Posted on 10/20/2015 1:57:08 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.
When you’re poor, you can’t buy your food in bulk, buy high quality stuff that will last, or own your own tech instead of renting. It costs money up front to save money over the long run. Worse yet, being poor often comes with hidden, intangible costs that make digging yourself out of poverty even harder.
Food Can Be Cheap, But Eating Healthy Is Expensive
As any college student can tell you, getting food when you’re poor isn’t that hard. Ramen is under twenty cents a pack. The problem is getting healthy food. Ramen consists of 20% empty calories and 80% salt. If you only ate that for every meal for years, your long term health would be at serious risk (or so my doctor tells me).
This was the exact situation I found myself in when I was broke. Time was more valuable than my health, and fast food was easier than cooking at home. It wasn’t much more expensive, either. This lead to an unhealthy hierarchy of meals: on a good week, I could buy hot dogs from my local QuikTrip for $2. On a bad week, it was Ramen for days. Two liter bottles of store-brand soda cost less than orange juice or milk, so if I wanted something to drink besides water, that was what I got.
Now, a few years of that diet is already going to be pretty bad. The long-term consequences were worse. Even when I started earning more, the habits stuck. Soda is still a staple of my diet. It’s taken a long time to build the habit of making proper, home-cooked meals. It’s easy to think that you’ll just change your habits once you get more money, but you don’t realize just how many bad habits you build.
When $1.50 a day can account for nearly 5% of your yearly salary, it’s no surprise you choose the $1 soda over the $4 orange juice. Who the hell cares about “long-term health consequences” when you can barely pay rent? You know what has some serious “long-term health consequences”? Getting evicted. I’ll pay rent today and worry about heart disease later.
When you’re poor, you can’t afford to think about the “long run.” I knew that it was smart to buy some stuff from big membership stores, but I couldn’t even get past the membership fees. I knew that eating gas station hot dogs and ramen was going to kill me some day, but as long as that day wasn’t before rent was due, I had to live with it. I probably could’ve done marginally better if I planned to cook more meals ahead of time but I, like 6.8 million Americans according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had to work multiple jobs to get by. I didn’t have enough time to be healthy, and I didn’t have enough money to save money.
Cheap Cars Cost More to Repair, and Public Transportation Is a Time Suck
Having a job doesn’t mean much if you can’t get to your job. Owning a car is expensive even after you’ve paid off the initial cost. Public transit may be more accommodating to lower income tiers, but it isn’t always available in every city.
Transportation has two major hidden costs when you’re poor. First, lots of expensive car repairs are avoidable...if you have money to fix them early on. I used to ignore changing my brake pads for months. My car would start making that familiar squealing noise that indicated I didn’t have much time left before the brake pads were gone. I hated the noise, but I hated overdrafting on my account more. So, I turned the stereo up a little louder and tried to drive less.
Replacing brake pads can cost an average of $145, depending on your car. If I had to spend $145 to change my brake pads (assuming I even had that much in my account), at best I’d wipe out my food budget for the month. At worst, I wouldn’t have enough to pay utilities. So I’d put it off.
On at least one occasion, my brakes got so bad they were grinding down the rotors. In case you’ve never had this happen, grinding rotors makes a terrible, metal-on-metal sound. Replacing a rotor also costs hundreds more than replacing brake pads. Sure, I successfully put off one expense, but when the rotors broke, I was screwed. The longer I waited on basic maintenance, the more expensive the repairs got.
Waiting was often my only option, though. Unlike buying healthy food, there were times I literally didn’t have the money. Not “I have this money, but I shouldn’t spend it.” More like, the car repair is $145 and I have $12 in my account. And I still have to drive my car to work. There’s no third option.
Public transit is a great option, but a lot of cities don’t provide it. If yours does, things still aren’t great. With public transit, you face a very different cost: time. What would be a fifteen minute drive becomes an hour long bus ride. Miss a bus and you’ve lost another 10-15 minutes. When you only have a couple free hours in the day, that hour on the bus might mean you can’t prepare a decent meal or do laundry. This can apply to cars too (“I’ll just do that hour-long oil change next week”), but with public transportation, the cost of time really adds up fast.
Unfortunately, transportation isn’t exactly optional. If your car breaks down and you don’t have money to fix it, you lose out on more wages. Some even lose their jobs. The time costs of public transit can also make it harder to fit in things that help dig yourself out of poverty, like education. Ironically, just getting to work can make it harder to work, if you can’t afford all the associated costs that go with it.
