I’ll tell you the difference between cheap and expensive clothes. It’s rare to find well-made cheap clothes. Walmart is the worst. I never buy there anymore because I found stains don’t come out, holes magically appear, seams come unraveled with a few washings, and the colors fade.
Luckily we have Goodwill and Salvation Army stores where I get good deals on better brands. My luck is running out lately though since my daughter has to wear school uniforms that don’t exactly match 99% of the other local public schools. I’m hoping the PTA group will have some sort of exchange next year, but I don’t count on finding too many white polos without an abundance of stains. Who was the idiot who decided white polos were a good uniform choice? Uggh!
I have the same problems with shoes but I don’t get them used. I mean, I have, but my daughter has the cutest little duck feet so most shoes don’t fit her right, even good brands. Walmart, Payless, and Target shoes will fall apart within WEEKS, I kid you not. The rubber sole will detach at the toe more than anything. Sandal straps pop off. The fake leather starts peeling. I try to save up and buy her one good pair with some of those knock-off crocs or flip flops for playing in, but it’s not always easy. For instance we finally got a little extra money this week saved up for those uniforms but we had two blow-outs this week on the van. TWO! I guess the tires were just getting old and this heat weakened them even more. But anyway now I either can’t take her to school because we have no tires, or I can take her to school not in uniform for another week and hope nobody fusses. Obviously I’ll get the tires but some parents don’t think that way. I’m just glad we didn’t get them yesterday so we still have the extra $100 in the bank. Now, you may think that’s not enough for two tires for a big Econoline van, but it’s enough if we get lucky at the junkyard in the morning.
All the while, and let it be known I am not in any way exaggerating, my sweetheart is working on a roof with one tennis shoe I threw out because they were so old they’d gone from white to black and one brown loafer. My old shoe was too small so he cut the tip so his toe could have room. I will take a picture tonight when he gets home. Poor man needs some shoes but every week something comes up.
It’s just one thing after another with us and we can never seem to get ourselves pulled out of this mess. We’ve made huge mistakes in both our lives. I don’t want to come off like an innocent victim. But damn. I’m nursing an abscessed tooth right now with my old bottle of spiced rum I got for Christmas and some under-the-counter ampicillin from the Mexican store. There will be no dentist for me, just swishing with hydrogen peroxide, popping what I’m hoping are real antibiotics (they are, I’m getting better) and holding a shot of rum in my jaw every few hours. I’ve done this dozens of times over the past few years. I don’t even worry anymore.
Poor people aren’t just in the mountains or in the ghetto. I live in a poor neighborhood but our neighbors are clean and neat people who keep their yards nice. We had one group of troublemakers but they moved last week. People might think we’re doing okay but we’re living on the edge here and that is no fun when you hit forty and can’t find a job for almost a year.
There IS some luck to it. I’ve lived this way long enough to know. I’ve screwed up a lot in my life but some things that have happened were bad things out of our control. That’s what I see as bad luck, not some curse cloud chasing me.
Beer and reefer do not come in to my house, by the way. I don’t buy lottery tickets. I’ve only been to a casino once, on my 21st birthday. I played nickel slots and had a dry steak dinner. It was too crowded and loud for my liking.
I don’t waste money; I just don’t make enough to cover dumb bad luck and past screw-ups. Like these tires. I should have bought new ones. Or at least gotten two spares just in case we have two blow outs. (How many people out there carry two spares?) We’re lucky the van still runs anyway. This van was new when I was in high school. I’m forty. We have a car too, but it failed inspection; the emissions, and nobody has been interested in buying it except the junk yard. We think it’s worth more to keep than junk though so we’ll hold on to it a while longer, hoping we can finally figure out how to get it through inspection. Hoping it doesn’t need a new motor. The van failed too at first but after a little work we got it through the second time.
And this crazy bad luck with cars has spread to my daughter, who scrimped and saved and I helped her with my tax refund so she could get a better car. Which within the first couple months has had several issues, including one morning finding a big crack across the windshield. She said she hadn’t noticed any little cracks so we don’t know how it happened. It’s just crazy little shit like that that pile up. And I know it happens to everyone, but when you don’t have the money to fix one thing then five new things pop up on top of it unless you have credit or someone to give you a loan it keeps you from getting ahead. If you’re* lucky*, you’ll at least float instead of sinking.
