My paternal grandmother always said you can be poor as a church mouse and still get by, but there’s no excuse for wallowing in filth. Soap is cheap and your labors are free to you. It’s the desire to hold things together, to not descend into hopelessness that is the difference, not money.
That's true for us today, but not for a lot of people in a lot of times. I was just reading about the soap shortage in World War II England, because the ingredients were going to war industries. Then there was the French factory workers getting sick from trying to cook with industrial grease ...