You Need to Dress Nicely to Move Up, But New Clothes Aren’t a Priority
Despite their necessity, buying new clothes is often seen as one of the most stereotypically frivolous purchases. Why should poor people be shopping for new or nice clothing when they’re struggling to make ends meet, right? The problem is, if you don’t spend money on clothes, you pay a hefty social cost.
Several years ago, I worked for Walmart. As is the case for most retail employees, I had to buy my own uniform. At the time, we were required to wear dark blue shirts and khaki pants. Since I owned exactly none of either, I had to blow through any clothing budget I had just to be ready for work (before I got my first paycheck, no less). The problem was, I worked outside as a cart-pusher. Navy blue shirts tend to fade in the harsh Georgia sunlight. Plus, my shoes wore through every three months from walking on pavement all day. And not just “they look ratty”—my toes were literally touching burning pavement a few months after getting new shoes.
Needless to say, I looked like crap most of the time. My shirts were faded and my shoes were falling apart, and that was while I was on the clock. The rest of my wardrobe looked even worse. Any money I could spare for clothing usually had to go towards new uniforms. The problem is, if I wanted to get a job somewhere else, the nicest thing I had to wear was my work outfit. It took a long time before I could afford to update my closet with anything even remotely presentable while still keeping up with uniform churn. In the end, I only pulled it off by opening a small line of credit with a clothing retailer. No matter how many people advised against borrowing money when you’re broke, I simply couldn’t afford the clothing I needed to look presentable to an employer before getting the job I was applying for.
Dressing well is an awkward catch-22. If you’re poor and you have a nice wardrobe, people think you’re irresponsible with money. However, if you dress poorly, you’re more likely to be judged poorly, especially in job interviews. How you dress can be the difference between landing the job and being ruled out as soon as you walk in the door. This type of effect is so strong, that even wearing a recognizable brand name can improve how others perceive you. It’s sad, but it’s the world we live in.
Of course, the costs of clothing don’t end at social pressures. Merely keeping your clothes clean and presentable can cost time and money, too. If you don’t own or have access to a washer and dryer, you need to spend time at a laundromat. Not only does this cost money every single time you clean your clothes, but it takes precious time that could be better spent working, learning a skill, or taking care of your family.
The worst part is how frivolous this all sounds. Frankly, it’s demoralizing. As someone who’s had to wear crap clothes to work and even crappier clothes on my off days, I know how it feels to be seen differently. You get comments about how you need new clothes. You’re reminded, politely and unhelpfully, how your clothes are faded. It’s vaguely implied that your failure to buy new shoes isn’t a symptom of your low paycheck, but laziness. Why haven’t you gone to the store to buy new shoes yet? As if going to the store was the biggest hurdle.
Yet it still feels like caring about how you look is vanity, rather than practical. Food is practical. Housing is practical. Transportation is practical. New clothes? Why are you wasting your money on new clothes, and then complaining about how broke you are? Fortunately, you can at least ignore this mindset. You can’t change people’s perceptions if you’re wearing old clothes, but you can at least ignore the people getting on your case for “wasting” money. You know, provided you can scrape enough together to find clothes to begin with.
Fees For Everything Can Compound to Ruin Your Budget
Avoiding fees is a life or death survival trait for low income households. This gets its own category because when you’re poor, fees are everywhere. Fees for having a bank. Fees for not having a bank. Fees for paying late. Fees for paying with a certain type of card. Fees for not being able to pay a fee. A person can drown in the various fees that disproportionately hurt poor families.
One fee that hurt me a lot over the years were overdraft fees. If I charged something to my debit card, and then it turned out I didn’t have enough money, I was charged $35 per transaction. This seems like a no-brainer, right? Just don’t spend money you don’t have, Eric!
Except that’s not how it works when you’re broke. You have to obsessively over-analyze every single transaction in your account. Not just how much, but when. If you pay the power bill today, but it doesn’t clear until next week, then you have to remember that your account is that much emptier than it looks. My credit union in particular had terrible software. Its website looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 90’s (and still doesn’t). It had absolutely no tools to keep track of which money was allocated for different purposes. The “Available Balance” box attempted to indicate how much unspent money I really had, but it was unreliable. The best I could do was to keep a written log of every transaction personally, but if I forgot something or made a math error, I was screwed.
This was made even worse when my credit union would apply transactions in a highest-to-lowest order, rather than chronologically. Say I had $150 in my account, and accidentally spent $160. One transaction was a $150 power bill, while the rest was four transactions of $2.50 each. Even if the power bill was the last one I paid, I would sometimes find it was taken out of my account first, leaving me with zero dollars. Then, each $2.50 transaction would cost me $35 extra in overdraft fees. If they were charged in the correct order, I would only get one fee, but instead I would be charged $140 in fees. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than it should. Sometimes, this was my own fault, but it also occurred when deposits didn’t clear when I expected them to, or bills were charged sooner than their due date. A minor mistake for someone with more money destroyed my budget for weeks.
