A bit of an extended illness ate into my savings. I had money once, I’ve collected more than one six-figure cheque from my brokers. What was left went into solving a liquidity crisis due to the fact that . . .
My employer is a cheapskate. Eight years in this field and I’m making less than the mean entry-level salary for someone in this city in my field. When I quit, everyone will know it and why.
I didn’t finish my secondary education. I know financially I’d be making more money now if I had, but with about 10-15 years to go before retirement, and weighing in all factors such as quality of life and physical ability, it’s now not likely that I’ll do that. So if I wanted to make more money than I do, I"ll have to do it by working harder, more hours, a second job etc.
Poor life choices in my 20s - a degree with no real career attached to it, married the wrong guy too young, had a child when I wasn’t prepared for it. Always took the path of least resistance.
Didn’t really start my life until my early 30s. The rest of it was just marking time, working crappy jobs and being to apathetic (and tired, to be fair, with a baby who didn’t sleep well and had other issues) to do much about it.
I’m lucky enough to have found a great job that pays very well, despite all my screwups in life. If I’d applied myself in high school and continued getting straight As in junior and senior year, I very possibly could have gotten a scholarship to a decent college. As it was, I went to community college in my mid-20s, but couldn’t hack trying to make a living and going to school, and quit after a year.
But if I’d have finished college, I honestly doubt my career would have panned out as well as it has in reality. I have been incredibly lucky in my career path, in that I’ve found a job that pays very well, that I have a natural acuity for.
Maybe I would be living a lot more comfortably if my wife and I spent money a bit less impuslively - our savings are quite low, and we’re living fairly month-to-month these days since we had to pay off the bills from the birth of our last kid. But overall, no complaints.
I’m poor as shit, but the reason is that I’d rather have a bunch of free time (ca. 80 hours per week) to read/write and study music than use the time making money. It’s 100% a choice – I’m single and don’t need/want a lot of money to take care of housing and food and clothes.
In my case there are no “class barriers” per se.
I work/earn to live. I don’t work to save, or live to work.
Right now I’m working on location (as usual) and have access to a flat in pretty bad shape owned by my agent, placed 1h away from work by subway and shared with two people, one of whom is a quite unpleasant coworker; zero rent. Yesterday I signed the contract to rent a recent-build studio half an hour walk from work, unshared. I gain one hour, get to walk for one hour every day, and get to relax while at home rather than walk on eggshells: the rent is absolutely worth it.
I recently rejected a job which would have had rates 2x as high as my current one plus expenses, plus travel home every week (the current job’s rate is all-inclusive), because it was for a former client whose name still makes my fingers itch for a flamethrower. Yes, if you’re going to be a whore better be an expensive one… but there are acts not every whore will perform. (Btw, I’m not the only one who feels like this about that company: the agents trying to hire for them got the bollocks to claim it’s “not them” - well, no, it’s just a wholly-owned subsidiary! :p)
My mother is an emotional and financial vampire. We have now put a stop to her draining, but the process was costly.
I’ve roamed around quite a while, changed careers twice, dropped out of grad school… the reasoning has sometimes involved family duty, sometimes “I want to die being able to say I lived”, sometimes both.
I’ve spent the last 5 years (from age 28-33) supporting my wife though a medical degree.
The course itself has not been cheap, but it also means we’ve lost out on her potential earnings for that same period (if she’s stayed in her old job).
It’s meant that I’ve been unable to pursue other career opportunities or go freelance due to a need for us to have a secure income during that time. My wife had one shot at becoming a doctor, and my career has been geared towards utter stability to ensure we got there.
We also have a 3 y/old who is in nursery full-time: this is a significant cost which has not been offset by a second income, and due to the often unusual hours involved in being a medical student, I’ve had to be in a position to leave the office at 5pm every day. This means I could not take a job involving travel or client-site work; or a job that requires out-of-hours or late working (all of which would pay significantly more).
But… I really enjoy my job, I work for a great firm in a great team in a role I’m good at, so I have no desire to jump ship just for the money. Unlike many of my peers I get to put my young daughter to bed every night (which is something I will never, ever regret being able to do), and I’m also able to be out on a tennis court or at a cub scout meeting 3-4 nights a week if I want.
My wife graduated med school this summer and has started work at a local hospital, so already our income has increased significantly (and will continue to do so for the next few years). Childcare costs are dropping as daughter nears school age, which is also improving our bank balance.
And we’ve managed to get through these 5 years without incurring any significant debt, which makes me feel “richer” than quite a few of our friends who’ve graduated with a hefty debt behind them.
We’ve bought a house, and I’ve been able to maintain a modest upward trajectory in my career which has left me well placed if I want to push on in the next couple of years.
It’s all a balancing act, but there’s more to life than just money.
Good question!
Firstly, I think I would have been richer than I am now if my parents had put more focus on my education. I was identified as gifted in my first couple of years of school, and it was suggested that I should be sent to a different school for gifted children. My parents decided not to do that.
Throughout my childhood, I never had the impression that my intellect was really valued by my parents or something to be proud of, so I only ever did the minimum work required, which put me in the middle of the top stream at high school.