I don’t have ambition though you’re right. I don’t know HOW to get it either.
I can look at my father’s side of the family and see how luck has played out VERY plainly.
My father had four sisters (one died a while ago), and a brother (who died last year). They grew up poor, in small town Indiana. My grandfather worked at a dry cleaners and my grandmother did a lot of things, but I think she spent a lot of time working at a nursery school.
The family was African American, by the way. All seven of them lived crammed in a two-bedroom bungalow with a converted attic.
My father: the youngest. The lightest-skinned kid in the family. “Damn-near white”, as folks used to say back in the day. He couldn’t pass in his small town, where everyone knew everyone else, but he could go to another town across the way and do that. He used to hook up with white girls, who (according to him) would do things that black girls wouldn’t. But that’s besides the point. He “blended in” well against the white backdrop of his high school. Seriously, in group pictures he does not stand out at all. I imagine that his blackness, because it was so subtle, was treated as a novelty more than a threat. His teachers nurtured him intellectually and told him he could be something. So that’s one lucky break he got in life that has followed him through life. Being an ambiguous-looking black person has more advantages than people think.
Second break: he was born the youngest and was thus spoiled rotten. And being a boy, he could do no wrong. He used to get into lots of scrapes, as youngsters often do, but was only arrested once while his friends got into more trouble. I think it’s probably because he was clever enough to talk his way out of stuff, but his parents sticking out their necks for him probably helped too.
Being male and being the youngest, he didn’t have the burdens that his older siblings dealt with (like having a younger sibling to raise). By the time he rolled around, his mother probably had seen enough to know that she needed to have one kid “make it” out of poverty. So she forced him to go to college. No one else in his family got that treatment–his brother Jackie went to the Army right after school and his sisters got married, as was the custom back in those days. My father didn’t want to go, but if Mama ain’t happy, no one is happy. So he got a deferment and didn’t get drafted into the war. Where he could have gotten killed or turned out like poor Jackie, severely disabled by paranoid schizophrenia no doubt precipitated by the stresses of war and recreational drugs.
Third break: Where he lived. His friends, his running buds, lived right around the corner from him. They went to the same grammar school and had the same teachers. Like the gang in that movie Stand By Me, my father and another kid in the gang were the “smart” ones, while the other one was the goof ball. But high school came and for some reason, the boys were splintered off into two different high schools. My father was able to go to the “good” high school, where he was put on the college prep track. His friends were sent to the “bad” high school, where they both floundered intellectually. Neither went to college. My father did.
Fourth break: He was not cursed with the mental illness genes that plagued not only his brother, but his father (supposedly) and two of his sisters. Genes which he has unfortunately passed down through his own progeny. One sister had a nervous breakdown after her husband left her with three kids, and had to be institutionalized. She never quite recovered from that; even when she was a lot younger than she is now, she always seemed a bit “frail” to me. Another sister (the one who died) was a hypochondric, chronically depressed and anxious, an alcoholic, smoked like a choo-choo (she died from right-lung pneumonia), and was severely addicted to scratch-and-lose lottery tickets. I mean, she probably spent thousands of dollars over her adulthood scratching off reams and reams of those things. Out of all the people in the family, not counting my institutionalized uncle, she was probably the poorest of the bunch. So right off the block, my father was lucky because he had “good” genes, combined with intelligence that was matched by no one else in his family.
Now, he has two sisters that ended up moving up from poverty as well. For them, being attractive women helped because they didn’t have to settle for some slob. One got a job with AC Delco while her husband got a job as a letter carrier, and the two of them were able to raise three independent, successful children. The other married a white guy in the military, had a slough of kids (all boys), and never had to work outside the home her whole life. Now her boys aren’t all doing well–part of it has to do with the family “curse”, perhaps–but they were definitely brought up in a middle-class lifestyle. Both of my aunts are still married to those same two fellows, just as my father is still married to my mother after more than 40 years. If my two aunts had been ugly hags, been burdened with illnesses like their other sisters, or had hooked up with lazy men, then things would have turned out quite differently for them. So luck not only benefited my father, but benefited them too.