Banks aren’t the only ones who charge compounding fees, either. Every year, I had to pay to register my car. One particularly bad year, I didn’t have spare money to pay registration. I also worked one mile from work, so when it came time to choose between registration or food, I took a risk that I could make it to work without getting pulled over. One week after my registration was due, I got pulled over. I was let off with a warning, and told to pay my registration. Another week later (before I’d even earned enough money to pay for registration), I got pulled over again. Since this was the second time for the same offense, I got a citation for nearly $100. This wasn’t making it any easier to pay the fine. Eventually, I was finally able to pay it with money I received from relatives on Christmas. Just what I always wanted.
Fees are everywhere when you’re poor. Banks may charge a ton of fees for using basic services like checking. A simple traffic ticket can spiral out of control, sometimes even leading to being arrested, plus more fees. Utilities may charge fees if you pay by debit card. If you can’t get approval at a bank, payment schemes like pay cards can have charge you fees just to use your money. All these fees add up to huge pains that hurt a lot worse when you don’t have money. Failing to pay those fees only leads to more fees, which means that, like most areas in life, it costs more to be poor.
With all of these things, there is an element of responsibility. For example, could I have walked to work instead of driving a car with an expired tag? Maybe! Then again, I tried that for a while, got caught in the rain, and my phone was destroyed. At the time I was trying to break into writing about Android, so that choice to save money could’ve derailed my entire career.
That’s what makes being poor so tough. Sure, you can make choices that lighten the load on yourself, but the margin of error is much thinner. Meanwhile, the amount of extra work you have to do just to break even is much higher. You could spend tens of hours each week trying to optimize every dime in your budget, just to have one mistake ruin you for a month.
This is just my experience, but many people had it way worse than I have. At my lowest points, I was fortunate enough to either have people to help out, or lucked into receiving a windfall right when I needed it. Others aren’t so lucky. When the punishment for making a mistake or having an accident is so harsh, it can make it nearly impossible for even the hardest working people to break out of the cycle of poverty.
Being rich is so much better.
I fought poverty by not becoming one of them.
George Orwell talks about this in "Down and Out in Paris and London."
Eggs, beans, rice, apples, lettuce, low-cost meats, etc. All very affordable. With spices, onions and garlic the boring can be made to be tasty.
If Ramen were really 80% salt, it would be inedible.
I am with you. And it is not mentioned that someone with that actual income would be getting food stamps, I expect.
Someone with the intellectual skills to write an article like this will eventually manage to make money, at least in our society. Maybe not right away, but in the long run.
Nobody who is truly poor “has to buy” soda.
He lost his argument right there.
“Fees are everywhere when you’re poor. Banks may charge a ton of fees for using basic services like checking. A simple traffic ticket can spiral out of control, sometimes even leading to being arrested, plus more fees. Utilities may charge fees if you pay by debit card. If you can’t get approval at a bank, payment schemes like pay cards can have charge you fees just to use your money. All these fees add up to huge pains that hurt a lot worse when you don’t have money. Failing to pay those fees only leads to more fees, which means that, like most areas in life, it costs more to be poor.”
These are the same fees that are around for the middle class and rich.
The author is an idiot.
.
The it’s too expensive to eat healthy excuse has been debunked many times.
Food Can Be Cheap, But Eating Healthy Is Expensive
—>> Learn how to COOK. Eating healthy, eating cheap and cooking from scratch go hand-in-hand.
Cheap Cars Cost More to Repair, and Public Transportation Is a Time Suck
—>> There was a time when owning ANY car meant you were in the middle class. Ditch the car and move to where public transportation can get you to work/shopping. Or ditch the minimum wage job and find another that you can make work. If you must have a car, learn how to repair it. Brakes pads are incredible simple, easy and pretty cheap to repair. Then charge to repair friend’s cars.
You Need to Dress Nicely to Move Up, But New Clothes Aren’t a Priority
—>> Garage sales, Goodwill and Salvation Army. You can find lots of nice clothing on the cheap. Even consignment shops have very nice clothing for not too much money.
Fees For Everything Can Compound to Ruin Your Budget
—>> Ditch the car and pay cash for everything. Problem solved. Live within your means. Cash does that.
That’s what makes being poor so tough.
—>> You have no idea of what “tough” is. My grandparents came from Slovakia to escape a famine after a war. They ate nothing by turnips in axle grease (back then it was animal fat) for months. They came to America with pretty much nothing and ZERO “safety nets.” Yet, somehow, they managed and prospered. And never complained.