I probably would have done a lot better at school and therefore potentially gone on to a more intellectual degree and job than doing a Bachelor of Arts and drifting a bit from job to job.
I think my parents felt that being a well-rounded person was more important than being top of the class or getting a high paid job, and they focussed a lot on developing my social skills, etc, which were somewhat lacking.
Secondly, I never really got a good financial understanding either from school or my parents. My parents never discussed money - I knew we weren’t rich but we weren’t dirt poor either. I never did any home economics type classes in high school - I was in the top stream which did Latin instead. Gee, that was useful. It didn’t occur to me that I needed more information about managing finances.
In my mid-twenties, my husband and I did a lot of ‘hire purchases’ and had our credit cards constantly maxed out. It wasn’t until our late-twenties that we realised we couldn’t keep living this way, so we went on a bit debt reduction drive. We’ve been debt-free except for our student loans for a good five years now and that feels great. However, we are still renting rather than owning a house, which isnt’ good.
So those are my two reasons for not being richer than I currently am. I’m happy with reason number one, but not so happy about reason number two.
Working: I’d probably be another pay grade higher (maybe two) if I’d gone straight to university rather than the military first, which delayed the career a bit. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the military, I’d probably never have stumbled into my current career.
Entrepreneurship: This is where I’d stand the most chance of really striking it rich; I could do it. On the other hand, I live great now and am managing to save for the future, so I actually have a lot more risk aversion than I would have if I were a lot younger/poorer.
Our son.
Me and my husband both work parttime so our son isn’t in daycare fulltime. That takes achunk out of our salary. Daycare costs a lot too. These past three years have not been a time when we could save, but instead a time to dig into our savings.
It will get better when he goes to school, next year.
I did a degree in a field I was interested in, rather than one with a defined career path (oh, the humanities!)
I didn’t pursue any internships while I was studying, preferring to work in a hotel with my girlfriend at the time.
On graduating, I moved out of my parents’ house straight away and got the first minimum-wage job I could find, rather than shopping around for graduate-level jobs.
My current position is partly commission-based, but the majority of accounts I work on are on a payment per day basis rather than payment by results. I get a guaranteed commission from those accounts, but obviously I can’t increase it by having an awesome month, so the carrot of uncapped commission isn’t a major plus.
I’m in a small company, so even though I have “manager” in my title I don’t pull the wage you’d expect. I’m happy with that setup as I don’t have the responsibilities you’d expect either 
So yeah, I’ve drifted into where I am now, and I’m maybe not as rich as I could be, but I’m able to pay my bills and I’m reducing my overdraft month by month, so I’m in a pretty sweet position for a recent graduate with very little ambition. Most of my friends are still in academia or related jobs, so I never feel under-paid (although I envy their flexible schedules).
We made a bunch of not-so-great choices over the years - trying twice to start businesses, changing houses like socks for a few years, changing cars even more often for a few more years, not making an effort to save, so we had to borrow when we got in a pinch… As I look back, I can probably pick the specific bad decisions we made which cascaded into other bad options, but there’s not a lot we can do about it now.
Fortunately, none of the decisions were bad enough to bankrupt us. I’m now retired, my husband has a good job that he enjoys, we’ve refinanced our house after making all the requisite improvements to cover the next 25 years or so, and we have a nice chunk of change in savings. Knowing then what we know now… oh well.
In my case, a double-whammy: poor parents (probably the single greatest factor in why people are poor) and lifelong personality disorder problems. My whole life I’ve varied between being lower-middle-class and outright poor, depending on luck, while my two sisters managed to make something of themselves.
Another reason,
While I don’t live lavishly, we do spend. We have two professional incomes in the house currently. If we lived on $12k a year (there are four of us, I figure we’d need a little more than that to live minimally), we could stash a LOT more. These aren’t poor choices for us, but we are valuing “doing and having stuff” over “acquiring wealth.”
And, like most people, we’ve had our share of luck - bad and good. I’m currently losing my shirt on a house my brother in law lives in - he has cancer and can’t work.
I was very poor when I was young, which made me quite hungry for more. My husband and I have worked hard and had some luck, so we are better off than some. But we are also quite under water on a rental house that we bought as an investment. That didn’t work out so well.
So we may not be one illness away from total poverty, but without a change in our current income pretty soon, we will have to start making some cuts in order to survive to retirement age. Scary to think about. Being poor sucks really bad.
Lack of ambition and lack of courage to move to a new area combined with a horrible economy. The town where I live in is not a hotbed for the field I studied in college so opportunities aren’t that great.
At the same time, I did spend a few months looking for work in San Diego, which is one of the best cities in the US for people trained in my field. And the job openings were more numerous, but they paid less per hour than I make in my current job in podunkville, plus SD has higher living expenses. From what I’ve seen looking up the areas that are better for my field the jobs really don’t pay much better per hour while the living expenses in some of those areas (Boston, San Diego, SF) can be much higher. So I don’t know if that is a solution. I would have more room for advancement in those cities though.