That’s not to say that my father didn’t make good choices, or that everything that happened to him was because of luck. After all, he chose to major in education. He chose to marry a “good” woman rather than some bimbo, and he chose not to break his marriage vows (as far as I know). He also chose to move AWAY from his small town and go to the big city, where more opportunities were. We recently visited his home town for a family reunion and he told me that things hadn’t changed that much since he had moved away. Same guys on the corner. Same crumbled buildings. Some restlessness and hopelessness. I think he went through a bad period awhile ago when he felt guilty for leaving behind his folks, but he knows he did the right thing for him and his family.
So yeah, luck is important. But it’s not the end-all, be-all. I don’t think anyone’s been saying that.
Heh I don’t know man, I love to read too. I just didn’t know what to do with all that book learnin’.
I try really hard not to cling to stereotypes. I’m sure there are a lot more people like you out there. Unfortunately I have a lifetime of much more negative experiences with wealthy people. I wonder if you and my friend being so compassionate (or whatever word I can’t conjure up right now that would better suit you) is because you know where we’re coming from. Mig, who is in everything but paper my husband, had it so much worse as a child and he’s so much more compassionate than I could ever be.
But I don’t know, some people come from the same and turn bitter cold.
I don’t understand. Why would you only give those two choices? Why was this on a standardized test essay? And hard work or luck…what? Which makes you more financially successful? Have their actually been studies done on this?
Years ago I also scored tests for high school students. Career assessment tests. They tested skills and did an interest inventory. Most of the female students at the time wanted to “do hair” and the young men wanted to be professional wrestlers. I always found it rather sad that by 12th grade most of these students had no clue what they really wanted or what they might be naturally good at. What’s worse, many of them had already started families by then.
Huh. Ya know I don’t feel like I have enough energy.
How does one un-lazify oneself?
Did that Forbes fella come from a poor background to know what he was talking about? I don’t really know much about his early life.
I have worked three part time jobs at one time. It sucked. My daughter never saw me, I spent so much more on fast food and gas and day care that it was pretty much pointless. I couldn’t keep up. I guess it could have been laziness.
Or, ya know, exhaustion. Damned if I didn’t get rich off it though!
I don’t know the specifics of your situation but maybe having a child when if you need to work 3 jobs to support her isn’t the best decision. Especially when you say you “don’t have any ambition”.
To answer your question on how you “find ambition”, it’s about setting and achieving goals. What is the minimum salary you would require to live a reasonably comfortible lifestyle? What jobs pay that kind of salary are within your interest and ability? What steps would you need to take to prepare for a career in those jobs? And then you go about actually doing those steps.
I find it interesting that these students don’t believe that becomming a rapper or NBA basketball player doesn’t require an enormous amount of hard work.
The problem is that these people don’t believe that anything in their life is under their control. “Luck” absolves them of any responsibility to take charge of their lives.
I didn’t say I was perfect, and I’m not playing a victim. I got married young to another kid; he was in the military and we were silly young people who thought our lives were set. She’s 21 now. My second daughter was a surprise. I used protection with my SO but clearly it failed. Now see THIS is what I see among my poor friends. We keep making babies we can’t afford. I did try at least, but I know I could have had an abortion both times. I know.
I really didn’t understand ambition as setting goals and keeping them. I just never knew. I assumed it was some burning desire I was lacking.
I don’t set goals because I don’t really keep them. I’ll try to work on it. I just feel so apathetic about it all. I’ve always been perfectly fine with not having much. I’ve always just made it through somehow. But lately it’s been pretty bad and I’m getting worried I’ve waited too long.
Another piece of bad luck that can stall someone’s progress from moving up from poverty:
Using birth control (like the Pill), when you are married and already have your “planned” number of kids. And then oops! You become pregnant again! And you’re just barely holding on as it is.
Happened to my parents. They had their 2.5 kids and didn’t want anymore. My mother became a diligent user of the Pill. I’m guessing it worked well during the six years after my parents adopted my brother (because they wanted a boy and already had a girl). Then viola! They had magical, Pill-resistant twins. Maybe my mother skipped a day or something. Or maybe we just busted through against all odds and no amount of progesterone was going to stop us! She wisely got her tubes tied after we popped out.
