I went to university in California several years ago. All I got in the way of financial aid were loans (which I’m still paying off) and a grant that almost everyone qualified for that was about $1,000 a year. My income the year before was just under $14,000. I had to fight for even that as they wanted to factor in my father’s income, despite my having been completely independent and having basically no contact with him for three years.
I got no monetary support from my family whatsoever and I had to prove that I got nothing before the university would even consider dispensing aid. I had to write a letter of appeal and get four letters of testimony from people who knew both my father and me, and they almost denied my appeal on the grounds that two of the letters were from family members, my aunt and my uncle; they preferred that letters come from someone who was not family. :rolleyes: Yeah, everyone knows lots of people who are close enough to know intimate details about their familial relationships and financial support, but who are also not relatives.
If I hadn’t been slightly stubborn and willing to put in the considerable time and effort to push past all this crap, I wouldn’t have gotten anything, and I wouldn’t have been able to go to school. Even with the loans, it’s not like it’s a free ride. I have been paying about 20–25% of my after-tax income toward them for the last 6 years and I still have an outstanding balance.
Another hidden expense for the poor is transportation. Cars are sometimes cheaper and always much more convenient than public transport. I had to get from my house, close to SDSU, up to UCSD for a job during the last few months before graduating and going to Japan. On my motorcycle (bought because it was cheaper than any halfway decent car I could find) I could get there in 25–30 minutes, with a cost of $400 a year in insurance, probably less than a buck for gas, and pretty low maintenance. It cost me about $5.50 (if I remember correctly) and well over an hour of my time to take the bus round trip after I’d sold my motorcycle and had to rely on public transportation for my remaining time in the country.
That’s close to $1,500 a year for transportation that takes 2 or 3 times as long and is nowhere near as flexible. That cost is for a fixed trip between two points, with a transfer. If you have to go anywhere else, that’s an added cost. If I’d gone anywhere besides work and home, it would cost me another $2-something for each leg, effectively doubling the cost of my transportation for the day. It’s not that reliable either. Busses would come early or would sometimes be full, in which case the driver sometimes wouldn’t even stop. If you miss the bus because the driver was ahead of schedule and you weren’t right at the stop when the bus passed by (happened to me once, though I was actually early if the schedule had been followed properly) or couldn’t get on due to crowding, you were out of luck; you’d be late and there’d be nothing you could do about it.
A mental cost: the route schedule was complicated, hard to parse, and you had to know all the stops to be sure of getting off at the right one. It took me a few days to feel confident that I was going to make the right transfers, and I’m both educated and probably smart enough to qualify for Mensa membership. Imagine how hard it is for someone who isn’t all that intelligent or used to figuring out complicated information.
You guys who keep talking about how easy it is to make good, you’re incorrect and your attitude stinks. Entrepreneurship is a gamble. My parents worked their asses off for years to build up a business, and when my mother got cancer it all evaporated as fast as frost in sunlight. Her medical costs were mostly covered by health insurance, but without her my father and grandmother couldn’t keep the businesses running and had to sell everything, most of it at a loss. No further income, close to no realized profit, and nothing to show for over a decade of work. That’s what happens to a LOT of small businesses. Just because you were successful doesn’t mean everyone will be.
My family went from having to take government charity and foodstamps when I was a little kid and my father got laid off from GM; to being lower-middle class through taking a chance, borrowing money from anywhere they could get it, and putting in a lot of hard work (my mother typically worked 12 hour days six days a week, and my father had to commute an hour each way to a job he hated but kept for the medical and dental benefits); right back to wondering if we were going to have enough money for food next month. You’re sometimes poor just because life sucks, not through any fault of your own. Work, sacrifice, and planning only goes so far.