Lack of ambition too, I have been more focused on personal work than career lately. But I don’t know if that is lack of ambition as much as my career not being my highest priority right now. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi.
This thread is actually incredibly comforting. I’ve been looked down upon all my life for not having ambition. I can’t help it so I don’t care, you can’t make yourself have that kind of drive (not for too long anyway) but it’s soooo nice to hear other people in the same boat. Not all of us has got a huge drive.
Does the OP have any comments? Advice? Suggestions?
I do have to say, I am always extremely surprised and disappointed at all of the people throughout my life who give me bad advice. And not bad advice like “Invest in this,” but bad advice like “You should buy a house!” House buying I think sometimes is the biggest scam in the world if you go into it blind; they say you will own the house (not for 30 years!) they say you never have to pay rent again (mortgage!). And that doesn’t count all of the various costs. I don’t pay property taxes while renting, nor school taxes, and if something major breaks, I call the landlord, not a plumber.
My aunts, who were the biggest pushers of this, bought a huge two story house in Colorado - and now they can’t sell it for love or money.
Then the other really really bad advice I get is “You should have kids.” 'Scuse me? You don’t know anything about my financial situation and I know kids are enormously expensive to raise, even if you raise them frugally.
I am not “one illness” away from major poverty…but of course a prolonged sickness would drive us into the poorhouse. No one can afford those medical bills and it is to laugh. We do both have 401Ks and both have savings accounts and we do put money in them constantly. We even save for our nephew and niece - it won’t be a huge amount of money we can give them, but some is better than none.
I’m another who’s just never really felt the pull to get more money- I can totally trace this to my Grandfather, who had the ambition to be, basically, the richest corpse in the graveyard. He worked in well paying jobs no-one else was prepared to do (which sometimes worked out - like 6 month shifts in Saudi Arabia, hell for most of his contempories, but suited him great) and never ever spent anything. He literally wore £1 jeans, still no idea where he even found them, he lived like he was below the poverty line. He was the person with the highest net worth I knew, and got almost no pleasure out of it. My parents started their own business, doing something they loved, and only took home pay averaging half the local minimum wage each for 5 years, and still managed holidays to Kenya, Costa Rica, Madagascar, the Carribean, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, India, and a few more, all in the past 15 years, just by being good at prioritising, and doing fun things on the cheap.
So far, to age 28, I’ve just drifted; I’ve travelled, I’ve worked in interesting jobs, I have virtually no qualifications. I’m thinking I should learn a trade (apparently plumbing, especially if you’re female, is pretty lucrative here), because I know I’m reasonably smart, though largely I wan to have it as a back-up plan, because trying to live an interesting life is pretty inherently risky. I want to at least have a shot at buying a house sometime, I don’t like renting; but that is my only financial ambition.
I’m choosing to spend my time on getting an advanced degree, so right now I’m poorer than I probably could have been if I’d chosen to stay in the workforce at the job I hated but did reasonably well. My fiancee is an attorney, but she works in a relatively low-paying field, so we’re not making what most people would think of as lawyer money.
We’ve both made our choices and we’re happy with them.
Also, I could be a brilliant catcher for the New York Yankees except that my progress was blocked by Jorge Posada and my lack of ability.
Wife and are are quite comfortable financially. If I was to look for a reason that we are not more rich than we are, I’d chalk it up to ambition, too, and maybe a little bit of risk aversion.
I have a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. “How is that not ambitious,” you’re wondering. Near the end of undergrad, I chose to pursue an M.S. in grad school. Why? cuz I didn’t want to get a job and start being an adult. I was a (financially) poor student, but I still preferred that life over actually getting a job.
Near the end of my M.S., my advisor asked if I wanted to stay on for a Ph.D. I did. Why? Cuz I still didn’t want to get a job and start being an adult.
When I finally finished my Ph.D., reality dragged me kicking and screaming into the adult world. Sort of. I landed a job at a government lab. The salary was (and, 12 years later, still is) considerably less than my colleagues in the private sector are earning. I could go and get one of those jobs, but I place a high value on the job security of being a federal employee (that’s the risk aversion).
For the past several years I’ve also had a side job manufacturing and selling tools out of my house. It’s basically been a lucrative hobby, supplementing my income by 20-30%. I have enjoyed the technical details of the work, and of course the extra money, and it’s certainly a nice feeling having strangers freely vote for your work with their wallets. My brother encouraged me on several occasions to spin it up into a full-scale, full-time business (advertising, wholesaling, employees, a real business website, etc.). It could probably be done, but I’m not that ambitious (and again, maybe I’m a bit risk-averse). I’m not interested in giving up the security of that government job for the hazards of full-time self-employment, and I’m not interested in busting my ass to grow this little basement enterprise into a real business.
I guess that’s another plus for the government job: 5:00 hits, and I go home right then. The home tool business eats up an average of 20 minutes a day, so that’s completely manageable. I enjoy having the rest of my time available for hobbies, home maintenance, and leisure time with my wife. If I worked in private industry, I know I would be working far more hours a week. Do not want.