Now it turns out my father’s career was rising in prestige, if not salary, at the time. But even then, he picked up part-time work in addition to his vice-principal gig to support his suddenly expanded family. (My mother worked as a social activitist, off of grants, and was lucky if she could get minimum wage from month to month). Imagine going to McDonald’s and seeing your middle school vice-principal behind the counter, not as a manager, not as a cashier, but as a fry jockey! And he got fired too, for eating the fries one too many times. He also worked at Sears selling carpets. I must have been barely four years old, but I remember visiting him while on the job and being impressed at all the carpet scraps. I’m guessing they had done the proper budgeting and everything, but had not allowed for unexpected pregancies (especially twins). So that’s why there was the scramble to bring more money into the house. If my father had been content with just his nine-to-five, we might have had to stay in that small house in the “bad part of town” instead of eventually moving to a bigger house in a slightly better part of town. In other words, we might have spent more time in the “lower middle class” phase of our family’s history. So really, it’s a story about bad luck mitigated by wise choices. Without the latter, the former can only spiral out of control.
Would you care to elaborate why or did you just come here to threadshit by making inane posts?
I can certainly have compassion for people who are less fortunate, however that compassion tends to fall short when I see people making the same dumb mistakes over and over again that contribute to their situation.
I don’t know who Patrick Bateman is, but you are coming off as kind of a jerk whether you care to know or not. You presented some of the biggest stereotypes about poor people in your OP and when offered other reasons why we may be poor you make snarky comments, such as what you said about me having a kid when I worked three jobs, as if I got knocked up while I was working those jobs. I don’t know if you ordinarily have loads of compassion but it’s not evident in your words here. It seems more like you’re deliberately trying to stir up ire here, not look for real answers.
And that’s cool. You don’t offend me. I’ve known many, many people just like you.
The thing is, economics is a soulless science that has no compassion. The basic model works on rational actors. Doing stupid stuff (not judging you, just stating in general) isn’t rational. Compassion is also not rational, and it causes market interference. Really, the most rational thing is not to do stupid stuff in the first place.
But, what happens if you didn’t know that, and already did the stupid stuff? Can you become a rational actor despite meeting current obligations? Yeah, there are ways. Give the kid up for adoption. That’s certainly not compassionate to you, but it’s really quite rational. (Again, you provide a good example framework, and that’s not intended specifically to pick you on you!)
I think you may be right. if I’m the agency who approves or denies applications, and I have 6 that are filled out wrong that I can deny, that’s 6 x however many dollars in assistance that I can delay paying out.
Not to mention the fact that the “it’s not likely to get better” mindset combined with the overwhelming application process makes a lot of people reluctant to open their mail and deal with the applications. An envelope from the state is not going to contain good news, so I’m going to let it sit on the kitchen table for a while. Then I lose it. Then I forget about it. Then I find out that that envelope I didn’t open was a reapplication for my health insurance and I got kicked off the plan and I either have to pay cash for my medicine, go without, or incur some debt. Oh, and I’m supposed to go in person to reapply now, but the office is only open 8 - 4:30 and I’m supposed to be at work during those hours and my boss doesn’t like me to miss work and I don’t want to push it with him.
A lot of the families I used to work with made similar purchases. But again, since they didn’t have credit or money saved up, their option was to make these purchases through someplace like Rent-a-Center, which ended up costing 3x as much in the long run.
Well, it may be true that online courses have made it easier, but many of the adults I work with now have no reliable way of completing the work for online courses. Even the computers at the library require sign-up times and you have to be there when the library is actually open. Having online coursework helps, but they’re not accessible to everyone.
And, yes, many youth and young adults have to choose—short-term cash vs. longer-term potential for more. It’s hard as hell to plan for the long-term. Community Colleges are not free. Books cost money. I’ve seen a lot of people decide that the* possibility* of improved job outlook they might get with an Associate’s Degree isn’t compelling enough when stacked against the time, cost, and enduarnce needed. Education is frequently longer, slower, and more expensive for working adults than people realize.