Yeah, and the article goes into why poor people don’t buy these low cost food items.
They don’t have time (or make time) or they’re too lazy.
God took care of me, in ways I never expected. But it taught me that my life is His, not mine.
Eventually, He got me a job ... things quit sucking so bad ... but I haven't forgotten. It's all God's. Not mine.
You expect poor people to cook? Horrors!
I have never been poor, but we have gone without much money for long periods. Cooking is the most invaluable skill you can teach your children. More good food goes to waste in this country than can be imagined.
Gleaning is another. People are generally happy to give away excess of they know you’ll use it. Canning, freezing, smoking and drying still work and beat the heck out of Ramen. There was once a time when you could hunt and fish in this country, but that has gone the way of the dinosaur.
Not long ago, I read (here at FR where I learn a great deal) that poor people have poor ways.
That really struck me as inarguably true.
Poor people have poor ways.
You can give them a fish every day. EBT cards, handouts, welfare, a thousand opportunities, and more.
But when their life is over - they will have nothing but bills and unfulfilled dreams.
“All very affordable”.
Yes and his other point about not having time is bogus because all can be prepared in an hour or so once a week and heated up as needed.
Being poor isn’t so much expensive as it is a hard lesson master.
You took Rev. Ike’s advice:
“If you want to help the poor - don’t be one of them.”
Author is under the delusion that somehow “being poor” involves living a “not poor” lifestyle and is surprised that it doesn’t work. My word, the stuff he tried to live on and couldn’t was _absurd_.
Yes, ramen is cheap but bad for you in the long run. So eat beans, or make pasta.
Yes, hot dogs are $2 at QuikTrip. You can buy 8 dogs & buns for $2 at Super Walmart.
Yes, 2-liter sodas are cheaper than milk/juice. Drink tap water then, it’s nearly free.
Yes, a $1 single-serving soda is cheaper than a $4 single-serving juice. Get a frozen juice concentrate for $1.25 and get 4 servings out of it.
Yes, membership bulk-purchase clubs have steep annual fees. So don’t join. You don’t need a four-pack of grand pianos.
Yes, car repairs aren’t cheap - if you pay someone else to do them. I maintained my own first car, and would do so still if my time weren’t more valuable expended elsewhere.
Yes, clothes aren’t cheap - if you pay full price. Most of my active wardrobe is $5 Walmart clearance shirts, and 70%-off jeans from Target. Goodwill has a whole lotta new and barely-used clothes for less. Last job I interviewed for (and got), the CEO said “oh, by the way, don’t ever dress up like that again” - that suit is collecting dust now; business casual seriously rules, even in interviews.
Yes, laundromats aren’t cheap if you’re relying on them. You’ve got a bathtub, right? Get busy. Takes about as long to do a load in that as it does waiting for the cold-air public dryers.
Yes, penalty fees are steep. They don’t want you to withdraw more money than you have, so don’t do that. Ya know, people went a long time paying in cash - if you didn’t have enough, you didn’t get hit with an overdrawn penalty, you just didn’t get what you were trying to buy.
Yes, you have to “obsessively over-analyze every single transaction in your account”. If you don’t, you get charged for it. Being lazy is costly.
Yes, driving without insurance can cost you a lot in fines. Don’t - especially if you’re working just a mile from home. Twit. Oh, you got wet one day walking to work in the rain? Umbrella. Bag of dry clothes if it’s pouring that hard. And keep your phone in a dry place, like a discarded plastic bag.
Yes, conveniences can cost more. If you haven’t earned enough to cover them, you don’t get the conveniences. Suck it up.
MY WORD THE AUTHOR IS A WHINER. Just more proof that “poor” is a state of mind. He has no comprehension that everything he whines about having to do to survive IS WHAT HE HAS TO DO TO SURVIVE. Somebody tell him, please.
In 2009, my whole work week was a total of 30 hours at the Louisiana minimum wage of $5.80/hr., except in the timeframe of July to October each year, since the organization lived off grants, where my week went down to 15 hours. If i had not a V.A. disability disbursement, I do not know what i would have done.
There were months where i did eat, some, just to pay the bills. No cable, but i had a radio. I used the library to get my internet information, the job office to submit all my papers, for whatever, the library to submit my newspaper article submissions.
I was glad and relieved when my social security lawyer called, and told me I has won my case. I phoned in my retirement that October.
Panera Bread gives away all its daily leftovers to charity. That's BUSHELS DAILY at each store.
Charity food pantries often can't give enough away.
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