Posted on 10/20/2015 1:57:08 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
BTDT, as have many. No doubt it was extra difficult for this whining author due to his lack of intelligence and common sense.
For starters....don’t buy all your food in a convenience store.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
Yep. No one forces a poor person to eat hotdogs and pop. And it’s not as though water at every meal is torture. Read any journal from a pioneer and it was water all the time. Milk was a rare luxury until they had their own milk cow.
We have been through times when I wasn’t sure how I was going to feed our kids. Discovered that a local butcher sells meaty beef soup bones for little cost. Bones, veggies and water creates a rich and healthy meal for next to nothing. Use a crockpot and you don’t even need a working stove. If you do have an oven-sourdough bread is very cheap, don’t even need to buy yeast.
I get so tired of being manipulated with guilt trips. We already have welfare and, yes, life is hard for some people because they haven’t been blessed with much intelligence. My adopted brother is one of them-he lives on his own after years in a group home. My parents are his safety net and I suppose when they pass away it will be me. However, his friends (More than him) suffer because they make one dumb financial decision after another. I mean seriously dumb decisions. Yet they always have money for chips, pop and cigarettes. The more money they have at any given time the more junk food they buy because they honestly aren’t thinking about their long term health or long term anything for that matter.
My mom’s job is involves educating those below the poverty level. There was once a client who was in dire straits. No food in the apartment and absolutely no way to purchase any. As this mom was really trying, my mom bought food for her: cut up whole chicken, potatoes and green beans. The young mom looked at her blankly and said,”what am I going to do with this?” Had she been given fries, chicken nuggets and applesauce she would know how to fix it. All costs at least double the non processed food. Throwing more money at people with no life skills doesn’t fix the problem. If they were raised by stupid and helpless parents then the only way government can help is by pushing home ec in schools to teach basic homemaking. But, no, they push technology and ideology instead.
Healthy living, long range planning, and owning a home are NOT priories for most of our nation’s impoverished.
My ranting is over. It’s just so maddening to hear the same crap over and over from naive elites.
Clothes: Try Goodwill or Savers or Salvatio Army. About the food— there may something to it. Everything costs... electricity, gas, water, milk, just the ingredients to put meals together,but knowledge would help save money. Too bad basic home economics is no longer taught.
There are a lot of aspects of being poor that act as a money suck and keep you that way. Transportation is probably the biggest one. Public transit is just painfully slow in most place (back when I was poor I walked almost everywhere, the bus took an hour and a half to get anywhere), adding 3 hours of travel time to your poorly paid work day removes a lot of opportunities to do other things right. Or you get a cheap car, which is cheap, and breaks. Banking fees definitely hit the poor more because they usually revolve around minimum balances.
And the biggest thing you just have no margin of error. Having been on both sides of the line it’s amazing to me how many problem I just make evaporate now with $50 to $100. Back in my poor days that was 1/4 to 1/2 of my paycheck, and those kinds of problems were a crisis. Now the biggest problem is usually time, having to get the car battery replaced takes an hour I had planned for something else, the $100 is immaterial now. And that kind of life of hopping from crisis to crisis is hard on the brain. A brain in crisis seeks instant gratification, which of course the poor person can’t afford either.
Unfortunately there’s not much that can be done about it. And you either find a way (usually stable relationship, a second income and brain really helps a lot of stuff) to dig out or you don’t. You can’t be given the path because you need to retrain the brain, and only the process of digging out can do that.
Chicken: 10 pounds for under $6 at Walmart.
Flour & rice: $13 for 50 pounds at Costco (ask a friend if you can’t afford the membership, most are glad to help out). $1 for 3 pounds at Walmart.
Mixed vegetables: $1 a pound frozen if you watch for sales and fill the freezer.
Spices: most people have more than they want and would give ‘em away if you ask.
Milk: loss leader (i.e.: priced less than cost) at many stores.
Yes, it requires work. If DIY is more productive than what your job pays for the time, DIY. No, it’s not that hard.
Biggest problem with “poverty” in the USA is people don’t know what to DO.
Author’s list is practically a litany of “first world problems”: oh, you can’t afford _prepared_ foods? you HAVE a car? you have a tub and free hot running drinking water, but complain that renting washing machines is too much? REALLY???
Having been hit for overdraft fees for resoling my shoes years ago, I can tell you that it's a big deal for someone living close to the line. Happily, I'm no longer in that situation and now the bank pays me 1.5% to 4.5% for spending money on its credit card. I still don't understand that, but there are no bank fees on me.
Actually most of those don’t exist for the middle class. The checking fee might, but a lot of those go away if you have a minimum balance. Since we get free checking we don’t have to worry if the utilities charges for using a debit card, because we don’t. We can get approval at the bank. Nobody pays us with those “pay cards” that are frankly just scams, unfortunately they’re scams used by a big chunk of minimum wage employers.
Life on the bottom of the food chain is brutal and unpleasant. There’s no two ways about it.
I don’t even know what a pay card is.
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You can make a loaf of white bread for about 25 cents. 25 pounds of flour is about $9, rice is cheaper. Buy beans in quantity.
There are so many ways to save money if you need to.
Likewise.
I grew up living a semi-self-sufficient life, growing half our food, heating on wood (cooking over it at times). I still aspire to return to high living on next to nothing.
My attempts to help others keep turning out discouraging. Bringing free prepared-and-hot meals to families...sitting around watching TV. Fixing broken furniture...for kids breaking the windows for fun. Bringing bakery leftovers...to people who turn it down because they don’t like the high-dollar gourmet breads.
Then I read the lead article above, where everything he whines about I live presuming such issues are the norm and solvable. I want to yell at him “OH, YOU HAVE TO DO THAT TO GET BY? THEN QUIT WHINING AND DO IT! I DID!”
Meh.
I’m going home and making my kids do all the mundane tasks - so they know how to do it all, themselves, CHEAP.
You're getting a kickback out of what the vendor pays your bank to process the purchase on their card.
Most thrift stores have dollar days too where a good portion of the merchandise is simply a buck. In our shopping addict society, you can find new or close to brand new items pretty frequently.
Uh...no kidding. Isn't that the idea?
It’s a relatively new invention. Basically think of it like a gift card that’s good almost everywhere. Except they have transaction fees, so every time you use it it loses value over and above the cost of your purchase. The fastfood places love to use them instead of paychecks, they issue you a card and transfer money to it on payday, so it works kind of like direct deposit, much cheaper for them.
But those fees, basically the world treats like you’re using an ATM that’s out of your banks network, I’ve seen them as high as $5. And that’s what kills you. Say you’re doing really well in fastfood terms and your paycheck (on the card) was $500. So you go put $40 of gas in the car, but the fee means it cost you $45 to get $40 worth of gas. $50 worth of groceries costs $55. Everything costs that extra $5, you could easily eat up a fifth of your paycheck on transaction fees. The only “safe” thing to do with them is put it in the bank, which you don’t have, or cash it out which usually costs extra. From the business’ perspective they make good sense, get rid of all that check overhead and hassle. But they just beat on the employee.
Get a crockpot at Goodwill for $10 and have your dinner ready when you get home. Soak your beans overnight and boil. Have a bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the fridge for a quick snack. Get a lettuce spinner at Goodwill and wash and spin multiple heads of lettuce so you have it ready to go for salad when you want it.
And his soda and bank charges comments make me think he's just a screw-up.
I am so sick of excuses from lazy people.
Bulk food clubs may have expensive annual fees, but bilk food stores, usually found around Amish communities, do not.
There ten pounds of rice is about $2, dried beans are cheaper than that, lentils and soup mixes are also just a few dollars each. Flour and sugar are really cheap, and cereals like oats, rolled and quick are also ten pounds for about $2.
Such foods do require some knowledge of cooking and a willingness to use that skill.
the author is an idiot but where his examples shows he does not understand poverty he is right that poor people tend to pay more because the mark up on stuff is higher when you don’t buy in bulk. Or cant shop around because you don’t own a car.
if you read his article he does not understand that if you are poor and truly struggling you take sack lunch with you when you leave the house. 2 dollars for a hot dog is better spent buying a package of eight and cooking it at home. and if you don’t have a kitchen it is hard but not impossible. I rented a room with no house privileges. I was poor still am. I cooked in my room using a George foremen grill I got the grill for five dollars at a garage sale, a microwave oven for ten dollars ,and a portable electric kettle.
living poor is hard but the thing is you got to prioritize your spending. if you need a new suit to get a better job that becomes priority one. there is a difference between living in poverty and being just poor. I have seen people that make good money live in poverty and it is all about the decisions they made.
I have been to the food bank before and the thing I noticed was how many smart phones there were. I am positive that a good percentage of the people there were there because they spent money on entertainment rather then survival and getting themselves out of there financial mess.
I currently do not have a cellphone because I am on a fixed income. I decided that I would rather spend that thirty dollars a month elsewhere in my life. the problem is that most people think they should have evert thing.
What is a poor person, especially single, going to do with ten pounds of chicken. Storage is definetly an issue for the impoverished. They may not HAVE a freezer, a normal ‘fridge, know how to can or any of that.
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