I've spanned the economic ladder from making $25k, to having enough money that I could retire before age 35. It wasn't that bad making $25k. I actually moved into my friend's large closet for 3 months. Life was more like the show Friends back then. I definitely made more stories and friends in that time period too. Now on the other side of the spectrum, life is more stressful and kinda boring. Maybe that is part of the pandemic's fault. My money is tied up in assets that I worry about at night. Part of me just wants to liquidate a lot of things and move into a nice van and tour the country.
On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
211–220 of 920 posts
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#212Queue my first truck. My uncle gave it to me. S-15. The bench seat didn’t lock, it slid forward and back when breaking or accelerating. Hard left hand turn and the keys would fly from the ignition and land on tue floorboard of the passenger seat (this did not turn off the truck). During the same hard left, some electrical thing would connect or un-short and my radio would temporarily turn on until the end of the turn…
Does the US or California not have some sort of annual check to ensure that cars on the road are roadworthy? Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test
You have, in California, a thing called Smog Check. An attempt to remove old, polluting cars - you can’t register your car without it. Lots of these check centers will let you pay under the table to let them hook up a better car to falsify your results. If a car is obviously not road safe, a cop can pull you over.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#213This is a great write-up, and as someone who spent time being poor-ish, it really resonated. What I realized from my own life experience: the US sawed the bottom rungs off the ladder in the 1950s when it suburbanized. There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area, and virtually every societal problem we deal with either stems from this or is made worse by it. Then the healthc…
I sometimes wonder if that event horizon is encroaching higher and higher up the economic ladder over time. Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially b…
It is called cost disease. Staying above is getting harder and harder.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#214Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…
I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it.
I made it and you can too.
It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's smart and ambitious and quite lucky.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#215Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…
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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#216Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…
Fellow former-poor here. It's the kind of thing that casts a shadow over your whole life.
And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires. I hear things get said by people that are so far from the orbit of my reality and I cringe.
Reading the article was really eye opening for me because I hadn't thought of all of the life skills that I've picked up simply as a result of being poor. It even affects how I think about my new-found wealth. I spend an enormous amount of money on tools and equipment. I'm the one helping all of my friends build, move or fix things.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>On the other hand, I find it laughable that this author describes a 900sqft apartment as "very small". 900sqft would be considered a decent-sized, mid-range apartment in London, Yep, we actually bought a 3-bed house(not apartment) in UK, and the total space is 950sqft(about 90square metres). And that's not a small house around here by any measure. American houses are like their cars - absurdly large.
American here that grew up in a 3 bedroom house with around 900sqft of space and 4 people, and now live in a 2500sqft house with just my wife and 1 dog..I don't know how we did it. Thinking back it was so insanely cramped, my parents bedroom was the 'big' bedroom and it was just large enough to fit a queen sized bed, a chest of drawers, a gun case, and then a night stand on one side of the bed. The kids bedrooms bare…
I once looked at a flat/apartment in a converted house here in the UK where the oven door got stuck on the wall opposite when you tried to open it.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#218As another ex-poor person: some of this is OK and some of it doesn't really ring true. E.g. > That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”. I don't think this is true, and why would it be? Unless you're in an area where the housing market is cliffed for some legislative or regulatory reason. But mos…
Value, not demand. A nurse who helps stop 50 people from dying each week is doing very valuable work, but a talented lawyer helping to defeat valid class-action lawsuits (negative value work) is probably paid more.
You don't even need a nurse - a farmer is preventing multiple people from starving and a cleaner is preventing multiple deaths from parasites and infectious diseases.
Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m not quite sure why it works this way. It works this way because people are, rationally, more interested in their own physical safety than they are in the feelings of strangers. Anecdote: I was in San Francisco a few years back. There were homeless folks everywhere. Some were nice, even chatty. We felt at ease even when walking through areas that were full of homeless folks. But a couple of days into our trip, a…
"Rationally"? You mentioned you had all sorts of nice experiences with homeless people and then one bad actor caused you to choose out of all of the attributes of this person, their lack of a home, to be the one for you to blanket-label all people like this as dangerous enough to place them outside of your treat-like-a-human-being sphere. Nah, there is not a rational way to blanket label groups like this from a sampl…
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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
#220I grew up poor (first gen immigrant family, the poor kind), so I empathize with the points raised. At the same time I don't really understand how some / a family can be (outside of some circumstances like health issues, disabilities etc) repeatedly behind on water bills or other necessities. For the first few years my family had an income of ~$1000 / month (back in the 90s). My mother wasn't legally allowed to work a…
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