they have built , but that will never happen.