My parents come from the Greatest Generation. The grew up in the Depression, both enlisted in WWII and took advantage of the GI Bill after the war. My mother really never worked after she got married, although several hobbies of hers turned into money-making ventures (money that went to pay for bills and money saved so as a family could have a yearly vacation). My father climbed the ladder although his career never did blossom as he had hoped. In his case, it wasn’t due to a lack of trying as much as it was because of several bosses who were just complete assholes. Yet, when he died he had 50 pall bearers, thousands of cards and letters and a family that knew the value of a dollar, and the importance of an education. He also left my mother a fully paid home, a retirement where she lives comfortably (and then some) and kids who continue to build on what our parents taught us.
People claim being poor today, but still must have those immediate desires fulfilled, no matter what. You want poor? Poor is having two sets of clothes growing up through high school, and that’s it. It means washing one set at night (so that it dries on the line outside) while you go to school wearing the other set. Poor is walking to and from school, rain or shine. Poor is saving money to buy a book (maybe once a month) and that’s your entertainment. No TV, no radio, no movie tickets. Of course, it’s also making things with your hands, fixing things with your hands when it breaks, using your imagination because you don’t have any money. And when you’re old enough to work, after the military, it’s living with your married brothers and sisters (and kids), working during the day and going to night school. Yeah, that was my Dad.
What my parents taught us which now carry over to their grandkids is really rather simple. You work for want you want in life because no one will give it to you. You buy what you need and not what you want. And if you want it, you save up to buy it so by the time you can buy it and pay for it (in total), you’ve thought it through long enough that you really never needed it for you as much as wanted it to show it off to others. I live my life today the same as my Dad did. Yeah, I had more money growing up than he did at the same age. As an adult I have way more money than he did at the same age, too, because of hard work and the value of a dollar. It never came down to “a break” from someone. You need it? You go after it. You do without in the meantime. You want it? Can you afford it? Do you want it for yourself or for others? And can you pay for all your needs first and get what you want with something extra saved?
Yes, I know poor. I know what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck. Been there, done that. Never again, no matter what. Yet I also see “poor” everyday, yapping on an iPhone, wearing expensive clothes, driving hot cars and living in shithouse homes held together with the dirt that is never cleaned away. Yes, some are poor because of limited choices. I see far more poor because of their own choices that the here and now is more important, the ego is more important than the self-worth, that the rabbit is somehow better than the turtle.
I think one prime reason is that kids tend to live up to what is expected of them. If a child grows up in an environment where he is not really expected to work hard in school, no one is available to help with homework, no one really encourages him to play an instrument, take an advanced math class, etc. why would he? Most kids are not self-motivated, no matter what their economic background. It takes training and showing by example for a child to know how to live. If kids are surrounded by parents and teachers with high expectations, kids will grumble about it but will generally meet those expectations. Lower the bar and they won’t set their sights any higher.
Kids often have to be shown that they can do something before they get excited or motivated about it. I am willing to bet that the kid who ‘pulls himself out of poverty’ actually had someone in his life who was an example. A poor child in a middle class school will likely do much better just because he is surrounded by examples and begins to change his mindset about what is normal and possible. The same child in a poorer school is getting shown a different example of what is normal.
It is easy to say poor people should just know better because they can look around and study rich people and see they are doing things wrong. But unless they have people they know at least around, showing by example, the lessons on how to be rich are going to be drowned out by their friends and family showing them how to be poor. Sure they look and see people with more money, but it is like studying another culture. You don’t really think it applies to you.
Once you know how to be rich, it is easier to do. There are tons of stories about rich people losing it all and rebuilding it, sometimes dozens of times. But they never call themselves poor, just broke. They know they can make it again. But people who grew up poor don’t know that. It’s not ‘head knowledge’, it is layers of self image and low expectations.
What if your Dad hadn’t taught you those values, but instead taughtt you the opposite? What if your Dad taught you that there’s no reason to work, because people will just give you what you want. Buy whatever you want now, because there’s no sense worrying about the future, because you can’t do anything to change your fate. And so on.
What kind of values do you think you’d have now, if your parents and grandparents hadn’t taught you your values? Do you think you’d have figured these out for yourself? How do you think your life would be different if your parents tore you down and held you back instead of building you up? Do you think you’d end up pretty much exactly where you are now, with only a bit more effort required?
