I’m the guy that started that rumor. Sorry about that. I tried to correct it with a later post, but I fear that the damage was already done through my initial miscalculation.
Sorry to hear about your financial difficulties. I know how it is because I’ve been there.
Growing up, my father made about $30K per year, and my mom volunteered at a local hospital. When I was in middle school, my father developed a medical condition that required him to retire from his job, and made finding other employment pretty difficult. He worked a total of about 9 months over the next 8 years. After about a year and a half of having a family income of $0, my mom was able to talk the hospital administration into paying her the princely sum of $13,000 per year. And just two years after that, she got a 2% raise.
Our family of 5 (2 parents, 3 boys) lived in a 1500 square foot “house.” I put house in quotation marks because there were often holes in the roof and walls that we couldn’t afford to get fixed. We almost never ran the heater during winter (we’d wear coats in the living room), or the air conditioner in the summer (in Texas, that’s pretty unpleasant). So our “house” didn’t offer much protection from the elements. Also, the plumbing didn’t always work, so we didn’t always have running water. Cable tv? We had a radio. When we finally got a tv, we only got one station (which came in fuzzy).
We almost never had new clothes for the first day of school. When my shoes would split or get holes in them, I’d use duct tape. Our telephone wasn’t always turned on. One Christmas, my parents wrapped up things that we already owned and gave them to us as presents. We didn’t always have snack food in the cupboards, but there was always food on the table for dinner, even if it was frequently low grade meat mashed into hamburgers, or chopped into tacos, or ground into generic-brand hamburger helper.
As for medical care, my mom worked at the hospital, so doctors would usually see us free of charge (or at very small expense). But I didn’t see a dentist for 10 years after my father “retired.”
I could go on, but here’s the point – as bad as I had it, there were others that had it worse. My parents were smart and industrious people that could stretch a dollar. We had free schools to attend, beds to sleep in, food on the table, clothes on our backs, and as corny as it sounds, it made me realize what’s important in life, and what’s really necessary. Cable TV isn’t necessary. Cell phones aren’t necessary. Nice clothes aren’t necessary. A new car isn’t necessary. If you think you’re poor because you don’t have any of these luxuries, you’re crazy. Our family of 5 would have thought that we were the Rockefellers if we had $19,600 per year.
My mom spent some time growing up in the Phillipines and Thailand, and some of those people had it bad. Compared to them, even the poorest people in America live like royalty. And here’s another amazing thing about America – my older brother went to one of the best colleges in the nation on an athletic scholarship, my younger brother went to one of the best colleges in the nation on the government (military academy), and I went to a great college and grad school totally on student loans. I now earn well over the $92K per year “threshhold.” I send some money home every month, and I also have monthly student loan payments that would knock your socks off, but guess what? I’m 28 years old, and I’m freaking rich.
