I need a good laugh here, so lets keep it light. What’s your funniest "we were/are so poor story? A couple from me
We were so poor we stole toilet paper from the gas station on the corner.
When we couldn’t get that, we used, coffee filters (scrape!), paper towels (don’t flush em), newspaper( …ouch! and your butt is black afterward) and God forbid, the ultimate, the cardboard from the old roll…ooooouuuuuch!
Ate at least 50 airline meals way before I was ever in a plane, (food pantry donations). When I finally got on a plane, after paying $350.00 for a ticket, I was like "WHAT the hell is this??? I paid 350 bucks and I got THIS???
We used to steal sweets from the grocery store when we were kids by dropping them in the hood of our ma’s parka. She was totally ignorant of what we were doing, they were always small things and she never noticed. UNTIL we left the store, and then we’d pull them out, and she would just freak out. She was very meek and afraid to go back and turn us in, but I guess we were just bad kids…
We always got something to wear, and something to play with at Christmas. One year we were so poor that I got a pair of Levi’s with a hole in the pocket…
You do not want to hear about the time I got sick and went to the ranch supply for antibiotics. Yes, I should have shopped around for a doctor that would let me carry a balance.
When I was 1, my mother was taken down to the fire station by the firemen to pick out Xmas toys for us. This was in the days when they took broken old toys and fixed them up, not like “new in box” rules of today.
My stepbrother and his halfsister would leave my baby stepsister in the bushes to steal bread from a truck parked outside a bakery at night.
BTW: My brother and I both received PhDs from schools in the top 10 in our fields and became college professors. Don’t ever blame your “humble beginnings” for your failures in life.
But anyhoo, my mom is very conservative to save money by not having to dispose of things if they could be washed or otherwise reused (maybe for something else).
Ex: Hand Paper Towels… if all the towel did was soak up water from our hands, she’d let it dry out and we could use it to clean something in the kitchen.
Ex: Zip-Lock bags… she would turn them inside-out and wash them, dry them, and re use them for the same food product. If she could, she’d re use them 30 times until they didn’t zip anymore.
Ex: Aluminum Foil: if possible, did not wrinkle it enough not to be spread out flat again… folded, and re used for <some>thing.
I guess the word i’m looking for is Frugal. She sure saved a lot of money by doing that, along with cutting and using coupons. But when i say saved, i mean, saved to BARELY make it until next pay check / government hand out. I miss govt cheese. (not the line though, )
Of course, throw in the stealing napkins and other ‘condiments’ from the local fast food restaurants.
Man, you’d think she was around to remember the depression… but she’s barely 50yrs old.
Growing up in a family with seven children, my mother didn’t have a job until we were all in school. We were so poor that we literally had to share the bath water (no shower). It was always a treat to get to use the water after mom because she liked to have the water scalding hot so when you got in it was still hot enough to get you fairly clean. If you were the unlucky one who had to wait until three of four others took their baths, it was pretty digusting. We never washed our hair in the bathtub, we used the sink instead, so that we didn’t get the bath water to gross.
We used to conserve water by taking a bucket out every time it rained and then using the water to wash our hair. Mom tried to use the reasoning that rain water was good for your hair, but we all knew the real reason.
I also didn’t know that everyone else used pillows on their beds because I never had one. It’s amazing the things you you take for granted in life.
We weren’t that poor either, but my mom still reuses things like plastic bags from the produce stand (she doesn’t buy Ziploc bags at all).
One year I found the perfect birthday card for her: “It’s your birthday, Mom! Go crazy! Throw away the plastic forks!” She was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak.
Mr. S’s family was so poor that people they knew who were on welfare used to give them food, clothes, etc. (His hardworking but alcoholic and illiterate dad was too proud to ask for “a handout” – they would have been better off on welfare.) The kids had to earn their own money for school clothes by picking cucumbers, shearing Christmas trees in the field, etc. The year one of his older sisters got married, his Christmas presents were a pair of gloves and a book.
Mr. S could probably come up with “better” stories than these, but quite frankly I know that he hasn’t even told me everything about what it was like to be so poor. It was not a fun time in his life.
I thought we were poor (6 kids) until my friend came for lunch (family of 9 kids). My friend was astounded about how we made tunafish sandwiches- apparantly his mom made 11 sandwiches from one can of tuna. How? I never found out!
…during one of our worst periods, we moved waaaay out into the boonies and lived in this old wood-frame farmhouse that had no central heat or air. I used to sleep in the living room in front of the fireplace, or sometimes in the kitchen, where we had an honest-to-goodness antique wood-burning stove. As long as you were within a six-foot-radius of the stove, you were toasty warm. Outside this radius, it was 10 degrees. Brrrr.
Another time, we moved into a friend of my mother’s house. There were 11 people sharing a two-bedroom house, and I had a pallet we fixed up on a treadmill where I slept. We lied to my elementary school and told them our phone didn’t work so they wouldn’t know we had moved out of district. I remember hiding food in my shoe boxes and sometimes I would get so hungry that I would lay on the couch for hours without moving, because the hunger was so great that every movement was torture. When we lived in the wood-frame house, our neighbor would shoot pigeons and bring them to us to eat.
Strange. I was just talking about this yesterday. When I was little, my mother was totally broke. She was on welfare while she was trying to make it through nursing school. I didn’t have a father, so our income was TINY. We had nothing. Sometimes, my mother would make “tomato soup” by mixing hot water and ketchup and serving it with a few crackers. Other times, my mother would make me a sandwich for dinner with the last two slices of bread and a few slices of government cheese. She would often go without meals so I could eat. Eventually, my grandfather stepped in and kind of yelled at my mother for not asking for help. I guess he’d had no idea how poor we actually were. One of the happiest days of my life was when we moved in with my grandparents and had hot meals every day, and enough for everyone. Heaven!
When I was a teenager I moved into a ratty house with some friends of mine, the owner was an alcoholic and we said we’d fix the place up instead of pay rent.
We installed one (very wobbly) toilet and lived there for months rent free. None of us had jobs. There was no heat so we burned stuff (furniture, pallets we found in the alley, etc) in the fireplace. The kitchen sink didn’t work so we washed dishes in the bathtub.
We tried to throw a rent party and charge people two bucks to get in, but someone stole the beer tapper and we ended up in the hole anway.
The landlord came one day for rent, and I had just come back from fishing. I had two nice big channel catfish in the sink. I gave him one as a rent payment and he staggered away happy. I now can honestly say I once paid the rent with a fish!
When I was a kid, my cousin and I would go into Wendy’s, ask for an empty bag, and proceed directly to the condiments to fill it up with free crackers!
)
:eek: