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.
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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